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I love the idea of this but, given the traffic numbers, this could run on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet and have the same result. They've burnt over a grand just t

I love the idea of this but, given the traffic numbers, this could run on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet and have the same result. They've burnt over a grand just to use vercel. Maybe I'm just older but I don't understand the logic here. A basic VPS, setup once, would have the same result and would be neutral in cost (it's how I run my own little free apps). Maybe the author is lucky enough that $100/mo doesn't really affect them or they're happy for it to pay for the convenience (my assumption).

scastiel 2y ago
Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet? I'd be very curious to see that ;) The web hosting costs basically nothing. Most of the cost comes from the database.
- tosh 2y ago
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  - deleted 2y ago
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- diggan 2y ago
  > Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet? How many times per second is the DB actually accessed? As far as I can tell my the metrics, they're doing ~1.7 requests/minute, you'll have a hard time finding a DB that couldn't handle that. In fact, I'd bet you'd be able to host that website (the database) in a text file on disk without any performance issues whatsoever.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  6k visits per week * 5 page views per visit is one view per 20 seconds on average. Even very modest hardware with naively written application code should have no problem handling thousands of CRUD database queries per second (assuming every query doesn't need a table scan or something). Modern computers are mind-bogglingly powerful. An old laptop off eBay can probably handle the load for business needs for all but the very largest corporations.
  - npsomaratna 2y ago
    My understanding is that DO VPS’ are underpowered (as are VPS offerings from most other VPS vendors). Dollar for dollar, bare metal stuff from Hetzner, OVH, etc are far more powerful. That said, I completely agree-a $4/month DO VPS can run MySQL, and should easily handle this load; in fact I’ve handled far bigger loads in practice. On a tangent: any recommendations for good US-based bare metal providers (with a convenience factor comparable to OVH, etc)?
    - diggan 2y ago
      > good US-based bare metal providers The times I've needed it, DataPacket (not based in US, but has servers in the US) and Vultr (based in the US) have both been good to me.
      - npsomaratna 2y ago
        Thank you so much. I’ll take a look at these.
      - mminer237 2y ago
        In a trademark travesty, I must ask DataPacket.com or DataPacket.net?
        diggan 2y ago
        Sorry, I was referring to datapacket.com
    - mxuribe 2y ago
      Hetzner is of course not U.S. based, but has expanded to have 2 U.S. sites (Oregon i think, and Virginia)....so that could be an option maybe. Caveat: i have not leveraged Hetzner in the U.s.....so can not speak to their quality.
      - npsomaratna 2y ago
        That’s news thank you. I’ll check this out.
- fs0c13ty00 2y ago
  My open source service, lrclib.net, handles approximately 200 requests per second at peak (yes you read that right, it's approximately 12000 requests per minute) on a simple €13 Hetzner cloud server (4 AMD based VCPU, 8GB RAM). I'd love to write a blog post about how I made it possible sometime in the future, but basically, I cheated by using Rust together with SQLite3 and some caching. I was surprised by the cost of Vercel in that blog post too, which is why I dislike all kinds of serverless/lambda/managed services. For me, having a dozen people subscribing to $1-$2/month sponsorship on GitHub Sponsors is enough to cover all the costs. Even if no one donates, I’d still have no trouble keeping the project running on my own.
- Dachande663 2y ago
  I didn't mean it quite so insultingly, but yes, even a very modest server would handle that kind of load easily. You're not particularly high throughput (a few requests per second?) and I imagine the database is fairly efficient (you're not storing pages of text or binary blobs). I think you'd be pleasently surprised by what a little VPS can do.
- explain 2y ago
  Running the 800th most popular website in the world (25-50M pageviews per day) on a 1GB VPS (Spring Boot, MariaDB, Redis) Very possible.
- avree 2y ago
  It’s surprising that you ask for advice on this topic in your blog, but then are very dismissive (complete with sarcastic wink) to the advice?
- codazoda 2y ago
  I think it would be fine. I run a little private analytics service for my own websites. That service isn't as busy but handles ~11k requests per month. It logs to a SQLite database. It does this on a little Raspberry Pi 400 in my home office and it's not too busy. The CPU sits at 1% to 3% on average. Obviously there are a lot of differences in my setup but I would think you could handle 10x the traffic with a small VPS without any trouble at all. You can read a little bit more about my analytics setup here: https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-400 https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...
- klabb3 2y ago
  You could run it on Cloudflare workers for free with plenty to spare. You get 5M reads/100k writes per day on D1. OTOH If you want managed Postgres it seems like you always have to pay a fairy high minimum.
- bdlowery 2y ago
  https://f5bot.com/ https://f5bot.com/ was free for like 8 years and it processed hundreds of thousands of db records a day, and it barely cost anything.
- trollied 2y ago
  "that many times". It's nearly zero traffic.
- Saris 2y ago
  They have under 1k visits per day, unless it's a really heavy app for some reason just about any basic VPS should handle a Webserver + DB for that just fine. It does feel like the tech community as a whole has forgotten how simple and low resource usage hosting most things is, maybe due to the proliferation of stuff like AWS trying to convince us that we need all this crazy stuff to do it?
deleted 2y ago
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scastiel 2y ago

Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet? I'd be very curious to see that ;) The web hosting costs basically nothing. Most of the cost comes from the database.

tosh 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
diggan 2y ago
> Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet? How many times per second is the DB actually accessed? As far as I can tell my the metrics, they're doing ~1.7 requests/minute, you'll have a hard time finding a DB that couldn't handle that. In fact, I'd bet you'd be able to host that website (the database) in a text file on disk without any performance issues whatsoever.
ndriscoll 2y ago
6k visits per week * 5 page views per visit is one view per 20 seconds on average. Even very modest hardware with naively written application code should have no problem handling thousands of CRUD database queries per second (assuming every query doesn't need a table scan or something). Modern computers are mind-bogglingly powerful. An old laptop off eBay can probably handle the load for business needs for all but the very largest corporations.
- npsomaratna 2y ago
  My understanding is that DO VPS’ are underpowered (as are VPS offerings from most other VPS vendors). Dollar for dollar, bare metal stuff from Hetzner, OVH, etc are far more powerful. That said, I completely agree-a $4/month DO VPS can run MySQL, and should easily handle this load; in fact I’ve handled far bigger loads in practice. On a tangent: any recommendations for good US-based bare metal providers (with a convenience factor comparable to OVH, etc)?
  - diggan 2y ago
    > good US-based bare metal providers The times I've needed it, DataPacket (not based in US, but has servers in the US) and Vultr (based in the US) have both been good to me.
    - npsomaratna 2y ago
      Thank you so much. I’ll take a look at these.
    - mminer237 2y ago
      In a trademark travesty, I must ask DataPacket.com or DataPacket.net?
      - diggan 2y ago
        Sorry, I was referring to datapacket.com
  - mxuribe 2y ago
    Hetzner is of course not U.S. based, but has expanded to have 2 U.S. sites (Oregon i think, and Virginia)....so that could be an option maybe. Caveat: i have not leveraged Hetzner in the U.s.....so can not speak to their quality.
    - npsomaratna 2y ago
      That’s news thank you. I’ll check this out.
fs0c13ty00 2y ago
My open source service, lrclib.net, handles approximately 200 requests per second at peak (yes you read that right, it's approximately 12000 requests per minute) on a simple €13 Hetzner cloud server (4 AMD based VCPU, 8GB RAM). I'd love to write a blog post about how I made it possible sometime in the future, but basically, I cheated by using Rust together with SQLite3 and some caching. I was surprised by the cost of Vercel in that blog post too, which is why I dislike all kinds of serverless/lambda/managed services. For me, having a dozen people subscribing to $1-$2/month sponsorship on GitHub Sponsors is enough to cover all the costs. Even if no one donates, I’d still have no trouble keeping the project running on my own.
Dachande663 2y ago
I didn't mean it quite so insultingly, but yes, even a very modest server would handle that kind of load easily. You're not particularly high throughput (a few requests per second?) and I imagine the database is fairly efficient (you're not storing pages of text or binary blobs). I think you'd be pleasently surprised by what a little VPS can do.
explain 2y ago
Running the 800th most popular website in the world (25-50M pageviews per day) on a 1GB VPS (Spring Boot, MariaDB, Redis) Very possible.
avree 2y ago
It’s surprising that you ask for advice on this topic in your blog, but then are very dismissive (complete with sarcastic wink) to the advice?
codazoda 2y ago
I think it would be fine. I run a little private analytics service for my own websites. That service isn't as busy but handles ~11k requests per month. It logs to a SQLite database. It does this on a little Raspberry Pi 400 in my home office and it's not too busy. The CPU sits at 1% to 3% on average. Obviously there are a lot of differences in my setup but I would think you could handle 10x the traffic with a small VPS without any trouble at all. You can read a little bit more about my analytics setup here: https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-400 https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...
klabb3 2y ago
You could run it on Cloudflare workers for free with plenty to spare. You get 5M reads/100k writes per day on D1. OTOH If you want managed Postgres it seems like you always have to pay a fairy high minimum.
bdlowery 2y ago
https://f5bot.com/ https://f5bot.com/ was free for like 8 years and it processed hundreds of thousands of db records a day, and it barely cost anything.
trollied 2y ago
"that many times". It's nearly zero traffic.
Saris 2y ago
They have under 1k visits per day, unless it's a really heavy app for some reason just about any basic VPS should handle a Webserver + DB for that just fine. It does feel like the tech community as a whole has forgotten how simple and low resource usage hosting most things is, maybe due to the proliferation of stuff like AWS trying to convince us that we need all this crazy stuff to do it?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]