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Pinboard 2014 Expenses
- hodgesmr 12y agoSource: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/494238943894700032 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/494238943894700032
- zrail 12y agoThis is great information on just how little it takes to run a service like Pinboard, with hundreds of thousands of active users, on your own hardware. Just imagine how much more it would cost on Heroku or even AWS, just so you can avoid having to think about ops.
- idlewords 12y agoThe site only has about 25k active users. But I'm pretty sure it could handle about 10x the traffic without changing this spreadsheet much.
- zrail 12y agoOh for some reason I thought it was more. I think my point still stands, though.
- michaelbuckbee 12y agoStats on usage, users, etc. at http://blog.pinboard.in/ http://blog.pinboard.in/
- AznHisoka 12y agoHow do you define active user?
- StavrosK 12y agoHmm. For comparison, historious has around 7k active users and I only pay $10/mo for a 1 GB RAM linode.
- TillE 12y agoCegłowski (@Pinboard) is utterly brilliant on Twitter, by the way: "I toyed with using Heroku but found that it was faster and more reliable to put hundred dollar bills through a paper shredder"
- ceejayoz 12y agoIt's by far the best "corporate" Twitter account I've ever encountered.
- lreeves 12y agoI've read so many terrible budget spreadsheets that I first I assumed it was all in thousands. Nice work on keeping the costs down!
- nness 12y agoThose figures aren't in thousands? That's some good cash management!
- kbar13 12y agoslicehost? :)
- adamnemecek 12y agowat https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/494239839349268481 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/494239839349268481
- tnorthcutt 12y agoYou've stumbled upon the greatness that is Maciej's sense of humor. Just click the follow button, and consider yourself lucky.
- aroman 12y agoIs it me, or does $60-70/month for DNS seem pretty high?
- idlewords 12y agoSeems high to me too (I use DNSMadeEasy). But I'm too lazy to shop around for alternatives right now. The current setup Just Works™ and is not a big proportion of my costs.
- ivank 12y agoCloudFlare offers DNS for free, or $20/mo if you want to pay them. https://www.cloudflare.com/dns https://www.cloudflare.com/dns
- ksec 12y agoThat doesn't sound right. On Business Account with Add on pack it should only cost about $360 / Year. Which is $30 /m. And you cant compare DNSimple / Route53 as suggested on twitter with DNSMadeEasy. Both in features and more importantly SPEED!. DNSMadeEasy is already one of the best out there. Most of the others that offer similar features and speed are multiple times more expensive. As far as i know there are only two other alternatives / recommendation. Cloudflare, which is free. Their DNS are quite fast, but i think there are limitation with what you could do with it. And if you grow larger, EdgeCast recently offers DNS services as well. Although it start at $50, its price on per million queries are one of the cheapest in terms of paid DNS services. And like its CDN network it is very fast.
- NKCSS 12y agoThey think it's a bit much too :) https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/494319940045111296 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/494319940045111296
- drdaeman 12y ago20M req/month seems like a trivial amount that can be handled by a bunch of geographically-distributed VPSes (for failover and better query times) running any sane (resources-wise) DNS server software. For comparison, we have a bare-metal E3113@3GHz machine that at the time happens to run only a full-fledged PowerDNS server (sqlite + pipe backends, query cache disabled due to split-horizon requirements, and passes queries to a pdns_recursor if can't answer directly). The server easily handles about 500M reqs/month, with negligibly low load average. Judging from top(1) output — pdns_server-instance has about 2-4% CPU consumption, most of which is probably due to disabled caches. But there are probably cheaper options with specialized services.
- continuations 12y agoThey use Hetzner for dedicated servers, slicehost for VPS, 2 colocation services, and AWS cloud. For a relatively small site, why do they need so many different hosting providers?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jlindley 12y agoAt one point the FBI accidentally seized his servers. He's pretty paranoid about redundancy and multi-site online data storage after that. https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/06/faq_about_the_recent_fbi_raid/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/06/faq_about_the_recent_fbi_ra...
- idlewords 12y agoThat is not correct; see my comment upthread.
- q3k 12y agoMy bad.
- 8ig8 12y agoThis is an old post, but may provide some insight... https://blog.pinboard.in/2012/05/a_cloud_of_my_own/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2012/05/a_cloud_of_my_own/ I'm sure there's a HN discussion from back then also. Edit: Lots more on the topic... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ablog.pinboard.in+server https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ablog.pinboard.in+server
- idlewords 12y agoI run admin + staging stuff and my own email on the dedicated servers. The Hetzner box has some offsite backups, too. I want something that won't die at the same time as the website. I use two colos for redundancy. One is in Sacramento, and it mitigates the earthquake risk of the one in Fremont. The AWS costs consists of stuff I'm too lazy to go find and delete. Everyone has an unused EC2 instance or S3 bucket somewhere; that's what keeps Amazon in the black.
- imaginenore 12y agoDon't confuse Pinboard with Pinterest, which is thousands times bigger. Pinterest active monthly users: 60 million Pinboard active monthly users: 24 thousand
- idlewords 12y agoBy all means confuse Pinboard with Pinterest if you are depositing that sweet VC money.
- logn 12y agoJust don't confuse it with pinboard-dot-com which looks pretty sketchy :)
- idlewords 12y agoPinboard dot com is run by a hilarious, crotchety Linux guy who has been around forever. He did me a huge favor by not selling that domain despite great temptation.
