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Comment by teoruiz | Hacker News Reader

It would be enlightening to know a bit more about the actual server architecture of the site. I understand that the storage footprint per user for a bookmarking site is quite big[1], but I still think $2k for 15k users is a fairly high hosting bill.

[1] Since they offer full archiving of bookmarked websites to their premium users.

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There's more information about this in earlier blog post, e.g.: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/08/a_short_rant_about_hosting/

As noted in that post, Pinboard's hosting costs are so high because it runs on (multiple?) beefy dedicated servers (8-16 cores, 24-48GB RAM) costing $500-$1000/month each.

Presumably he has gone this route in order to keep a large database mostly in-memory, but I'd be interested in hearing more about the application constraints that led to this architecture. Some applications certainly need beefy servers, but they have to provide a lot of bang for your buck to compete with the 10-50 VPSs you could rent for the same cost.

When you need 48GB of RAM, having 50 VPSs with 1GB of RAM doesn't do you much good, not to mention the i/o issues he describes.

I agree completely. It's the genesis of "needing 48GB of RAM" that I'm curious about. The I/O issue with shared hosting, as I understood it, was that it took a long time to rebuild a busted RAID volume. This, to me, seems like a different symptom with the same underlying cause: there is a big server in the middle whose operation is critical to the site (otherwise, having 1 of N replicas take a long time to rebuild wouldn't be a big deal). For some sites, this big-server-in-the-middle is fundamentally necessary to do what the site does. I would like to know what it is about Pinboard that puts them in this boat. This is an honest question, not a sneaky way of saying "surely they don't need a server that big."

hint: You don't need 48gb ram to run a social bookmarking site.

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