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Comment by cluda01 | Hacker News Reader

I'm unfamiliar with hosting costs or really any costs running a site as popular as reddit. Anyone with experience in this area have a ballpark figure for how much it would cost per month to run this sort of setup?

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My back of the envelope estimate. These are based on the figures from last year and the fact that they currently have 240 EC2 instances, some are large (guessed 70), more are x-large (guessed 170).

8760 is the number of hours in a year.

(8760 * $0.24 * 170) + (8760 * $0.12 * 70) = $430,992/yr in hourly fees

($1,820 * 170) + ($910 * 70) = $373,100/yr in reservation fees

373,100 + 430,992 = 804,092 / 12 months = $67,007.67/mo

Reference for last years calculations: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/ctz7c/your_gold_dollar...

Nearly $1million/year in infrastructure costs so that I can laugh at GIFs of cats.

The internet is truly a wonderous thing.

$300K

Where do you get this estimate from? (Not disbelieving you, just curious)

One year and half ago, it was calculated and then confirmed by an admin[1] that the monthly cost was around 22K/month, or 270K/year. jedberg added that they were projecting to be around 350K/year by the end of 2010.

Supposing that the cost increased linearly with the number of users (which sounds like a bad hypothesis, but is a start), the cost at the end of 2011 could be around 1M/year... That's impressive, but nowhere near the 300K/month proposed by rdouble.

So I would say that the monthy cost of reddit's infrastructure is around 90K. Which is really impressive.

1: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/ctz7c/your_gold_dollar...

You're probably right as I calculated with expensive instances. Also, when I made my estimate I was guessing at image storage costs, forgetting that the images are coming from image sharing sites.

Thanks for the clarification, I thought $300k sounded a little off since cluda01 asked about estimated monthly (not annual) cost.

A year and a half is a long time in reddit time

and also -- any idea how much they can bring id ad revenues?

Usually 1,000 ad impressions is around $1.00 (varies greatly though, can be lower like $0.15c and higher like $4.00+).

Assuming $1.00 per 1,000 impressions, and taking their 2.07billion impressions/month figure:

Roughly 2,070,000,000 / 1,000 = $2,070,000 in ad revenue per month?

Wild guess.

Many/most page views on Reddit don't have any ads. Promoted stories only appear on story lists, not individual story pages, and don't appear 100% of the time (the space is also used to promote random new submissions). The graphical slot in the sidebar is almost 100% non-paid in-house ads.

I've always wondered why they don't contract out with other ad networks when they cannot fill the ad content themselves. Say for example their self serve ad can't fill the page request why not put in a google text ad link on the right side where the banner is? That to me seems like a straightforward way to massively increase revenues.

They dont do it because they really care about the user. Just sticking up random google ads isnt going to make anybody happier and with an internet savy crowd like reddit ad clicks are likley to be low. Sure very targeted ads like the ones that self-serve currently delivers work because its redditors advetising to redditors.

I have the same question. I tried googling it, but no luck.

me too.

There's no way in hell it costs $300k per month to run Reddit!

True, that's probably per-year instead.

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