5 ms·

"I checked the server logs and saw the traffic and was like, ‘holy shit. this might cost me a lot of money to run this thing.’" excuse me? running a (mostly) s

"I checked the server logs and saw the traffic and was like, ‘holy shit. this might cost me a lot of money to run this thing.’" excuse me? running a (mostly) static site that just makes API calls to third parties is costing you lots of money? i swear, everyone's obsession with running things on per-instance resources that charge fractions of a cent that add up astronomically. run this on a $5/mo VPS in ovhcloud and save yourself the headache.

domano 6y ago
70M visitors is a lot of traffic, no matter how you host it. Assuming we are talking about 1MB per visit then that is roughly 70TB. At least my VPS in germany does have a traffic limit. Also he did statically host it on vercel if i remember correctly.
- progval 6y ago
  > Assuming we are talking about 1MB per visit then that is roughly 70TB. If you visit the site today with scripts blocked, the site still works and the page is only 160kB, including 140kB of images of book covers. And the "I checked the server logs and saw the traffic" part of the story happened before they added these ads (see https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-website https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit... for a better timeline)
- ZWoz 6y ago
  If you have hobby site, then failing action "going dark" is better than "going cost 1000 times more".
  - domano 6y ago
    That is true, mostly i think that the initial commenter underestimated the costs, but it seems that i myself have overestimated them.
- tomjohnneill 6y ago
  Yeah it was statically hosted in the end (initially it wasn't quite static). When it was at its most popular, the total site size including JavaScript was around 70kb as far as I can remember, so it didn't come anywhere near as high as 70TB.
simonbarker87 6y ago
I think you’re being a tad unfair here. I’ve been a web dev of sorts for 15 years and to be honest even on my current provider I’d have no idea how much this “could” cost me if it got popular, I’d have exactly the same concerns regardless of the tech involved. Given it was a personal joke site there’s a chance £200 is “a lot of money” for him.
- leokennis 6y ago
  I pay €7,25/month for 10 GB of space and unlimited traffic. It’s probably far from the best deal out there.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    How soon after your site becomes popular do you find the definition of "unlimited traffic" your host is running on differs from yours? Is be amazed if they didn't throttle it at all.
  - ripper1138 6y ago
    I always thought it was ridiculous that my old company marketed the product as being capable of “infinite scale”. Words like unlimited and infinite have no meaning anymore.
0goel0 6y ago
Your comment history makes me worry for you. If you don't already, do therapy. Times are hard, take care of yourself.
- dang 5y ago
  Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules. You've also been posting many unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments elsewhere. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop.
tomjohnneill 6y ago
Part of my worry was that I messed up the caching initially so it was making API calls on the server for each request. Once I fixed that, there wasn't really anything to worry about.
Fern_Blossom 6y ago
I'm going to fully agree to this. There's a huge obsession with bloated pages for the sake of bloat at that. Somehow they're using it as an excuse to why they need the whole per-instance cloud setup when, as you said, a $5 (cheeseburger-meal) priced a month VPS would do the equivalent job. Maybe you'd have to pay 2 or 3 cheeseburgers a month to upgrade when things get heavy... if you setup your site correctly. Don't get me wrong either, I thought the site was awesome and visited it often during that week. Reading the post-mortem of it was super cool too... until I read how the site was developed. I get the idea of a practicing small sites with a framework of choice. You need to practice, especially in a real world environment. Nothing wrong there. But the site could have been made in strict HTML and CSS, by hand, and called it a day. No one would know the difference. It was a super simple, basic site. There was zero special in it that needed anything more than that. Sure, maybe something was going on the background, but if that ended up not being useful for the dev, it was surely a zero value addon for the user. A lot of these frameworks are the equivalent of hiring a semi-truck with a 53 foot trailer to move a couch across town. Yes, it works. Yes, there are potential benefits if something were to pop-up. But, a small city van or pick-up truck would have gotten the job done easier, cheaper, and faster. 99.9% of the time, that's all you need. If you're moving a couch, the likelihood of you needing the extra space because someone calling you up to move pallets worth of stuff is minimal. Same goes with small, single purpose sites. Basing everything on that 00.1% chance is pretty silly. War and Peace (the book) in simple text is roughly 900kb from Project Gutenberg if I remember correctly. That's how many hours of reading? 587,000 word count. Average adult reading speed is about 200 words a minute. 2,935 minutes or 48.9 hours of reading. 2 days worth of constant reading. Minus pictures and videos, when you traverse the web, how many pages require more than a mb worth of data for providing 10 minutes worth of reading content? Twitter is probably the ultimate champion in bloat for mb to read time ratio. Design and styling is one thing that people are going to use as some excuse for the bloat. But with all the people that use HN, don't piss in my pocket. Overly graphic designs aren't needed for conveying content well. I hope I don't have to get into how all the background tracking needs to go straight to the same ring of hell that holds people who kick puppies and kittens. I remember a day when programmers valued themselves in being efficient in delivery. Oh, the good ol'days. Now get off my lawn!

