4 ms·
The primary bottleneck for most startups isn't money, it's time. Also for most startups (assuming you're not doing something CPU/bandwidth heavy) the actual co
by ig1 14y ago
The primary bottleneck for most startups isn't money, it's time.
Also for most startups (assuming you're not doing something CPU/bandwidth heavy) the actual cost of hosting is going to be a relatively small part of the budget. If your burn rate is a million dollars, reducing 10k of hosting costs to 1k isn't really worth the effort.
- fauigerzigerk 14y agoMoney can buy time in various forms. I think PaaS is one abstraction level too much to remain flexible and efficient as you grow.
- raverbashing 14y agoKind of depends There's the "two guys in a dorm eating ramen" and there's the YC backed "startup" that already has a couple of hires So if your monthly budget is of hundreds of dollars, using a VPS instead of Heroku makes sense
- ig1 14y agoLet say your average http request takes 200ms to serve, then with 5 heroku worker dynos you can serve about 10 million requests a day which should comfortably cover the requirements of most startups. How much do those dynos cost ? - $143/month. That's less than three hours salary for a developer. If your monthly budget is hundreds of dollars I'm guessing your traffic is low enough you can just use the free tiers of heroku, appfog, etc.
- tolas 14y agoWell the point of all this is that simple scaling math like that doesn't add up because of the queuing latency introduced by heroku's routing layer. But still at that scale your point is valid.
- raverbashing 14y agoYes, but there's a step before $143 is money that is missed by a college student, for example. Better go with something cheaper or the free tiers of Heroku, AWS, etc You're probably still developing the system, or having only a small amount of requests.
- antirez 14y ago10,000,000 requests each day are 115 requests per second. I don't follow your math here with a 200ms CPU time per request.
- badgar 14y agoHeroku customers don't typically do math when they do capacity planning. That's part of the Operations toolchest they're buying. They just up/down dynos.
- jstanley 14y ago115/30 is almost 4, which is almost 5; 5*200ms = 1 second; I guess he meant 10M/mo, not 10M/day.
- ig1 14y agoYes, my mistake.
- ansgri 14y agoAnd the real problem is the non-uniformity of the load. If your 10M/mo request start concentrating around weekends, you've got a problem... Except you haven't, as your infrastructure is elastic, and this is the real bonus. Also, I'd be very afraid to get accidentally hit by HN traffic if I'd host my own server.