7 ms·

375 Million pageviews for $15 a month

43 points by DanyO 14y ago

StavrosK 14y ago
Alternate title: Varnish can serve 375m pageviews/mo on a mostly-static site on an EC2 micro instance. It's true, but I guess most people here know that.
- uncoder0 14y ago
  Also worth mentioning that there should be another $40 worth of data fees from amazon. 375000000.0 / 1024. / 1024. * $0.12 = $42.91
thezilch 14y ago
In short, if your site is mostly or entirely static after the initial creation of a page, setup Varnish (or similar reverse proxy / web accelerator) to cache and serve your pages at a timeout rate you find acceptable.
pronoiac 14y ago
Honest questions: Don't Micro instances get throttled under sustained demand? And aren't they lowest priority on the host?
- riledhel 14y ago
  I think what gets throttled is the CPU, so if your instance isn't consuming too much CPU then you're fine. I believe that because he's using Varnish and a cache plugin he's not hitting the DB often, thus serving static content most of the time.
dkoch 14y ago
Of course the bandwidth bill will be a bit more than $15 for 375MM pageviews.
steve8918 14y ago
This is a more in-depth article with almost the exact same information that was previously on HN a few months ago. http://www.ewanleith.com/blog/900/10-million-hits-a-day-with-wordpress-using-a-15-server http://www.ewanleith.com/blog/900/10-million-hits-a-day-with...
pdog 14y ago
Seeing this (supporting over 10 million hits a day on an Amazon EC2 micro instance), it makes less and less sense to host a site entirely on Amazon S3.
- spindritf 14y ago
  The advantage of hosting a site entirely on S3 is the minimal administrative overhead. You don't have to configure, run, maintain, update and secure a server.
- awj 14y ago
  It depends heavily on your needs. Some top-of-my-head pros/cons: EC2 Pros: * Cheaper * Easier to handle infrequently-updated content * (Possibly) a simpler application pipeline EC2 Cons: * Have to administer a server * Not durable, have to handle backups * Worse availability (S3 goes down far less frequently than servers) That said, if I'm reading it right 10M hits/day on S3 will cost you $100/day (edit: as aidos noted, I'm high by a factor of 10 here) in hits alone, so the price difference here obviously is not small.
  - aidos 14y ago
    I think you're a multiple out - it'll cost you $10 / day; still not to be sniffed at if you're trying to keep costs down. You pay the same for bandwidth with either solution. We used s3 for a flash sale that even big boxes (with varnish) couldn't cope with. In our testing s3 didn't even blink (35,000 req/second). Real severs can't come close to that for the same price.
    - awj 14y ago
      Indeed I am, that's what I get for envelope math. I think there's a price/performance sweet spot where a small server with something like varnish makes a lot of sense. Move outside of it in terms of hits/day or acceptable cost/hit and S3 gets a lot more attractive, especially when you can slap CloudFront in front of it so easily. Actually, looking at the CloudFront pricing, unless you plan on doing a lot of cache invalidations it comes out much cheaper than S3.
LeBen 14y ago
The other thing you might want to watch out for is network caps. Usually on a small instance, RackSpace imposes some sort of insanely low network caps (I think something like 30mbps).
staunch 14y ago
People forget how much we did with servers that had less horsepower than that ten years ago. Computers these days are really powerful.
- orthecreedence 14y ago
  I agree. I think there's a balance between just throwing hardware at a problem versus trying to squeeze every bit of juice out of every box. I'm cheap as hell and actually like a bit of ops, so I'm more towards the squeezing side. I've seen people install 4-6 webservers where 2 would have easily handled the load because they didn't want to optimize. I realize it's a viable strategy, but it makes me cringe...
blhack 14y ago
This is a pretty fluffy article, and a pretty linkbaity title. 500,000 pageviews/hr does NOT equal 375 Million pageviews/month. Traffic comes in bursts, and has peaks and valleys.
- ksec 14y ago
  Exactly. I am guessing you would need at least 4 - 5 times the pageview/hr to handle a website with 375 Million PV/M load.
northisup 14y ago
We should sell this bumper sticker: DISQUS, doing the hard work so you can scale your static site.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
rquantz 14y ago
It's funny that I'm seeing this today, since just yesterday I was reading about varnish. I've been given the task of scaling up my first big Wordpress site for a client, which has been running pretty slowly -- it's been getting about 3 million uniques per month. I'm thinking the nginx-varnish setup described in the article that appeared on HN a few months ago (linked to elsewhere in this thread) may be the best way to go, along with throwing some more hardware at it. Does anybody have any additional thoughts about this process for a noob like me?

