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Comment by babul | Hacker News Reader

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516108

Only one server:

    Old: 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, 4 GB RAM, 32-bit FreeBSD 5.3.
    New: 3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1.

PG: "The new server seems to be about 2x as fast. The frontpage renders for me in about 50 msec. But the site should seem more than 2x faster (for logged-in users) because many requests will terminate before being interrupted. There's now enough memory that we can fit all the links and comments in memory at once again. We should be good for another year or so." (traffic: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#15jan09)

Not sure of how or where server is hosted or what else is used e.g. router/firewall/bandwidth/ups/utilities/etc., but if pg/rtm billed for time all other costs would be insignificant.

Maintainance:

A lot less than most people considering it's rtm and pg.

View on HN

So that brings the hardware costs to about 2000-$3000 per month?

As for man hours, can 2 guys in a basement with nothing else on their schedules maintain and moderate a site like HN?

Don't forget what it took to actually build this community. It's not exactly a fair comparison.

Not to mention (or maybe you are implying) providing compelling reasons to frequent HN.

I don't understand how that makes the hardware cost $2000-$3000 per month.

Whoops, my bad. read that as 24 GB RAM instead of 12 GB RAM (which made me wonder why they would need so much memory)

The server should come out to a little over $1000 per month then?

I don't think so. You can build out that Linux box for just a few thousand total. Check out System76 if you don't want to build it.

I think he's referring to how much it would cost if you paid for a server like that through a hosting provider.

Well, he shouldn't call it hardware costs then :)

A hosting provider gives you lots of services too.

You could get similar services from a colocation company as well. You could purchase a fully decked 1U server for $2000, then pay $50 a month for colocation (that's what I'm doing).

I suspect your hardware costs are a bit off.

Just for an example, you can rent Xeon 5570, a rather nice 2.93 Ghz machine with 12GB RAM, and 2 TB of monthly bandwidth for $724 from Softlayer and others.

You're right. My math was off. I read it as 24 GB RAM, instead of 12 GB RAM.

I was actually checking out Mediatemple's nitro server. Low on the memory and speed end (2.33 GHz and 8 GB RAM) but it seems to be getting glowing reviews for it's customer service.

I'm going to also check out softlayer.

Any other suggestions?

I still think it's amazing that we live in a world where we can store 25,769,803,776 bytes on a computer that we entrepreneurs can afford!

It's causes a huge change in the way people look at Databases- In the past, you needed huge database servers so that you could keep everything stored on disk, and intelligently cached.. Today, I'd imagine that 99% of companies data can be kept entirely in memory.

Stunning, really. It entirely changes how you think about data storage.

> It entirely changes how you think about data storage.

It should entirely change how you think about data storage. What's stunning to me is the number of people who are stuck on "Fully ACID, fully RDMS or it's crap and you will fail and deservedly so."

It all depends on what your goal is.

In health care applications? In financial applications? I would never trust anything less than fully acid with all the bells and whistles.

In a website where people aren't going to be that bothered of a few transactions are inconsistent if some major snafu happens? (status updates get lost in the ether, for example.) The cost isn't worth the benefit of high power.

RDMS is a similar tradeoff.

wait for widely available SSD storage to truly change databases

I was actually talking about developer rather than machine overhead.

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