5 ms·

I don't think it's lunacy if your startup is cheap enough to run. If you can support a million users on $100/month, why not... It's worth that just to put it on

by axod 18y ago

I don't think it's lunacy if your startup is cheap enough to run. If you can support a million users on $100/month, why not... It's worth that just to put it on your resume, or just for the knowledge learned from scaling. Then you just have to figure out how to make $0.0001 per user/month and you're into profit. I do agree about the ones that take a ton of funding and have a ridiculous burn rate though.

mattmaroon 18y ago
If there's scaling involved, you're spending a lot more than $100 per month. The only websites I can think of that could get high traffic for low cost are blogs, since they can just run on TypePad or something, but I don't really consider them startups generally. TechCrunch and HuffPo maybe. There's almost nothing that's profitable at a fraction of a cent per user per month. The net is cheap, but it isn't that cheap.
- ntoshev 18y ago
  It's not a typical case, but e.g. Talkinator is cheap to run and potentially reaching millions of people. http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/08/benchmarking-talkinator.html http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/08/benchmarking-talkinat... "In my benchmarks now, on my quad-core desktop the talkinator server can push about 39000 messages per second. Keep in mind this is processed messages as in decoded, packaged, and queued for particular recipients." The typical architecture for web applications is pretty inefficient.
- axod 18y ago
  You're definitely spending more than $100/month in terms of time, but in terms of servers/bandwidth, you can support a million users pretty well on $100 if you don't use the standard web frameworks etc which are woefully inefficient.
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    Well, at $100 per month there's no real scaling. You're running everything on one inexpensive server. Scaling would be just getting a better one. (Can you even get a dedicated for that low?) I guess maybe you and I define scaling differently. I'm thinking like adding in web servers, load balancing, replicating db. You may be just talking optimizing code and caching or something. Curiously, can you serve even some simple dynamic content like a Wordpress blog to a million somewhat frequent users a month?
    - axod 18y ago
      That's the issue though... you don't need a dedicated server to serve 1m users, and you don't need to add web servers, load balancing, replicating etc etc VPS servers are so cheap and more than enough. The current web stacks are just ridiculously lousy.

by axod 18y ago

mattmaroon 18y ago

If there's scaling involved, you're spending a lot more than $100 per month. The only websites I can think of that could get high traffic for low cost are blogs, since they can just run on TypePad or something, but I don't really consider them startups generally. TechCrunch and HuffPo maybe. There's almost nothing that's profitable at a fraction of a cent per user per month. The net is cheap, but it isn't that cheap.

ntoshev 18y ago
It's not a typical case, but e.g. Talkinator is cheap to run and potentially reaching millions of people. http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/08/benchmarking-talkinator.html http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/08/benchmarking-talkinat... "In my benchmarks now, on my quad-core desktop the talkinator server can push about 39000 messages per second. Keep in mind this is processed messages as in decoded, packaged, and queued for particular recipients." The typical architecture for web applications is pretty inefficient.
axod 18y ago
You're definitely spending more than $100/month in terms of time, but in terms of servers/bandwidth, you can support a million users pretty well on $100 if you don't use the standard web frameworks etc which are woefully inefficient.
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  Well, at $100 per month there's no real scaling. You're running everything on one inexpensive server. Scaling would be just getting a better one. (Can you even get a dedicated for that low?) I guess maybe you and I define scaling differently. I'm thinking like adding in web servers, load balancing, replicating db. You may be just talking optimizing code and caching or something. Curiously, can you serve even some simple dynamic content like a Wordpress blog to a million somewhat frequent users a month?
  - axod 18y ago
    That's the issue though... you don't need a dedicated server to serve 1m users, and you don't need to add web servers, load balancing, replicating etc etc VPS servers are so cheap and more than enough. The current web stacks are just ridiculously lousy.