43 points by DanyO 14y ago

Alternate title: Varnish can serve 375m pageviews/mo on a mostly-static site on an EC2 micro instance. It's true, but I guess most people here know that.

uncoder0 14y ago
Also worth mentioning that there should be another $40 worth of data fees from amazon. 375000000.0 / 1024. / 1024. * $0.12 = $42.91

thezilch 14y ago

In short, if your site is mostly or entirely static after the initial creation of a page, setup Varnish (or similar reverse proxy / web accelerator) to cache and serve your pages at a timeout rate you find acceptable.

pronoiac 14y ago

Honest questions: Don't Micro instances get throttled under sustained demand? And aren't they lowest priority on the host?

riledhel 14y ago
I think what gets throttled is the CPU, so if your instance isn't consuming too much CPU then you're fine. I believe that because he's using Varnish and a cache plugin he's not hitting the DB often, thus serving static content most of the time.

dkoch 14y ago

Of course the bandwidth bill will be a bit more than $15 for 375MM pageviews.

steve8918 14y ago

This is a more in-depth article with almost the exact same information that was previously on HN a few months ago. http://www.ewanleith.com/blog/900/10-million-hits-a-day-with-wordpress-using-a-15-server http://www.ewanleith.com/blog/900/10-million-hits-a-day-with...

pdog 14y ago

Seeing this (supporting over 10 million hits a day on an Amazon EC2 micro instance), it makes less and less sense to host a site entirely on Amazon S3.

spindritf 14y ago
The advantage of hosting a site entirely on S3 is the minimal administrative overhead. You don't have to configure, run, maintain, update and secure a server.
awj 14y ago
It depends heavily on your needs. Some top-of-my-head pros/cons: EC2 Pros: * Cheaper * Easier to handle infrequently-updated content * (Possibly) a simpler application pipeline EC2 Cons: * Have to administer a server * Not durable, have to handle backups * Worse availability (S3 goes down far less frequently than servers) That said, if I'm reading it right 10M hits/day on S3 will cost you $100/day (edit: as aidos noted, I'm high by a factor of 10 here) in hits alone, so the price difference here obviously is not small.
- aidos 14y ago
  I think you're a multiple out - it'll cost you $10 / day; still not to be sniffed at if you're trying to keep costs down. You pay the same for bandwidth with either solution. We used s3 for a flash sale that even big boxes (with varnish) couldn't cope with. In our testing s3 didn't even blink (35,000 req/second). Real severs can't come close to that for the same price.
  - awj 14y ago
    Indeed I am, that's what I get for envelope math. I think there's a price/performance sweet spot where a small server with something like varnish makes a lot of sense. Move outside of it in terms of hits/day or acceptable cost/hit and S3 gets a lot more attractive, especially when you can slap CloudFront in front of it so easily. Actually, looking at the CloudFront pricing, unless you plan on doing a lot of cache invalidations it comes out much cheaper than S3.

LeBen 14y ago

The other thing you might want to watch out for is network caps. Usually on a small instance, RackSpace imposes some sort of insanely low network caps (I think something like 30mbps).

staunch 14y ago

People forget how much we did with servers that had less horsepower than that ten years ago. Computers these days are really powerful.

orthecreedence 14y ago
I agree. I think there's a balance between just throwing hardware at a problem versus trying to squeeze every bit of juice out of every box. I'm cheap as hell and actually like a bit of ops, so I'm more towards the squeezing side. I've seen people install 4-6 webservers where 2 would have easily handled the load because they didn't want to optimize. I realize it's a viable strategy, but it makes me cringe...

blhack 14y ago

This is a pretty fluffy article, and a pretty linkbaity title. 500,000 pageviews/hr does NOT equal 375 Million pageviews/month. Traffic comes in bursts, and has peaks and valleys.

ksec 14y ago
Exactly. I am guessing you would need at least 4 - 5 times the pageview/hr to handle a website with 375 Million PV/M load.

northisup 14y ago

We should sell this bumper sticker: DISQUS, doing the hard work so you can scale your static site.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

rquantz 14y ago

It's funny that I'm seeing this today, since just yesterday I was reading about varnish. I've been given the task of scaling up my first big Wordpress site for a client, which has been running pretty slowly -- it's been getting about 3 million uniques per month. I'm thinking the nginx-varnish setup described in the article that appeared on HN a few months ago (linked to elsewhere in this thread) may be the best way to go, along with throwing some more hardware at it. Does anybody have any additional thoughts about this process for a noob like me?