I'm curious about the hardware used to run Hacker News. My guts tell me that despite its popularity it is running on modest hardware, but I'd like to confirm.
Playing around with the calculator, you're roughly on track with an r3.x4large - most of the Linux options happily bundle far less RAM.
Getting 9TB of EBS on top of that puts the bill at $1516 per month. None of that accounts for traffic, of which we know nothing about.
The thing is in an Amazon world, you could optimise the setup for an Amazon deployment. For example, you'd probably move parts of that data, like database snapshots, onto S3.
Those costs are still nothing to sneeze at, and very likely suboptimal.
It just goes to show that cloud prices are somewhat of a ripoff if you have the knowhow to use CDNs and setup a single server in a colocation center. That machine can be built for less than 5k.
Of course -- if you know your traffic well ahead of time. If you start growing quickly, it's not quite as simple. (And if you don't have the traffic/growth anticipated, you wasted a bunch of money).
You also aren't accounting for redundancy. If the machine totally blows up, how quickly can you build another? Or do you spend +5k to have a second sitting as a standby? If the hardware does fail (whether it's a single drive in RAID or the whole system), who fixes it (or deals with getting it fixed)? For that matter, is the person who built or sourced the hardware's time worth $0?
Cloud IS more expensive, but it's not as simple as comparing to the up-front cost of one piece of hardware.
I'm assuming you know of the search box at the bottom of every HN page - what more do you think is being used? Why do you think something more is needed?
As an aside, I went to look at some of your old posts and got this:
Secure Connection Failed
The connection to the server was reset
while the page was loading.
The page you are trying to view cannot
be shown because the authenticity of
the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the web site owners to
inform them of this problem.
To add to what CarolineW posted, I remembered that the comment existed so I went to HN search and entered "by:kogir gc". (I then had to manually switch the results from stories to comments, though.)
Yeah, it came from the API which goes back to item id 1. It's all here if you are interested: http://silo.lukeheuer.com/mirrors/news.ycombinator.com/ Post items are organized by month so you can check out the byte size progression over HN's lifespan.
41 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 84.2 ms ] threadFreeBSD is the OS of choice for them.
[0]http://arclanguage.org/
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html
[O] http://arclanguage.org
Detailed specs have been written before, try searching.
Getting 9TB of EBS on top of that puts the bill at $1516 per month. None of that accounts for traffic, of which we know nothing about.
The thing is in an Amazon world, you could optimise the setup for an Amazon deployment. For example, you'd probably move parts of that data, like database snapshots, onto S3.
Those costs are still nothing to sneeze at, and very likely suboptimal.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11315525
You also aren't accounting for redundancy. If the machine totally blows up, how quickly can you build another? Or do you spend +5k to have a second sitting as a standby? If the hardware does fail (whether it's a single drive in RAID or the whole system), who fixes it (or deals with getting it fixed)? For that matter, is the person who built or sourced the hardware's time worth $0?
Cloud IS more expensive, but it's not as simple as comparing to the up-front cost of one piece of hardware.
How much of this is actually utilized? O.o
I think the whole HN dataset is well under 100GiB, and maybe even under 30GiB.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6014632
As an aside, I went to look at some of your old posts and got this:
Thanks the website has been taken down.