4 ms·

> We consume 2GB/S, maxed out, which ends up being 5184TB a month. We have millions on users a day, all on a streaming video platform. > It cost less than $2K/

> We consume 2GB/S, maxed out, which ends up being 5184TB a month. We have millions on users a day, all on a streaming video platform. > It cost less than $2K/Month. The solution in this article is serving on the order of 100TB/month for $400/month including a high speed global CDN, their API and database servers being hosted reliably, and redundancy and backup being handled by someone else. Your solution is hosting on the order of 1000s of TBs of month (ignoring the database and other aspects of this website), but the price is an order of magnitude higher. You’ve also given up all of the automatic redundancy and hands-off management, and you don’t have the benefit of a high speed global CDN. But more importantly, you have significantly higher engineering and on-call overhead, which you’re valuing at $0. If anything, that only makes Polyhaven’s solution sound more impressive. > Of course, for this price, you don't have redundancy and horizontal scaling. Which is a huge caveat. The global CDN makes a big difference in how the site loads in global locations. Maybe not a big concern if you’re serving of static files with a lot of buffering, but they have a dynamic website and a global audience and they said fast load times are important. > You also don't have to maintain and debug a system with redundancy and horizontal scaling. But you have to do literally everything else manually and maintain it yourself, which is far from free. All of these alternative proposals that value engineering time at $0/hour and assume your engineers are happy to be on-call 24/7 to maintain these servers are missing the point. You pay for turnkey solutions so you don’t have to deal with as much. Engineers don’t actually love to respond to on call events. If you can offload many of your problems to a cloud provider and free up your engineers for a nominal cost, do it.

mjburgess 5y ago
One has to presume that they have priced this and found the non-cloud version over-all cheaper. Labour isnt expensive if you're operating towards a minimum needed to function, and your systems are sufficiently operationally stable.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Labour isnt expensive… Engineering labor is definitely expensive. The entire $400/month bill for this linked website will only get you 2-3 hours of consulting time. They’re getting an enormous value by just offloading the work to someone else and not having to worry about it.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    if only there were an `if`
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    That is based on the id a cloud base service would not need a team to make it work. I'd argue it actually need a more expensive team.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      You have to do an apple-to-apples comparison though. If you're comparing a single colo'd machine vs a 3000-EC2 instance fleet with a load balancer, api nodes, database nodes (and requisite db admin team), and Kafka and DynamoDBs somewhere in there, then the cloud is going to be more expensive to manage. Barring in-depth research (which I'd love to read if someone has any links), it's not clear on a 1:1 basis what's cheaper. Paying for someone's time to research hardware and talk to vendors, run POs for them, figure out where/how to install them (Equinix is expensive), and RMA hard drives as that comes up; versus not paying for that and instead paying a cloud vendor for that privilege. Throw on top a changing hiring landscape (how much 'sysadmins' cost vs 'devops') and it really depends on the size of this hypothetical fleet that we're trying to manage, and how complicated the backend of the site is. If there's no real backend to speak of, Cloudflare's CDN for static assets is going to be way cheaper, and available now, vs anything you could possibly build from scratch, that would maybe be ready in a couple months.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
A python that knows python and linux is enough to support the up time needs and evolutions of this particular product. Actually a part time one. The entire team is composed of half of one dev. I'm 100% sure it's way cheaper than anybody that has AWS on resume. Of course, some things have to give, like the global CND, and some data guarantees. Everything is a compromise. It's all depend of what is important for your project. EDIT: also, my comment was not meant to oppose the article, but rather confirm the view that you should calibrate your setup to your project. Doing so will lead to great savings in hosting, and project complexity. A lot of projects don't need the cloud.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > The entire team is composed of half of one dev. Who is on-call 24/7/365, never takes vacation ever, and is always available to fix the website? It’s weird how much HN hates jobs with on-call requirements, but every time cloud services come up the solutions always involve forcing someone to be permanently on call to save a few hundred dollars per month in hosting costs.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    Nobody is on call 24H. If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the morning. The world doesn't stop because a streaming service is down for a few hours. It's not a medical service, or something thousands of businesses rely on. It just looses a bit of money and users are grumpy for a day because they had to wait until they could access new content. It's ok.
    - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      > Nobody is on call 24H. This one dev is literally on call 365 days a year and can never be away from a computer on vacation. If he leaves, the project has no one. How is that not a problem? Surely you can see that this isn’t reasonable for anyone who wants to run a business, or any employee who doesn’t want the website to be their life. > If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the morning. > It just looses a bit of money and users are grumpy for a day If you’re running a website where extended outages are no big deal and you don’t care about lost revenue, then it’s not really a valid comparison to the typical business website. Your situation is unique, not a model by which other companies should follow.
pcj-github 5y ago
Whether or not a site is hosted in the cloud, it will break from time to time. S** invariably happens, no matter what. So, even if you host in the cloud, you're going to have problems, but they will be different problems. A developer to backup and support the site will be required, one way or the other. Case in point: polyhaven.com (the subject of this article) is not reachable as I write this.
chalcolithic 5y ago
Does it work for video as well?

