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Ask HN: $4,100 worth it for traffic surge to non-profit website?

1 points by socrates1998 ↗ HN
A close friend of mine runs a non-profit and they are going to be on national news in a day or two.

The problem is that the website won't be able to handle the traffic.

The host, WP Engine, gave some quotes to upgrade, but really the only option they said would work is $4,100/month. The other options they admitted wouldn't guarantee that the website could handle it (and probably would crash).

It's super critical that the website be able to handle the donations when the news story airs.

Is $4,100 a fair price? My friend doesn't mind paying for it if:

1) It works and the website doesn't crash.

2) It's a normal rate for this type of issue.

The website is:

http://www.kaylacares4kids.org/

4 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 20.8 ms ] thread
alpb
Just put it behind CloudFlare free tier, and apply some load testing and see how it goes.
colept
It looks like a semi-static website. $4100 is an outrageous quote. If it's just for a day or two and the content will remain the same - then I suggest using a static cache and something like Cloudflare.
heh
Absolutely not. If you can, run it on your own machines, or GCE/AWS, where you can commission a large server or build a scale-able infrastructure (wp frontends, EFS, aurora on AWS or wp frontends, gluster, cloud sql on GCE).

For $4k, you can pick up a couple of used servers off of ebay, 4 ssd drives, and probably colocate them for a year.

Hell, if you want to, you could probably even go with just one larger server from hetzner or scaleway or aws and you should probably be fine, depending on how much traffic you anticipate.

WestCoastJustin
If it is a static website or can be converted to one for a short period. You could just have AWS Cloudfront [1] sitting in front of your website acting as a cache. You then redirect all requests to Cloudfront. It'll at most cost a small small faction of that. I probably wouldn't go the route of setting up your own dedicated boxes since you have a time crunch and you might not configure things correctly (as you'd need to load test, etc). The Cloudfront option will take a few hours to setup and test if you've never done it before (about 25 minutes if you have). Cost wise, it is pay as you go. But, you can use the AWS calculator [2] to get a ball park figure. A big traffic spike would probably only cost you $100-200 bucks or something (many millions of hits over a couple days). It all depends on how much data you are pushing, so if you have tons of large files, or binary objects, you need to think about that.

www.kaylacares4kids.org -> AWS Cloudfront Cache -> Wordpress

AWS will take the pounding and your site will be fine. You can do the same thing with CloudFlare but I've only used Cloudfront (as the other comment mentions).

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

[2] https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html