7 ms·
Ask PG: Cost and effort of running Hacker News?
In terms of servers and hardware, how much does it cost to keep hacker news up and running each month?
In terms of man hours, how much is needed to maintain and moderate hacker news?
- huhtenberg 18y agoIf it were a very cool clustered, load-balanced setup with analog monitoring gauges set up in a nuclear bunker, then I'm guessing we would've heard about it by now :) So it's probably just your good old boring rack server. Anyone else care for a guess ?
- babul 18y agoFrom http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516108 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516108 Only one server: Old: 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, 4 GB RAM, 32-bit FreeBSD 5.3. New: 3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1. PG: "The new server seems to be about 2x as fast. The frontpage renders for me in about 50 msec. But the site should seem more than 2x faster (for logged-in users) because many requests will terminate before being interrupted. There's now enough memory that we can fit all the links and comments in memory at once again. We should be good for another year or so." (traffic: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#15jan09 http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#15jan09) Not sure of how or where server is hosted or what else is used e.g. router/firewall/bandwidth/ups/utilities/etc., but if pg/rtm billed for time all other costs would be insignificant. Maintainance: A lot less than most people considering it's rtm and pg.
- knightinblue 18y agoSo that brings the hardware costs to about 2000-$3000 per month? As for man hours, can 2 guys in a basement with nothing else on their schedules maintain and moderate a site like HN?
- simonista 18y agoDon't forget what it took to actually build this community. It's not exactly a fair comparison.
- blogimus 18y agoNot to mention (or maybe you are implying) providing compelling reasons to frequent HN.
- andrewljohnson 18y agoI don't understand how that makes the hardware cost $2000-$3000 per month.
- knightinblue 18y agoWhoops, my bad. read that as 24 GB RAM instead of 12 GB RAM (which made me wonder why they would need so much memory) The server should come out to a little over $1000 per month then?
- andrewljohnson 18y agoI don't think so. You can build out that Linux box for just a few thousand total. Check out System76 if you don't want to build it.
- joshuaxls 18y agoI think he's referring to how much it would cost if you paid for a server like that through a hosting provider.
- andrewljohnson 18y agoWell, he shouldn't call it hardware costs then :) A hosting provider gives you lots of services too.
- catch23 18y agoYou could get similar services from a colocation company as well. You could purchase a fully decked 1U server for $2000, then pay $50 a month for colocation (that's what I'm doing).
- e1ven 18y agoI suspect your hardware costs are a bit off. Just for an example, you can rent Xeon 5570, a rather nice 2.93 Ghz machine with 12GB RAM, and 2 TB of monthly bandwidth for $724 from Softlayer and others.
- knightinblue 18y agoYou're right. My math was off. I read it as 24 GB RAM, instead of 12 GB RAM. I was actually checking out Mediatemple's nitro server. Low on the memory and speed end (2.33 GHz and 8 GB RAM) but it seems to be getting glowing reviews for it's customer service. I'm going to also check out softlayer. Any other suggestions?
- e1ven 18y agoI still think it's amazing that we live in a world where we can store 25,769,803,776 bytes on a computer that we entrepreneurs can afford! It's causes a huge change in the way people look at Databases- In the past, you needed huge database servers so that you could keep everything stored on disk, and intelligently cached.. Today, I'd imagine that 99% of companies data can be kept entirely in memory. Stunning, really. It entirely changes how you think about data storage.
- njharman 18y ago> It entirely changes how you think about data storage. It should entirely change how you think about data storage. What's stunning to me is the number of people who are stuck on "Fully ACID, fully RDMS or it's crap and you will fail and deservedly so."
- ibsulon 18y agoIt all depends on what your goal is. In health care applications? In financial applications? I would never trust anything less than fully acid with all the bells and whistles. In a website where people aren't going to be that bothered of a few transactions are inconsistent if some major snafu happens? (status updates get lost in the ether, for example.) The cost isn't worth the benefit of high power. RDMS is a similar tradeoff.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- knightinblue 18y agohttp://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html - over 25,000 ips per day http://ycombinator.com/images/2yeartraffic.png http://ycombinator.com/images/2yeartraffic.png - Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but does that image show 300,000 pageviews per day?
- javanix 18y agoSure looks like it to me - the peaks on the graph are too close together to be going by months.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- andrewljohnson 18y agoIf Hacker News is anything like my site, both of which basically need to serve up little bits of text to lots of people, then hosting is cheap. I bet you could serve 20,000 people a day on an HN-like site for well under $1,000/month on AWS, assuming you are smart about caching and you don't thump the database with every request. So, even if you were totally clueless about ads and just ran random ad sense, the thing would more than pay for itself. It's incredibly cheap to run a site that doesn't need much bandwidth. Basically, if you are serving no pictures or media, you should be able to build a website at super-scale in your garage, or using some Cloud Service.
- jonknee 18y agoUnder a $1000 a month? I'd hope so! That would pay for a couple extra large instances which is way overkill for a simple site like this. It could be hosted on a simple VPS for $50 if you wanted to (well with a different architecture, hosting it all in memory makes a VPS not very efficient).
- lyime 18y ago$50 for 20k users a day? Good Luck. I don't think 512 MB VPS with any architecture could do that.
- jonknee 18y agoWhy not? That's only a couple page views a second. Around $50/m can get you a gig of RAM. Use some for memcached, spend the rest running Nginx or Lighttpd.
- zepolen 18y agoMemcached is probably a little overkill for 5 req/s.
- jasonwatkinspdx 18y agoHN has very little user specific content in it's hot pages. Also, since it's mostly time based, there's a lot of locality. It should cache like mad. My guessing math puts it at 300MB for the hot data set (1000 100kb pages, 20k 10kb users). With 10 page views per unique, 90% hit rate on the page/user cache and 20% of page views being writes I'd guess average is less than 1 iop a second. Even at high peak to average ratios it's likely within what a single sata disk can do. I'd say it might be a little tight on a 512MB vps, but possible if you optimized carefully. On a reasonable dedicated machine it should run very well without any particular effort paid to optimization beyond basic caching.
- pg 18y agoI think the server costs around $350/mo. I don't like to think how much time HN actually takes up, but when I was traveling recently I found that checking in for about 30 min a day was enough to keep things under control. On a weekday we get about 350k pageviews from about 30k unique ip addrs.
- knightinblue 18y agoShort, sweet and to the point. Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks pg! :)
- listic 18y agoHow much traffic do you see in a month?
- listic 18y agoI meant to ask, how much network traffic (bytes) do you see? I guess your hosting provider counts it, if you don't. And, while we're at it, what hosting provider do you use?
- SomeIdiot 18y agoWhy do you need to check in every 30 minutes?
- rams 18y agoWhat time zone is the hosting centre located in ? I always wondered about those posting times (x hours ago, y minutes ago, etc).
- knightinblue 18y agoTime zone doesn't matter. The clock starts from when you submitted an article or posted a comment and it's the same for everyone. So if you submitted an article 10 min ago, it shows as being posted 10 min ago for you and everyone else.