mjburgess 5y ago

One has to presume that they have priced this and found the non-cloud version over-all cheaper. Labour isnt expensive if you're operating towards a minimum needed to function, and your systems are sufficiently operationally stable.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Labour isnt expensive… Engineering labor is definitely expensive. The entire $400/month bill for this linked website will only get you 2-3 hours of consulting time. They’re getting an enormous value by just offloading the work to someone else and not having to worry about it.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  if only there were an `if`
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  That is based on the id a cloud base service would not need a team to make it work. I'd argue it actually need a more expensive team.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    You have to do an apple-to-apples comparison though. If you're comparing a single colo'd machine vs a 3000-EC2 instance fleet with a load balancer, api nodes, database nodes (and requisite db admin team), and Kafka and DynamoDBs somewhere in there, then the cloud is going to be more expensive to manage. Barring in-depth research (which I'd love to read if someone has any links), it's not clear on a 1:1 basis what's cheaper. Paying for someone's time to research hardware and talk to vendors, run POs for them, figure out where/how to install them (Equinix is expensive), and RMA hard drives as that comes up; versus not paying for that and instead paying a cloud vendor for that privilege. Throw on top a changing hiring landscape (how much 'sysadmins' cost vs 'devops') and it really depends on the size of this hypothetical fleet that we're trying to manage, and how complicated the backend of the site is. If there's no real backend to speak of, Cloudflare's CDN for static assets is going to be way cheaper, and available now, vs anything you could possibly build from scratch, that would maybe be ready in a couple months.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

A python that knows python and linux is enough to support the up time needs and evolutions of this particular product. Actually a part time one. The entire team is composed of half of one dev. I'm 100% sure it's way cheaper than anybody that has AWS on resume. Of course, some things have to give, like the global CND, and some data guarantees. Everything is a compromise. It's all depend of what is important for your project. EDIT: also, my comment was not meant to oppose the article, but rather confirm the view that you should calibrate your setup to your project. Doing so will lead to great savings in hosting, and project complexity. A lot of projects don't need the cloud.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> The entire team is composed of half of one dev. Who is on-call 24/7/365, never takes vacation ever, and is always available to fix the website? It’s weird how much HN hates jobs with on-call requirements, but every time cloud services come up the solutions always involve forcing someone to be permanently on call to save a few hundred dollars per month in hosting costs.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Nobody is on call 24H. If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the morning. The world doesn't stop because a streaming service is down for a few hours. It's not a medical service, or something thousands of businesses rely on. It just looses a bit of money and users are grumpy for a day because they had to wait until they could access new content. It's ok.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > Nobody is on call 24H. This one dev is literally on call 365 days a year and can never be away from a computer on vacation. If he leaves, the project has no one. How is that not a problem? Surely you can see that this isn’t reasonable for anyone who wants to run a business, or any employee who doesn’t want the website to be their life. > If the system has a problem during the night, the users will wait until the morning. > It just looses a bit of money and users are grumpy for a day If you’re running a website where extended outages are no big deal and you don’t care about lost revenue, then it’s not really a valid comparison to the typical business website. Your situation is unique, not a model by which other companies should follow.

pcj-github 5y ago

Whether or not a site is hosted in the cloud, it will break from time to time. S** invariably happens, no matter what. So, even if you host in the cloud, you're going to have problems, but they will be different problems. A developer to backup and support the site will be required, one way or the other. Case in point: polyhaven.com (the subject of this article) is not reachable as I write this.

chalcolithic 5y ago

Does it work for video as well?