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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

According to this talk they're paying around $250k/year for server hosting at EC2: http://pycon.blip.tv/file/3257303/

See the question at around ~27m into the video.

WTH are they using EC2 (One of the most expensive hosts around)?

Can't find a link for this, but one of the employees mentioned that it was related to Conde Nast's arcane rules about buying and managing servers.

This is one of those cases where it's totally appropriate to just do what's right and lie to your parent company.

It has nothing to do with that.

It is simply that EC2 offers us the best bang for the buck for our requirements (one of the main ones being able to spin up a lot of iron very quickly).

May I ask why you don't use another cheaper provider for fixed base load and reserve EC2 for peak load capacity? Is it that the overhead of running on two different providers not worth the money you'd save? Or is this something you've considered doing but haven't had the time to implement yet?

> Is it that the overhead of running on two different providers not worth the money you'd save? Or is this something you've considered doing but haven't had the time to implement yet?

Pretty much yes to both of these. With so few of us, the overhead of running it and moving to it just doesn't make sense at this time.

You don't seem to really trying. You could be moving everything to one host and still be saving money.

Surely the traffic/load isn't that variable? Seems like even a VPS provider (linode/slicehost/etc) would offer far more bang for the buck.

The pricing for bandwidth alone on EC2 is simply insane.

Actually, it isn't so much the traffic. It's when something like Cassandra suddenly stops working correctly and we need to take emergency action to keep the site up by, for example, doubling our memcached pool temporarily.

None of the VPS's can give us that many nodes that quickly.

Also, bandwidth is by far our lowest cost. It is less than 5% of our total bill.

>> "Also, bandwidth is by far our lowest cost. It is less than 5% of our total bill."

I can't see why Reddit should be a particularly high CPU usage website. So perhaps time to optimize and swap out some things...

They're not actually one of the most expensive.

Yes it is true, they are more expensive than others, and if I were starting a new company I might not use them from the start, but they offer us one thing that no one else seems to be able to handle -- the ability to spin up a lot of heavy iron quickly to absorb sudden changes in traffic.

Just curious -- why don't you start a new company?

It's obvious that your work isn't being respected by your current employers.

Does reddit mean a lot to you personally?

> Just curious -- why don't you start a new company?

Stay tuned. :)

> It's obvious that your work isn't being respected by your current employers.

Hmmm, I've never really thought about it that way before.

> Does reddit mean a lot to you personally?

It does. I've worked for reddit officially for over 3.5 years, and I've been friends with Steve and Alexis for almost 5 years.

I've watched reddit grow from a tiny site to the huge site it is now.

And when Steve and Alexis left, the put it in our hands to take good care of it.

It's like watching your friend's kid grow up, and then one day becoming their guardian.

reddit's been a big part of my life.

Well, I wish you the best of luck. Reddit is awesome.

I wish it could just be taken non-profit and run it like like wikipedia with a fundraiser every year to keep it going.

BTW, do you know Philip Guenther from sendmail? :)

with only four engineers, this is what I'd focus on, personally. hardware is not as hard or expensive to deal with as people seem to think, especially as they already have a SysAdmin.

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