HN Explorer

Ask YC: What are the likely server costs for a facebook ad network?

2 points by louisadekoya ↗ HN
Ask YC: What are the likely monthly server costs for a facebook app that serves the facebook developer community, i.e about 5000 apps and rising? Assume that the app is an ad network of sorts and does not need to store video or audio media files. Thanks.

6 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 38.1 ms ] thread
Jaggu
It is hard to give that detail without knowing detail about how many concurrent users are using apps. If we have more breakdown then it is easy to give that detail.

Without much requirement detail, On the safe side - My guess is three Linux server cluster (Specs 2-CPU and @4GB RAM ( @2500$) )should be enough to server content for high usage site like facebook.

It is purely guess based on my limited knowledge of facebook. If you have any specific detail like

- Avg Concurrent users - Peak time concurrent users - Apps software platform ( java app server, php, .NET ?? )

then that will help.

louisadekoya
Thanks but it is just as hard to forecast how many concurrent users the app will get as it is to predict costs.
ALee
Project Agape who is behind the Causes Facebook app uses the following:

    *  mySQL 5.0
    * Ruby on Rails
    * 14 application servers, 2 database servers and 5 boxes in reserve
    * 3 Image Servers (2 Squid, 1 image source)
    * Apache 2 on Image Source
    * WebApp servers have 2GB of ram
    * 1 server for serving static content
    * 26 Mongrel services per box
    * 4 GB of RAM per box
    * 50 - 60 MB of RAM per Mongrel service for a total use of around 1.5 GB of memory set aside for Mongrel
Additional:

    * A pair of F5 Loadbalancers
    * All systems running FreeBSD 6.2
    * memcached
    * nginx (not pound)
Specific Rails technologies used: nginx (not pound), Evented Mongrel, squid From: http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/interview-with-joe-green-an...
louisadekoya
Thanks - this is useful. I will check out the Causes app.Any ideas on what this kind of setup might cost? Would an ad-network targeted at facebook apps need this much hardware or less - or more even? I have no idea.
ALee
Sorry for the late reply. So Causes received about $1.25M in funding, and they only have about five engineers I think. The hardward is always the lowest cost. With an ad network, that will be quite a lot actually especially if you plan to scale to every app imaginable. According to many of those in the top 3% and 1% of facebook apps, it's fairly data intensive, but I think you can scale this pretty easily. I'd start with a smaller amount first and then just scale up with a managed hosting service.