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mixmax

Some metrics:

From the article:

60 servers

35% active users (defined as being active a given month)

2,335,676 total users

41,598 premium users

38972 users per server

4 sysadmins

$68,641 - Total variable expenses (hardware + software + hosting + network + operations staff + support staff)

$145,000 - Total revenue from active premium users

From this we can deduce some interesting numbers:

free/paying ratio (all users) - 1,7%

free/paying ratio (active users) - 2.2%

revenue per user (all users) - $0,06

revenue per active premium user - $3,5

Variable expense per user - $0,29

38927 users per server

583919 users per sysadmin

I particularly find the $0,06 revenue per user interesting, since it gives a rough number to work with if you're doing a freemium website. Eg. if you need $10.000 in monthly revenue to break even you will need 166.666 users.

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I'm starting up my own tiny business and have been spending a great deal of time understanding how to optimize every part of the product infrastructure to minimize cost (to a reasonable level).

$68K per month blows my mind if the number represents monthly expenses instead of yearly given the number of active users. I've an iPhone game with over 3MM active unique users and by my math I can host a multiplayer solution for less than $800/month. Granted, my service will not be sending giant PDFs, notes, voice memos, etc. but still... What am I missing? I am not being snarky. I need to learn.

Also, is the 4 ops guys per 60 servers a non-shocking number? When I worked at Yahoo, the ratio of ops staff count to production server count was IMHO ridiculously high and I never understood why it was required. Sure, some redundancy and so on. Clearly I'm missing something though - what?

I'm eager to correct my misunderstandings if I'm the one off base here. Can you recommend where I might find similar (perhaps more detailed) descriptions of production environments by other companies?

I've got the same question. Anyone with an idea of why the monthly expenses would be so high, and why so many ops guys for just 60 servers? I don't want to be so cynical as to assume it's because of bad management or something; I must be missing something.

Just speculating.

Assuming they have a sysadmin available 24/7 (which they should) 4 employees is hardly too much. Its just enough.

When your business is on the cloud with 60 servers, there should be at least one person available at all time, whether the server ever goes down or not.

"Also, is the 4 ops guys per 60 servers a non-shocking number?"

4 people is the bare minimum for realistic 24/7 support. Even if you just do "on call" support outside office hours, making sure someone (capable) is available every weekend and at o-dark-thirty every day is difficult with less than 4 people.

(Says a guy who spend too many years as part of a 2 or 3 person sysadmin team...)

I suppose it depends on the thing(s) being monitored though. I certainly do not want to have 4 people for my always-on development project. I am designing the system to be as fault tolerant and self-healing as possible so I do not have to have people (read: me) awakened at 3AM with alerts.

Maybe I'm insane or overly optimistic or both. Designing things to bend and not break is really difficult and time consuming. "Thanks Captain Obvious! You are so insightful!" No, I know, but I'm going through the cutting-of-teeth ritual now so these kinds of things are on my mind.

It doesn't necessarily depend on the things you are monitoring. If you are running one server, don't sweat it - if you are running anything more than 20+ server (my preference) and the capacity is constantly growing and you still don't have a 24/7 sysadmin. I think you are doing it wrong.

The key point is, if your business model depends on more user usage ie, more uploads more money (on a 60 server scale), you would like to have someone standby all the time.

I'm aware that some Europeans use commas to do their decimal separator, but I've never heard of anyone using the same symbol for both decimal separator and thousand-multiple separator. All the same, thanks for breaking out the numbers.

I'm ashamed to say that it boils down to two factors: Laziness and copy/paste

:-)

I'm surprised at the low amount per active premium user, my numbers are much lower overall, but the amount per active user is almost 7 times as high.

The free to paying ratio is (coincidentially?) almost exactly the same.

Well, in engineer's/scientist's terms, 7 times approaches the bar of significance, 10 times :)

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