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Comment by jbverschoor | Hacker News Reader

A single server which can probably serve your complete customer base could / might cost less than 5k

As I recall, StackOverflow runs (ran?) on 6 large but not massive servers.

They also used the dotnet stack (Windows Server, IIS, MSSQL, dotnet), and optimized the heck out of everything. They're not the typical use case.

(I'm not saying dotnet allowed them to get by on N low digit servers. I'm saying those folks are atypical)

What are you saying by pointing out that they use the dotnet stack?

It’s interesting trivia to be sure, but I’m wondering if you were making a point with that

Have you seen the performance of standard ruby and python web frameworks in comparison? It's a massive difference

We did very similar with a Java stack without even trying really. Competitors using things like Ruby and went all in on distributed messes had hundreds of servers but we had about 15. It does require you to be aware of performance, but I wouldn't call it difficult or particularly time consuming.

So assuming your code is 5 times worse that still fits within one rack

> I'm saying those folks are atypical)

Calling "write not shit code in language that's not dog slow" "atypical" is sad state of our industry.

Also in many cases you can get a lot out of caching if you do it smartly.

I am gonna go out on a limb and say that given that they're talking about replication they mean server rack which definitely is not $100k/mo but can pretty easily be $100k up-front.

Sure, but 100k buys you a lot of iron and silicon.

Add in redundancy and that number quadruples bc you need to manage shared state and 2-3x the hardware

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