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Comment by abootstrapper | Hacker News Reader

Years ago I ran a side project that went viral. It grew to 60k visitors a day and my monthly cloud expenses were around $1,500. I cannot fathom a scenario where you get a surprise $100k bill from a viral hit. Anytime my project went down due to scaling, it was painful. You don’t get many chances at going viral.

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60k is on the low-end of visits only from HN where I've normally seen 100k+. I saw around 60k once of 4-5 of my projects hitting the front-page.

Also I know I make mistakes, both at coding and at setting things up, which can easily trash things around and make a 10x-100x multiplier for the cost. The risk is small, but the consequences are horrible so I prefer to avoid this risk.

Edit: also note that even a $10k would be horrifying to spend in most personal projects, and $1500 is more than what most programmers are saving monthly in most of the world.

That depends a lot on the article and the views from reports on reddit/twitter/facebook/linkedin. 100k is rather toward the top of the curve.

Here I've published stats on my few posts that reached first page on HN. https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-front-p...

$1500/month is a massive cost for a side project, I'd rather have it go offline by far.

Side project turned business. It’d paid for itself and more.

I’ve seen surprise bills not far off that, not from a viral hit, but from bugs in the firmware for connected devices which suddenly switched them from taking 1 action/10 minutes to 1 action/3 seconds. Needless to say firmware QA has become much more focused since that incident.

What was that cost for? 60k visitors is less than 1 req/sec, something a terribly small server should be able to handle with relative ease. We’re there a lot of static assets not served by a CDN or cache?

It was a SaaS. Required heavy database and memory work. But it supports my point that a surprise $100k is a far fetched concern.

I was getting $3-5k bills from Azure and AWS several times without being viral just because I enabled some wrong features. Luckily they refunded them. I don't want that crap anymore. We also tried to run on AWS EC2 for a while and it was costing us 10 times more than a dedicated server that we got later on. Ridiculous. Now I have a backup server on Azure just because they give me $50 credits and it's a basic VM with a 1Tb slow disk attracted and they manage to charge me $70 for this, when I can buy a box at https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml for 5-7 EUR. I think cloud is for idiots

You're right. I've went with the $100k assumption from the other comment.

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