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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

When I see per month or per day stats I get suspicious.

Let's say a month has 30 days -- 5 million views a months is 166,666k per day, 6944 per hour, 116 per minute, and ~1.92 per second.

1.92 qps.

Of course it's not expensive, it's a tiny amount of traffic!

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At 80TB (~83886080 MB) and 5000000 that's 16,77 MB per request in average. And at 1.92 qps that's 32,2 MB per second.

So they're saturating 25% of a gigabit uplink every second of the month.

To look at a different angle, I would imagine the traffic isn't evenly distributed, and part of being happy with your offering will be if things don't grind to a halt during peaks.

In ideal world where the traffic is a horizontal line, yes. In real world you probably get idle times, and peaks of 20x that traffic.

Also note that they say "page views" which can translate in many more requests per each page opened.

It is indeed tiny. The backend for my app currently handles 500 qps for 300$ in GCP. I guess traffic is the biggest chunk for OP.

Yes. It should be per month with peak request per minutes or better per seconds. Since we are always optimising for the rare peak usage. Instead once you sum out to monthly or even yearly a lot of things are meaningless.

I know, but it is impressive that they are doing it for $400.

It's impressive it takes that much money to do almost no traffic.

A raspberry PI could handle the compute.

Only if the traffic is evenly distributed during the day. Which it's almost certainly not.

The traffic graphs in their blog look pretty stable. Maybe 1.5x, but not hugely uneven.

You can get a $15 2.5 gigabit ethernet adapter for that Raspberry and now you're set for peak loads.

No it’s not. 2 qps is pitiful. If anything $400 is crazy expensive. I guess most of it goes to traffic/storage costs, otherwise they are being ripped off.

According to the blog post half the money goes to their CDN (Cloudflare) which is a good decision. And about $100 for the database hosting.

I don't think they are overpaying for what they are getting. $400 is not a lot for a proper site that serves a lot of bytes. I just don't think it's that impressive either -- it's just yet another website serving static assets through a CDN, with low QPS too, so I don't see why it's noteworthy.

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