Ask HN: How to account/charge for web app bandwidth/disk usage?

2 points by kingofspain 15y ago ↗ HN

I'm working on a web app in my limited spare time which, if all goes well, will require storing and serving a large number of small files (HTML, JS & images mainly). I'm going to get a VPS from Linode to start with (and possibly join up with a CDN) but I'm not sure how to estimate how many resources each user will require and whether I'm going to lose money off them. For example, I don't want a $10/mo user costing me $50 in bandwidth. I'll set limits obviously, but right now these are just totally abitrary; they could be far too conservative or far too generous!

I realise this isn't very specific but I was curious how other people handle things like this - especially when you have no idea how take up will be, or average usage loads?

1 comment

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ConceitedCode 15y ago ↗

Generally speaking, bandwidth is cheap. You can get an extra 100gb of bandwidth added on to any linode for $10/mo. S3 bandwidth is incredibly cheap at $0.15 per gb for the first 10 terabytes after that it gets cheaper.

More S3 pricing information can be found here (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/)

Using those numbers you can generally figure out how much you would need to charge a user to stay profitable.