Comment by kyledrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyledrake | Hacker News Reader

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Just servers, about $550/mo once we launch the new infrastructure. That doesn't include the $10k I had to sink in to buy the equipment and IP addresses.

Then pad the bill a lot of misc other nonsense: social media liability insurance (yes this is a thing), ARIN fees, LLC registration, a literal fax machine (for DMCA compliance), monitoring, etc. Grand total will hover around $1000.

Architecture is a core + CDN model. The main servers run as a HA cluster in a datacenter, and then the anycast CDN caches content at the edge. It's not too far away from how S3+Cloudfront works or something like Cloudflare works. Nginx does all the heavy lifting, and the "front store" is just a giant blob of ruby: https://github.com/neocities/neocities

Not too bad for 110,000 web sites. Costs at this point are pretty stable for the next million sites (but surprises happen). I can double our bandwidth capacity for about $200/mo in less than a few hours if I needed to in a pinch.

> How much traffic do you get per day usually?

The sites average about 25 million unique views (IP address per hour) and 50 million hits per month. This increases about 20% per month, sometimes slowing down a bit, then shooting right back up again.

Every once in a while a big site somewhere hotlinks an asset on Neocities and this skyrockets, but we just ask them to host the asset(s) directly and things go back to normal. Technically it's never caused any capacity issues, but obviously we don't want huge sites hosted elsewhere to use Neocities as a CDN.

Awesome, thanks!

It's interesting to realize someone can do this for about $0.01/site/month. It makes one ask the question "just why do we need ads for social networks"?

Advertising is lucrative as hell right now, and is propped up by it's true market value being hazy (FWIW, I think advertising is probably overvalued right now). Neocities would make a lot of money if we put advertising on the sites, but of course, that would also destroy the site, just like it did with GeoCities.

The big cost at most social network startups is labor. Infrastructure expenses are somewhere down there with the free bacon budget and the open bar tab at OSCON (I'm joking, but you get the idea).

Are you confident about the current donation model? (I understand/appreciate that it's not a business) I just want to make sure sites can stay up before I start recommending this to friends' kids.

They let you download the whole site as a .zip.

Any webhost (paid or not) can disappear overnight, so it's generally a good practice to keep two or three copies of the source code of any website (one at a home computer, one on GitHub or something).

Besides, aren't kids into the whole ephemeral thing now (Snapchat and the like)?

I'm very confident in the donation/supporter model. Once we stop needing to upgrade our infrastructure, it should grow faster than expenses.

I can be high and mighty about this, but legally Neocities is a public benefit LLC, so it is infact a private business operating on a freemium model.

I've pondered arranging Neocities as a nonprofit, but unfortunately that would add a ton of paperwork, costs, and bureaucracy. All I would really get in return is the option to roll the dice a couple times on some temp grants. Not sure it's worth it.

As for VC, I have good friends in VC, but I'm not really interested and nobody's ever offered. IMHO there's insufficient demand to justify 10x growth companies here. There's some people doing business/developer focused static hosting VC startups, but again, lots of competition and insufficient demand. Most of them have ended up as talent acquisitions, and the sites they hosted shut down. We've outlived most of them with the supporter/donation model.

> That doesn't include the $10k I had to sink in to buy the equipment and IP addresses

where did you buy the IP addresses? I them for sale on sites that purport to auction IP space but I've never known which of those sites are trustworthy etc.

Are you able to pay yourself a salary from donations? Or are you doing all of this work for free?

What is social media liability insurance for? Never heard of it...

How much traffic do you get per day usually?

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