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We're currently running most of our stuff from a Mac Mini we own (about US$1500) that's co-located with macminicolo.com in Las Vegas (about US$30/mo). It's mos

by donmcc 14y ago

We're currently running most of our stuff from a Mac Mini we own (about US$1500) that's co-located with macminicolo.com in Las Vegas (about US$30/mo). It's mostly a static sight right now, though we'll be setting up an online store to do direct e-book sales in a few weeks. We will also get a second Mac Mini sometime soon to use as a staging/emergency replacement server. We're selling e-books to a niche market (check out www.photoshopdimensions.com) so we're not worried about runaway traffic growth, though of course we'd love to have that problem. This has worked out well for us so far. Setting aside our questionable server OS choice, the downside of owning your server is the higher up-front cost and responsibility for the hardware. You can reduce this by leasing a physical server from a hosting company. The upside is you have the full server CPUs/memory/disk at your disposal; a modern server can support a pretty sizable load if you don't have to share it. I believe StackOverflow got pretty far in their early days on a single app server and a single DB server.

yashchandra 14y ago
so do you have paying customers ? If yes, what is the approx. volume ?
- donmcc 14y ago
  We had over 1000 downloads direct from our server of our first free issue, and hundreds more from the iBookstore. Our second issue sold around 40 so far at $5 through the iBookstore and Amazon (with direct sales coming soon). We're gearing up to publish our next issue at the end of July and do a big marketing/PR push around Photoshop World in September. I'm confident our one little server will hold up just fine. The bulk of the 1000 downloads came over a couple days after we were mentioned in Adobe's Photoshop.com blog. According to Google Analytics we had on the order of 20 simultaneous visitors at times without a hiccup. That's actually a pretty light load for a modern PC server -- I didn't even bother to ssh into our mini to check performance stats. We do have CloudFlare proxying the site, so undoubtedly that helps.

by donmcc 14y ago

yashchandra 14y ago

so do you have paying customers ? If yes, what is the approx. volume ?

donmcc 14y ago
We had over 1000 downloads direct from our server of our first free issue, and hundreds more from the iBookstore. Our second issue sold around 40 so far at $5 through the iBookstore and Amazon (with direct sales coming soon). We're gearing up to publish our next issue at the end of July and do a big marketing/PR push around Photoshop World in September. I'm confident our one little server will hold up just fine. The bulk of the 1000 downloads came over a couple days after we were mentioned in Adobe's Photoshop.com blog. According to Google Analytics we had on the order of 20 simultaneous visitors at times without a hiccup. That's actually a pretty light load for a modern PC server -- I didn't even bother to ssh into our mini to check performance stats. We do have CloudFlare proxying the site, so undoubtedly that helps.