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Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

I don't know -- by some guestimates fed into

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

I ended up with an estimated 600USD/month bill ... so what would they gain by complicating their architecture when they're already able to handle the traffic?

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Using CloudFlare instead of CloudFront would have meant, what, $20/month?

And what guestimates would those be? I doubt they are serving 10TB in static files per month.

If adding a CDN to your architecture is too much complication then I would definitely not want to use your product for my business. It's literally a question of pointing CloudFront to your server, and substituting the CloudFront assigned domain in for static assets.

Also, from what I can tell, they aren't handling the traffic. I have tried numerous times to use the "Open Live Instance" link and it does not work.

Hi, the link should say (for now) "Almost ready" when you hover. We will have that ready soon (soon = days). We don't have problems with adding a CDN at all. We do that a lot for many other projects. It's just a matter of this "stealth launch of Taiga" going out of control, we didn't need a CDN for a 1 core + 1 GB RAM virtual machine, which is what is actually handling all the traffic. Having said that, expect a CDN in place next week.

Hi, thanks. I didn't mean to indicate you weren't capable of adding a CDN. I was just providing a counter to the "why complicate the architecture" argument.

Thanks for the explanation of the "Almost Ready" message. I do see that, however I took it to mean that an instance was being spun up (as I waited). Might want to change that to "Coming Soon" or similar.

> And what guestimates would those be?

1gb/week with 60% traffic to the US, average 20kb size with 1000 reset requests/month. I'd love to hear some more realistic estimates. And while (server/service) price is far from the most important consideration, it sounds like they manage to stay way under 50 usd/month in hosting currently. So as anything over 30/month would be a considerable (relative) increase. Add to that doubling? the management overhead from, say, an hour a week to two -- and they'd need to see some clear benefits? And what are those?

As for "open live instance, it says "ready soon" for me - but perhaps that is because they didn't, as you say, handle the traffic after all?

You are actually seeing the dedicated IP "custom ssl certificate" charge ($600/month). Check the cost with and without that option. I just used your exact numbers and the monthly cost is $0.73 without that.

Note that doesn't mean you cannot serve your resources over HTTPS. It just means you cannot alias something like "cdn.yoursite.com" to the cloudfront cdn, you will need to use the cloudfront https url.

You only need to pay the $600/month if you need to support clients older than IE7. You can use the SNI option instead which is "free" (relative to the rest of the costs associated with a CFD).

I did think it came out oddly high -- I also didn't chceck ssl/dedicated ip... I think. Maybe the calculator helpfully updated itself with more "reasonable" settings... ;-)

[edit: yep, was the ssl cert thing. Now I end up with 0.00 USD/Month, which certainly isn't an unbearable expense...]

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