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I built a static site served by S3 & cheap Lightsail boxes that serves a $5B/yr business. That was 4 years ago and beyond basic patching they've barely touched

I built a static site served by S3 & cheap Lightsail boxes that serves a $5B/yr business. That was 4 years ago and beyond basic patching they've barely touched their infrastructure and it runs around $100/mo.

Railsify 6y ago
This use case is about where AWS cost effective scalability ends, anything more complicated and you are into multiple thousands a month for a redundant solution for a critical web-app with a database. We used to run prod and stage envs in aws but as our stage environment grew we realized we could on-prem some pretty bad-a* hardware for the cost of a few months AWS billing. Now we run prod on aws, staging and dev locally.
- murukesh_s 6y ago
  Second that.. and hardest thing is you don't really know where you are getting charged. i mean you can look at the billing but boy they do add up to 1000s before you know and you are so hooked into auto scaling, s3, rds with multi-az what not..
- monsieurbanana 6y ago
  There's a cost maintaining a staging environment on-prem while prod is on a cloud. Slightly different versions of databases, different networking, etc... It could create issues. This does depend on how much you buy into the AWS ecosystem, if it's strictly EC2-only it's not as much of a problem. Not that I wouldn't do it, a lot of times it does make financial sense.
- busterarm 6y ago
  You don't exactly need to tell me. I have 10^4 machines in multiple clouds right now plus more n datacenters. Cost effective scaling is hard, but you have to design your applications around it. Tbh, I find most engineering orgs don't have the competency to pull it off.
codegeek 6y ago
"that serves a $5B/yr business." Ok but is that static site primarily generating the $5B in revenue ? That's more relevant to know. Having a static site for a business where the revenue is generated elsewhere is not that big of a deal in my opinion. Yes I get your point that the $5B company is hosting a static site on S3 which is cool but what will be cooler is if THAT static site is the primary revenue driver. I bet it isn't.
- monsieurbanana 6y ago
  I tried to imagine what kind of website could generate $5B without requiring more than $100/month of hardware. Seems impossible.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Just take a look at the top 10 adwords keywords and let your mind wander. Our business touched 4 out of 10...
    - monsieurbanana 6y ago
      Found in a random blog post, top 10 keywords: - Insurance - Loans - Mortgage - Attorney - Credit - Lawyer - Donate - Degree - Hosting - Claim Still can't see it. But just to be sure, you're saying that the $100/month website was directly generating most of that $5B? And not, for example, being just a bridge between users and an army of attorneys?
      - busterarm 6y ago
        Qualified leads are king in that business. Keep in mind that a large number of law firms in this space do not try cases and just generate and sell leads. Yes, obviously there's a lot more that goes into it, but my point was that websites can be extremely simple in their infrastructure and still be extremely effective.
- busterarm 6y ago

Railsify 6y ago

This use case is about where AWS cost effective scalability ends, anything more complicated and you are into multiple thousands a month for a redundant solution for a critical web-app with a database. We used to run prod and stage envs in aws but as our stage environment grew we realized we could on-prem some pretty bad-a* hardware for the cost of a few months AWS billing. Now we run prod on aws, staging and dev locally.

murukesh_s 6y ago
Second that.. and hardest thing is you don't really know where you are getting charged. i mean you can look at the billing but boy they do add up to 1000s before you know and you are so hooked into auto scaling, s3, rds with multi-az what not..
monsieurbanana 6y ago
There's a cost maintaining a staging environment on-prem while prod is on a cloud. Slightly different versions of databases, different networking, etc... It could create issues. This does depend on how much you buy into the AWS ecosystem, if it's strictly EC2-only it's not as much of a problem. Not that I wouldn't do it, a lot of times it does make financial sense.
busterarm 6y ago
You don't exactly need to tell me. I have 10^4 machines in multiple clouds right now plus more n datacenters. Cost effective scaling is hard, but you have to design your applications around it. Tbh, I find most engineering orgs don't have the competency to pull it off.

codegeek 6y ago

"that serves a $5B/yr business." Ok but is that static site primarily generating the $5B in revenue ? That's more relevant to know. Having a static site for a business where the revenue is generated elsewhere is not that big of a deal in my opinion. Yes I get your point that the $5B company is hosting a static site on S3 which is cool but what will be cooler is if THAT static site is the primary revenue driver. I bet it isn't.

monsieurbanana 6y ago
I tried to imagine what kind of website could generate $5B without requiring more than $100/month of hardware. Seems impossible.
- busterarm 6y ago
  Just take a look at the top 10 adwords keywords and let your mind wander. Our business touched 4 out of 10...
  - monsieurbanana 6y ago
    Found in a random blog post, top 10 keywords: - Insurance - Loans - Mortgage - Attorney - Credit - Lawyer - Donate - Degree - Hosting - Claim Still can't see it. But just to be sure, you're saying that the $100/month website was directly generating most of that $5B? And not, for example, being just a bridge between users and an army of attorneys?
    - busterarm 6y ago
      Qualified leads are king in that business. Keep in mind that a large number of law firms in this space do not try cases and just generate and sell leads. Yes, obviously there's a lot more that goes into it, but my point was that websites can be extremely simple in their infrastructure and still be extremely effective.
busterarm 6y ago