- Cogito 12y agoLooks like he recently moved to pinboard.jp pinboard.com is currently not responding, and was last cached on 29 Jul at 1:47 GMT (roughly 5 hours ago).
- icebraining 12y agoIt's working here (redirecting to .jp)
- kawsper 12y agowww.pinboard.com redirects to a transition site.
- chatmasta 12y agoSo you're seeking VC money now? :)
- trevmckendrick 12y agoAbout how much were the AWS expenses before moving to your own servers?
- idlewords 12y agoI never ran the site on AWS. Here's a spreadsheet from 2011, when I was running the site on leased servers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au7yiR802qQmdHU2ZXJfVDY0c0JSbHd6aTd0M01BWEE&usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au7yiR802qQmdHU... I had to change providers numerous times that year for various reasons, hence the confusing number of services.
- linklet 12y agoI'm building a bookmark site as well and I'm looking for seed users. If you have a such need, please try https://linklet.io/ https://linklet.io/ It's not officially released yet so there might have problems.
- tnorthcutt 12y agoI clicked, ready to chastise you for blatantly advertising on a competitor's thread, and for launching yet another business without charging users money. I'll still chastise you for the blatant self-promotion on a competitor's thread, but kudos for actually charging money!
- daturkel 12y agoPinboard is one of a few services I happily pay for. Honestly, I'd probably pay a subscription price for it. I've got 1041 bookmarks, it's fast, searches and tags flawlessly, the unread functionality is super useful, and I've got some (unofficial?) android app that makes it a snap to use with my phone. Keep up the great work.
- saltylicorice 12y agoStart paying for archiving then. :)
- esusatyo 12y agoMaciej finally bought an iPhone! When I met him last year in Australia he uses his 15" laptop to check his tweets.
- patio11 12y agoHe runs a really, really right ship. Off the top of my head I think the SaaS budget alone at my companies is larger than that. That said, by the standards of physically extant businesses, it is ridiculous how far you can get on $1k or $2k a month.
- lifeisstillgood 12y agoI am actually jealous of the level of control. I need to work harder !
- lifeisstillgood 12y agoSorry that was meant to comment on the top, not yourself. Edit: And was barely worth commenting at all, let alone this comment only drawing attention to the information-free nature of my opinions. Oh dear ... But the OP has shamed me into realising I do need to upgrade my financial controls - "worrying" does not seem to count as a system!
- timme 12y agostill happy i paid for pinboard a while ago. the "no-nonsense, speed first" policy and the fact that it's actually being executed are my favorite things about the service.
- pjc50 12y agoI wonder what other services would suit this small, "artisinal", paid-for internet service model? There's some RSS readers and email providers. Photo hosting and blogging are too "bulk" and high-profile for this business model, probably. I suspect the abuse/takedown request workload is tiny, which helps a lot in keeping the cost down.
- petercooper 12y agoMaybe my memory is poor but I seem to recall SmugMug being somewhat similar in its early days for photo hosting. Svbtle could have done similarly in the blogging space if they'd charged early on. In terms of single/small group companies running profitable Internet services though, there are tons, not least the well known ones around here involving people like patio11 and Amy Hoy. I'd say the sky's the limit. Indeed, it might be more fun to think of what services could never suit the model..
- adventured 12y agoThere are a lot of niche opportunities in larger segments. The hard part is always getting attention / traction, getting those first thousand customers to pay, getting enough money to afford some marketing and support (if necessary). Just a simple example: HomeAway's huge vacation rentals business. Within the larger super category ('for rent by owner'), there are long term rentals, and that's a niche compared to the much larger vacation rental market. Several years ago, you could have created a modest business around that smaller niche, charging $30 or $50 per year for a listing. 10,000 listings at $50 per year becomes a nice, likely quite profitable, small business. Real estate listing concepts are great if you can get traction and listings, the costs of hosting and serving up the data and images might as well be zero.
- morkbot 12y agoDoes Hetzner has any proper competitor somewhere, with similar power/price ratio? Especially interested in some on the US side of the pond. They seem to be a go-to company for everyone that wants to host stuff on his/her own.
- petercooper 12y agoI do not have a server with them, have never used them, am not associated with them, etc, but one I keep seeing coming up in the US is http://www.servermania.com/ http://www.servermania.com/ - it's still not quite as a cheap as Hetzner though (of who I'm a happy user).
- adventured 12y agoThere aren't very many trust-worthy hosts that come close to Hetzner in the US market. I use WebNX, and love them. They have a particular west coast focus (first major location out of LA). Their prices are a bit higher than Hetzner, but they provide an amazing service, have a solid network, and the prices are great; plus they'll do any custom setup you need. They frequently have deals on WebhostingTalk. Check out Versaweb: http://versaweb.com/dedicated.php http://versaweb.com/dedicated.php You can get a E5-1650v2 with 32gb of ram and 50tb of bandwidth for $139 (no setup). They're a quality host, and their network is very fast. Reliable Servers / Constant.com have some great prices and deals from time to time. Their network is great. They're comparable with Servermania mentioned by another post (Servermania is out of Buffalo; Constant is out of New Jersey, the DuPont Fabros datacenter). ReliableSite.net is pretty great: http://www.reliablesite.net/ http://www.reliablesite.net/ They're out of the same datacenter as Constant.com mentioned previously. Fast network, good prices. The only one of these that comes close to Hetzner pricing is Versaweb however.
- ksec 12y agoDo OVH count as one? They do have DC in Canada.
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