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Ask HN: Help me estimate costs for my web app

2 points by why-el 14y ago

Hey fellas, I am currently working on a Ruby on Rails application that will be used on campus, so there is a upper bound on the number of requests it will handle. We are about 1600 students, so in the best of the worlds I will be handling 1000+ requests per second. I am in the process of drafting a funding proposal and I need help locating a good host provider and estimating costs for hosting for this app. I am thinking of taking the app to a national level, so ideally the host provider should scale nicely. PS: I live in a small country, so even nationally is not that big, giving that I am targeting a subset of the population (students).

shasa 14y ago
I think you might want to look into amazon aws
caw 14y ago
Is this an application for students and you are a student on the campus? And is the funding from the school or something else? If you can tie it into the school, perhaps you could host the server on school resources in their datacenter. At my school, the campus Linux mirror was actually run by a student group, and just colo'd in the IT datacenter. If this is something that you're developing on your own and you're trying to build traction, you could also host it on your own computer on your internet connection. For as much as anyone needs it to be up until you're making money, that's fine. You could start off with a cheap VPS or the free tier on heroku or Amazon aws and see how it goes.
- jamesjguthrie 14y ago
  > If this is something that you're developing on your own and you're trying to build traction, you could also host it on your own computer on your internet connection. This is what I do.
dchuk 14y ago
"We are about 1600 students, so in the best of the worlds I will be handling 1000+ requests per second" The chances of 1000 students all making a request to the site at the exact same moment are very low. You'll probably be fine with a small VPS from Linode or similar.
- why-el 14y ago
  Yep, thats what I thought. Thanks for the feedback!
mion 14y ago
A friend of mine once wrote a little script that benchmarked a free Heroku app and to our surprise it handled a shitload amount of requests per second (at 1000 requests it was still going but the server thought it was a DDoS attack and cut us off).

2 points by why-el 14y ago

shasa 14y ago

I think you might want to look into amazon aws

caw 14y ago

Is this an application for students and you are a student on the campus? And is the funding from the school or something else? If you can tie it into the school, perhaps you could host the server on school resources in their datacenter. At my school, the campus Linux mirror was actually run by a student group, and just colo'd in the IT datacenter. If this is something that you're developing on your own and you're trying to build traction, you could also host it on your own computer on your internet connection. For as much as anyone needs it to be up until you're making money, that's fine. You could start off with a cheap VPS or the free tier on heroku or Amazon aws and see how it goes.

jamesjguthrie 14y ago
> If this is something that you're developing on your own and you're trying to build traction, you could also host it on your own computer on your internet connection. This is what I do.

dchuk 14y ago

"We are about 1600 students, so in the best of the worlds I will be handling 1000+ requests per second" The chances of 1000 students all making a request to the site at the exact same moment are very low. You'll probably be fine with a small VPS from Linode or similar.

why-el 14y ago
Yep, thats what I thought. Thanks for the feedback!

mion 14y ago

A friend of mine once wrote a little script that benchmarked a free Heroku app and to our surprise it handled a shitload amount of requests per second (at 1000 requests it was still going but the server thought it was a DDoS attack and cut us off).