Ask HN: How much server space does a startup need? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much server space does a startup need?

2 pointsjaphyr6 comments

I have been wondering how much server space a successful startup like Codecademy needs. We've read that they had ~200,000 unique visitors in three days, and that those visitors spent a long time on the site and completed ~2,000,000 lessons.

How much server space is required for this kind of volume? Is it just a couple dedicated servers at a hosting company, or is it something more complicated than that?

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You can do 200000 unique visitors on a 80486. Oh wait, you did not explain what kind of product you have online. Is it a rails app? Does it need storage? Is it just static html?

Give out more details and people can probably give you pretty good estimates and ideas on scalability.

I'm thinking of projects like codecademy. Something that uses a framework like rails or django. Something that needs a moderate amount of storage, but not a photo or video site where storage is the focus. Not just static html.

Unfortunately, this sort of information is still too vague to make even a stab in the dark at server sizing worthwhile. If you're curious about how much CodeAcademy needed, I bet someone would be willing to tell if you tweeted/emailed/facebooked them. If you're looking for more data points I bet a lot of start ups would be willing to share their server info (and a lot have here at HN).

If you're asking because you want to know for your own project, don't put the cart before the horse-build it, do some testing and you'll be able to make an assumption that is actually based on something more than guesses.

Thanks, I thought it would be easy to give a ballpark answer. I will keep an eye out for a discussion of scaling in regards to server needs.

Actually, if anyone can point to such a discussion on HN I'd appreciate it. I couldn't easily find a relevant discussion, because the word "server" appears in so many threads.

I just searched and maybe these conversations don't come up as often as I thought. On the other hand, it's also difficult to nail this sort of topic down because so many startups use Heroku, EngineYard, AWS, etc, so it's more like number of instances vs. number of servers. It seems Quora has a lot more insight. Examples here: http://www.quora.com/How-Many-Servers-Does-X-Have

You need as much space (as in, disk space) as there is content to server, plus a bit more. It's not the disk space you should worry about, though. (Even an entry level server at whatever hosting company will have plenty of space to host pretty much anything.)

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