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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

Which geocoder is $100/mo? Nominatim? Which cloud?

Either way this looks really cool and I’ll give it a try!

I think I priced Nominatim on EC2 and it came in around $350/mo because you need 64GB of RAM. Also on EC2 Pelias ended up being close to $100/mo. Keep in mind that I'm including EBS prices for around 500gb of storage for both of those. If you go with a bare metal server on hetzner (which most regular folks would do, and what we do for maps.earth) you can definitely come in under that.

Even if I'm off by a little bit or if EC2 prices are a bad benchmark, the fact remains that you need 100x less RAM to run Airmail than Nominatim, which felt novel enough to post about.

> EC2 prices are a bad benchmark

In general, reserved instance prices are a better number for "cheapest way to run a thing on AWS.

I find https://instances.vantage.sh/ is a good way to look for the pricing info.

It says an x2gd.xlarge in us-east-1 has 64gb ram and costs $72 USD/mo (on a 3 year reservation paid up-front).

Thanks! I’ve been using OSMs free Nominatim for testing but need to move off it to support a higher query volume - I had no idea it was going to be so expensive, so this comes at the perfect time!

There are ways to make it work on a budget, but with Nominatim you do need 64GB of physical memory at a minimum for the planet. Some of the other replies in this thread have offered resources on how to find that for cheap. My go-to for this is hetzner but I'm super curious if there's anything west of the atlantic that compares because the latency going to Finland is brutal, even with mosh instead of ssh.

Good luck! Don't use Airmail in prod (yet?), if that thought crossed your mind. It's just a demo for now and that's probably how it should stay for a while longer :)

You can set it up off AWS. A 64GB RAM server would cost you $16/mo.

https://serverhunter.com is amazing

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