8 ms·
Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?
How much cost to run Hacker News monthly?
These costs could be cloud costs as well as any engineers assigned to upkeep.
- Havoc 4y agoLast dang talked about hardware it was on a pretty modest xeon so probably not all that much https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379 Unsure if anything has changed since
- raverbashing 4y ago(Edit: probably not) I think they also are behind Cloudflare and they use Algolia for search So not everything is running there
- voytec 4y agodig a news.ycombinator.com +short 209.216.230.240 Not Cloudflare's address.
- theCrowing 4y agoThey had a hardware failure this year and were for a really short time on a cloud instance and behind cloudflare.
- zinekeller 4y agoWhile most of your statement is true, it was direct-from-AWS (at least from my testing, so I'm not sure if some users were routed through Cloudflare).
- theCrowing 4y agoOh you might be right I could've sworn traceroute said cloudflare when I probed it.
- mritchie712 4y ago> Algolia Are you referring to https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/? pretty sure Algolia runs that for free (for marketing)
- halotrope 4y agoI would be surprised if it was more than $100 per month
- inductive_magic 4y agoPretty sure dang can't afford rent on that
- revskill 4y agoOf course he has good salary to rent anything he wants.
- hahalolha 4y ago> Pretty sure dang can't afford rent on that #dangdeservesbetter
- throwaway14356 4y agoHe must have made more than enough decisions by now to train a bot.
- moffkalast 4y agodanGPT
- halotrope 4y agoStricly for the hosting I meant. Doesn't HN famously run on a single Computer?
- ttyyzz 4y agoI think you might be off here by the order of ~10
- MacsHeadroom 4y agoReal cost is probably closer to $10/month, given HN is apparently hosted from an on-prem server built in 2012.
- xuki 4y agoPretty sure the most expensive thing is @dang's time.
- asar 4y agoDeservedly so
- RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y agoDo they really only have a single moderator? What happens when @dang has to sleep?
- penguin_booze 4y agoLegend has it that dang can moderate even while asleep. On the other hand, I've read here previously that dang is not human but a lizard. We may never know.
- nabaraz 4y agoI believe it still runs on one box. Xeon E5-3567 (3.5Ghz). Stack is FREEBSD with nginx as front-end. From a quick look at M5 hosting price, cost is probably $500-$1000/month (6M requests).
- sph 4y agoI wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard. The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we'd suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not worse.
- gchokov 4y agoThat comment exactly.
- japanman425 4y agoI just and an aneurysm
- xuki 4y agoI lol-ed at this. A few years ago, someone said it runs as a single process on 1 core and use no database, everything is written to filesystem.
- andai 4y agoTwo years ago I emailed HN to ask why favoriting posts is rate limited. Got the reply, "HN's main software runs on a single core." They also said they are working on an overhaul of Arc and HN, which will massively improve performance.
- hackernewds 4y agoThey gave you false info https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34171328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34171328
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- marban 4y agoText-only, No media hosting/ops — less than $500 on a humble setup.
- amelius 4y agoFor the answer to be relevant I think you first need to answer how many pageviews per day.
- bullen 4y agoE5-2637 (32nm) is from 2012, I can not encourage people enough to buy the last 1151 Xeons or 8 core Atom on Mini-ITX SuperMicro motherboard (might be hard to find new soon): In particular I have E-2124 (2018), E-2224 (2019) and A2SDi-8C-HLN4F (2017); all 14nm, those you'll probably never have to replace for peak performance... the only question is if you will be able to afford powering them without revenues (75W/25W)...
- pedrocr 4y agoWhy get those instead of modern Ryzens that are much faster at the same power levels?
- bullen 4y agoBecause I trust Intel and I don't see Mini-ITX motherboards with server grade quality for Ryzen... The only AMD I have ever had was a Thinkpad X100e and that convinced me to never buy anything AMD again. That said, X86 and ARM are peaking together so it does not matter what you buy, the M1 might save you some electricity but at peak performance below what a Xeon can deliver. For parallelism on the same atomic memory more than 4 cores will invalidate too much cache. And if you have a embarrassingly parallelizable problem you might as well use Raspberry 4.
- densh 4y agoIn microATX form factor Asrock has had a number of AM4 motherboards with IPMI and ECC RAM available for a long time. For example: https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=X570D4U#Specifications https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=X... AMD is now firmly ahead in performance/watt, and in peak performance on most server-side benchmarks (see phoronix). Xeon superiority is a thing of the past. The only area where Intel is competitive is in AVX512 workloads.
- bullen 4y agoMicro-ATX is too big. This is how you build a 75W server that lasts 100 years and can do AI too :D, just remove the GPU for no AI: http://move.rupy.se/file/xeon_1030.png http://move.rupy.se/file/xeon_1030.png
- rasengan 4y agoA request optimized HN could cache pages and essentially only dynamically load votes and comments. This would reduce the need for a strong system.
- throwaway14356 4y agoi imagine it funny if you limit voting to min 2000 max 3000 point accounts. could be an interesting formula in all kinds of hierarchical systems. Above some salary you are banned from the bike shedding discussion.
- egberts1 4y agoHacker News' secret sauce: no fat image nor video nor sound file serving, just the text, ma'am. Something that would have made Gopher protocol proud to coexist along in this exclusive class. Probably could save even more money in bandwidth cost with mostly unsecured HTTP.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]