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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

Something not mentioned but I’d like to know is the running cost?

He gives his server specs and his cloud provider, he pays most likely a bit less than $100 per server per month: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets

Which is absolutely insane for a website that serves 200 visitors per hour.

8c/16g seems absolutely bonkers for an web/app server. I could understand if there was also a data & caching layer shoved onto the same box, but that's a LOT of memory for a python app. That's more inline with "mystery meat ASP.NET app built by some a couple guys in Slovenia 12 years ago".

> mystery meat ASP.NET app built by some a couple guys in Slovenia 12 years ago

FastComments is on track to serve 1 billion pages loads next year and we spend less than $500/mo for US and EU deployments combined (+about 15m uniques a month and each user gets a live websocket connection).

Just to be clear are you saying the costs are HIGH or LOW? That cost seems high given his relatively low traffic count but I don't know what sort of processing is going on in the background.

High. Although the assumption here is that there are no spikes… which might or might not be true, but for a web-app, 200 visits per hour is not much.

70 requests per second at peak-time

probably that's why he already got white hair.

"Around 500 USD. I also use Sentry.io, Papertrail, Twillio and a few other tools that cost money."

From: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/xobba8/comment/iq05...

This seems to me to be a hefty bill for the traffic received. I run devops on a site with 1.5-2mm unique users a month, bursty traffic, and our monthly bill is just a couple hundred higher than his. We are overprovisioned.

The author says the product is hosted on two VPS servers, a managed database, and a floating IP; I doubt that'll be a significant part of the costs.

If that bill includes (business) licenses for software and subscriptions, it's pretty reasonable. I'm sure it can be done cheaper and I'm sure the author has looked into this as well. Maybe it's not worth the effort, or maybe there's some other blocker preventing migration to cheaper alternatives.

Maybe $2500 of monthly profit is enough for the author not to bother messing with the code base? Maybe the fact the reported revenue has doubled [1] over two months has something to do with it?

[1]: https://casparwre.de/blog/python-to-code-a-saas/ vs https://casparwre.de/blog/webapp-python-deployment/

according to his bio https://twitter.com/wrede he makes about 1.5k a month so infra cost is hopefully is not much more than that. for sure the labor is the biggest part of this operation

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