Ask HN: Technical cost of a web startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Technical cost of a web startup?

7 pointstypicalday6 comments

I am working on a social networking concept and I'd like to make a prototype. I've got most of the know-how, but my problem is, I'm not sure how much capital to allocate to running my test.

Setting aside certain logistics (assume I pay myself nothing and I pay nothing for marketing/advertising) how much would you estimate it costs to maintain servers (using AWS for example) and scale to a reasonable level (200 users, 1k users, 5k users) per month? How quickly will that change?

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There is probably close to zero technical cost or risk associated with your social network. I have no idea what stage your concept is at, but from my brief flirtation with building a social networking concept, I would urge you to consider the following if you haven't already:

What problem does this solve? Who are your first 100 customers? You'll be surprised at how little time even your best friends will spend humoring your service. Who are your first 10,000 customers? Why would any of them spend their precious time on your service? How do you solve the chicken and egg problem? Most social networks won't be interesting until they have millions of users. How do you keep people engaged before then? How do you make money? If you have a general audience, unless you have hundreds of millions of unique visitors per month, don't say advertising.

Back of the envelope calculation -

A passenger instance for a typical small app takes 30-40 MB. You will be able to run 4-5 passenger instances on a small 512 MB slice.

Assuming that the slowest request in your app takes 100 ms, one passenger instance can handle 10 requests/sec. 5 instances can handle 50 requests/sec.

Tweak the numbers according to your app and get a rough idea of the hardware requirements.

A 512 MB VPS on Linode costs 20 dollars.

+1 to the VPS for small (early) web apps. These VMs can handle more than one normally assumes. Especially if the load does not come in bursts.

Running my app (https://addresspush.com) now since 9 months and the smallest slice with Apache and 2 balanced nodes works perfectly. 1 unnoticed down-time for a few hours. I bet that happens with cloud services as well (hi AWS!).

Depending on how you are going about it, Google App Engine may suit you the best..uses java, python, or go

One huge advantage - its free till 5,000,000 hits or some given # of cpu cycles

That said, you would need to carefully evaluate your requirements first. App engine uses Big Table for database, and they recommend it for apps that have a lot more reads than writes. Google it!

For the level of users you mention the costs would be very low assuming you're not talking about storing huge quantities of data per user.

AWS offers a free instance when you register an account - it sounds like it would cover your initial needs. You would probably want to bind a larger volume to it (perhaps 20GB or so?) which would cost $2 per month.

AWS, think 1 small instance (80$/m) for, say, 1000 users. Depending of course.

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