domano 6y ago

70M visitors is a lot of traffic, no matter how you host it. Assuming we are talking about 1MB per visit then that is roughly 70TB. At least my VPS in germany does have a traffic limit. Also he did statically host it on vercel if i remember correctly.

progval 6y ago
> Assuming we are talking about 1MB per visit then that is roughly 70TB. If you visit the site today with scripts blocked, the site still works and the page is only 160kB, including 140kB of images of book covers. And the "I checked the server logs and saw the traffic" part of the story happened before they added these ads (see https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-website https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit... for a better timeline)
ZWoz 6y ago
If you have hobby site, then failing action "going dark" is better than "going cost 1000 times more".
- domano 6y ago
  That is true, mostly i think that the initial commenter underestimated the costs, but it seems that i myself have overestimated them.
tomjohnneill 6y ago
Yeah it was statically hosted in the end (initially it wasn't quite static). When it was at its most popular, the total site size including JavaScript was around 70kb as far as I can remember, so it didn't come anywhere near as high as 70TB.

simonbarker87 6y ago

I think you’re being a tad unfair here. I’ve been a web dev of sorts for 15 years and to be honest even on my current provider I’d have no idea how much this “could” cost me if it got popular, I’d have exactly the same concerns regardless of the tech involved. Given it was a personal joke site there’s a chance £200 is “a lot of money” for him.

leokennis 6y ago
I pay €7,25/month for 10 GB of space and unlimited traffic. It’s probably far from the best deal out there.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  How soon after your site becomes popular do you find the definition of "unlimited traffic" your host is running on differs from yours? Is be amazed if they didn't throttle it at all.
- ripper1138 6y ago
  I always thought it was ridiculous that my old company marketed the product as being capable of “infinite scale”. Words like unlimited and infinite have no meaning anymore.

0goel0 6y ago

Your comment history makes me worry for you. If you don't already, do therapy. Times are hard, take care of yourself.

dang 5y ago
Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules. You've also been posting many unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments elsewhere. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop.

tomjohnneill 6y ago

Part of my worry was that I messed up the caching initially so it was making API calls on the server for each request. Once I fixed that, there wasn't really anything to worry about.

Fern_Blossom 6y ago

I'm going to fully agree to this. There's a huge obsession with bloated pages for the sake of bloat at that. Somehow they're using it as an excuse to why they need the whole per-instance cloud setup when, as you said, a $5 (cheeseburger-meal) priced a month VPS would do the equivalent job. Maybe you'd have to pay 2 or 3 cheeseburgers a month to upgrade when things get heavy... if you setup your site correctly. Don't get me wrong either, I thought the site was awesome and visited it often during that week. Reading the post-mortem of it was super cool too... until I read how the site was developed. I get the idea of a practicing small sites with a framework of choice. You need to practice, especially in a real world environment. Nothing wrong there. But the site could have been made in strict HTML and CSS, by hand, and called it a day. No one would know the difference. It was a super simple, basic site. There was zero special in it that needed anything more than that. Sure, maybe something was going on the background, but if that ended up not being useful for the dev, it was surely a zero value addon for the user. A lot of these frameworks are the equivalent of hiring a semi-truck with a 53 foot trailer to move a couch across town. Yes, it works. Yes, there are potential benefits if something were to pop-up. But, a small city van or pick-up truck would have gotten the job done easier, cheaper, and faster. 99.9% of the time, that's all you need. If you're moving a couch, the likelihood of you needing the extra space because someone calling you up to move pallets worth of stuff is minimal. Same goes with small, single purpose sites. Basing everything on that 00.1% chance is pretty silly. War and Peace (the book) in simple text is roughly 900kb from Project Gutenberg if I remember correctly. That's how many hours of reading? 587,000 word count. Average adult reading speed is about 200 words a minute. 2,935 minutes or 48.9 hours of reading. 2 days worth of constant reading. Minus pictures and videos, when you traverse the web, how many pages require more than a mb worth of data for providing 10 minutes worth of reading content? Twitter is probably the ultimate champion in bloat for mb to read time ratio. Design and styling is one thing that people are going to use as some excuse for the bloat. But with all the people that use HN, don't piss in my pocket. Overly graphic designs aren't needed for conveying content well. I hope I don't have to get into how all the background tracking needs to go straight to the same ring of hell that holds people who kick puppies and kittens. I remember a day when programmers valued themselves in being efficient in delivery. Oh, the good ol'days. Now get off my lawn!