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If 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

If 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 ago
Under 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 ago
    Why 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 ago
      Memcached is probably a little overkill for 5 req/s.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 18y ago
    HN 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.
    - wooster 18y ago
      Given the "more" links on the front page, I'm guessing HN is using continuations as state storage mechanisms, and that they're stored on a per-user basis. So, I'd expect the site's RAM requirements to be pretty hefty just on that basis, hence the 12GB of RAM.
  - catch23 18y ago
    350k hits per day is only 4 req/s. Assuming there are typical peak hours, I'm guessing it could reach 300 req/s during peak hours. Nginx on a crappy 128MB server can deliver around 8000 req/s on a static page. Even if there was zero caching, I would hope you could manage 300 req/s. (and yes, I actually tested this on a crappy 128MB VPS. I also tested out using a rails, merb, and compojure generated pages and was able to reach 500-1000 req/s easily)
  - wlievens 18y ago
    $50 a month will rent you a 2048 MB VPS.
WalterGR 18y ago
Is that realistic? Running random AdSense + 20,000 people a day = "more than" $1,000 a month?
- andrewljohnson 18y ago
  Absolutely. 20,000 people a day is definitely worth 35 dollars per day. That would mean, if your ads were impression-based, your CPM of $1.75. You pay $45 CPM for eyeballs on a site like backpacker.com, which actually has a tight audience, but you're gonna get $1.75 unless your site is just spam. CPM means cost per thousand eyeballs. I'm talking about impressions here just to simplify things.
  - staunch 18y ago
    This site could easily make $10k/mo+ with ads.
  - WalterGR 18y ago
    The reason I ask is that my site gets about 7,000 unique visitors a day. If 20,000 = $35 a day, 7,000 = $12.25 a day. I make about half that. I don't recall seeing any articles on HN about advertising options (AdSense vs. AdBrite vs...) or optimization. (Though it's possible I've simply missed them.) Any good resources I should investigate?
    - andrewljohnson 18y ago
      What's your website?
      - WalterGR 18y ago
        http://onlineslangdictionary.com/ http://onlineslangdictionary.com/
        andrewljohnson 18y ago
        It does seem to me like "you're doing it wrong." I don't know why you are showing adsense ads for dictionaries on your site. I can't imagine your audience is the sort that buys dictionaries. Given you are a slang dictionary, I imagine your users are young. And most young people get their dictionaries online. It seems like such an oxymoron that you would have an ad to buy something printed on your dictionary website. Your ad sense literally show ads for a printed competitor to your site. It seems to me you have your adsense set up wrong, or naively. If I go to a page and look up a word slang for a word like girlfriend, you should show me ads for dating! When I look something up in your dictionary, then you start to know who I am and you can show me relevant ads. As it was, all I get is banners for online colleges and slang dictionaries and a Google ad for Ask.com. You just need a bit better ads... I guess I was wrong about being able to put up random ads, but I think you could make more if you thought about it more.

jonknee 18y ago

Under 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 ago
  Why 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 ago
    Memcached is probably a little overkill for 5 req/s.
- jasonwatkinspdx 18y ago
  HN 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.
  - wooster 18y ago
    Given the "more" links on the front page, I'm guessing HN is using continuations as state storage mechanisms, and that they're stored on a per-user basis. So, I'd expect the site's RAM requirements to be pretty hefty just on that basis, hence the 12GB of RAM.
- catch23 18y ago
  350k hits per day is only 4 req/s. Assuming there are typical peak hours, I'm guessing it could reach 300 req/s during peak hours. Nginx on a crappy 128MB server can deliver around 8000 req/s on a static page. Even if there was zero caching, I would hope you could manage 300 req/s. (and yes, I actually tested this on a crappy 128MB VPS. I also tested out using a rails, merb, and compojure generated pages and was able to reach 500-1000 req/s easily)
- wlievens 18y ago
  $50 a month will rent you a 2048 MB VPS.

WalterGR 18y ago

Is that realistic? Running random AdSense + 20,000 people a day = "more than" $1,000 a month?

andrewljohnson 18y ago
Absolutely. 20,000 people a day is definitely worth 35 dollars per day. That would mean, if your ads were impression-based, your CPM of $1.75. You pay $45 CPM for eyeballs on a site like backpacker.com, which actually has a tight audience, but you're gonna get $1.75 unless your site is just spam. CPM means cost per thousand eyeballs. I'm talking about impressions here just to simplify things.
- staunch 18y ago
  This site could easily make $10k/mo+ with ads.
- WalterGR 18y ago
  The reason I ask is that my site gets about 7,000 unique visitors a day. If 20,000 = $35 a day, 7,000 = $12.25 a day. I make about half that. I don't recall seeing any articles on HN about advertising options (AdSense vs. AdBrite vs...) or optimization. (Though it's possible I've simply missed them.) Any good resources I should investigate?
  - andrewljohnson 18y ago
    What's your website?
    - WalterGR 18y ago
      http://onlineslangdictionary.com/ http://onlineslangdictionary.com/
      - andrewljohnson 18y ago
        It does seem to me like "you're doing it wrong." I don't know why you are showing adsense ads for dictionaries on your site. I can't imagine your audience is the sort that buys dictionaries. Given you are a slang dictionary, I imagine your users are young. And most young people get their dictionaries online. It seems like such an oxymoron that you would have an ad to buy something printed on your dictionary website. Your ad sense literally show ads for a printed competitor to your site. It seems to me you have your adsense set up wrong, or naively. If I go to a page and look up a word slang for a word like girlfriend, you should show me ads for dating! When I look something up in your dictionary, then you start to know who I am and you can show me relevant ads. As it was, all I get is banners for online colleges and slang dictionaries and a Google ad for Ask.com. You just need a bit better ads... I guess I was wrong about being able to put up random ads, but I think you could make more if you thought about it more.