The Costs of Bookmarking

This seems too expensive and I'd like to try and help, so I'm going to give you an idea of my hosting bill and why it's low and then suggest something for you:<p>I pay around $3k per month. I own my own servers and lease a full rack and I serve roughly 1 billion page impressions per month. My bandwidth consumption is measured in Mbps rather than amount of data transferred because I get billed using 95th percentile billing. I average around 130 megabits per second of transfer - constantly, peaking at 150mbps I'm transferring roughly 40 terabytes of data per month. 95th percentile billing and owning your own servers is they key here.<p>To give you an idea, for one month of your hosting bill you can buy 1, possibly 2 servers from Dell and put them in a half rack that will cost you around $800/month including power, secure access, bandwidth, etc. Those servers will last around 5 years with a possible drive replacement or two during that time for a few bucks.<p>But I think you have another problem that's making things worse. With 15,000 active users you should be able to support them on one or two small Linode servers using round robin DNS. That's a relatively small user base and the number of requests per second can't be anything more than 10 per second? So I'm guessing something about your basic app architecture is off. It could be that you're not using Nginx to reverse proxy to Apache and you think you need more apache children/processes, and therefore more memory, than you actually do. You could have a DB that doesn't have indexes in the right places and so you're IO bound.<p>I would suggest first looking at your app and seeing where the bottlenecks are in performance. Fix that first, then look at hosting.<p>Questions:<p>-How many servers do you currently have and give us a rough idea of config.<p>-How many app requests per second do you get at peak?<p>-What's your peak bandwidth throughput in Mbps?<p>-On your servers, is lack of CPU or lack of disk throughput the bottleneck?<p>-Have you had problems running out of memory that caused you to buy more servers? Which app ran out of memory?<p>-Give us an idea of your server config. e.g. nginx -&#62; Apache -&#62; MySQL &#38; Redis. Do the servers talk to each other and if so what do they do?

Hmm. For another data point, <a href="http://historio.us" rel="nofollow">http://historio.us</a>, which has about 3k active users, costs $30/mo to run. I'm sure costs wouldn't scale completely linearly with users, but there you go.

$2k for 15000 users. &#60;wrong&#62;Each user is worth $7.50/month to you. But, they only pay once to sign up.&#60;/wrong&#62; Each user is worth 13 cents.<p>So, it seems that the users paying for the archival service($25/yr) are the one's keeping the lights on at your bookmarking service. 1000 such users would bring in $25K. Basically you need 7% of your users(15000) to break even today.<p>Each user is worth $2000/15000 ~= 13 cents<p>My Question:<p>1. Is it easy to get recurring paying users?<p>2. In the long run(for any paying web service) what % of the user base do you think will be such users ? [Is 20% the max ? or 30 % ?]<p>EDIT: Fixed my cost per user

Since we seem to be sharing the numbers now, let me add my 2c. I ran the Hamachi service [1] with 3 mil registered accounts off 4 co-located servers at a cost of about $700/mo in total. The servers were mid-range 1U Dell boxes, each costing around $1K. That was back in '04, so I'm sure prices have gone down quite a bit since then.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamachi_(software)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamachi_(software)</a>

FYI, Maciej is banned from HN - his comments are autodead, so don't expect responses.

It would be enlightening to know a bit more about the actual server architecture of the site. I understand that the storage footprint per user for a bookmarking site is quite big[1], but I still think $2k for 15k users is a fairly high hosting bill.<p>[1] Since they offer full archiving of bookmarked websites to their premium users.

Thanks for sharing the data.<p>Can you break this down into how many actual servers you have? Is providing a high level of redundancy the source of the high costs?<p>Why do the S3 numbers fluctuate so much -- that implies a lot of transient data. At $100\month you are storing ~50MB per active user?

That's an amazing amount of money to be spending on hosting.<p>Should be spending nearer $200/mo total for hosting a service like this with that number of users IMHO.

Maciej, can you share that google doc in a way that would let viewing it without needing to create an account with Google?

what % of the users are paying? what is the average rate they each pay (since i know you had the each additional person pays .01 more thing for a while)<p>What was your rationale behind these ISPs vs say pure cloud (EC2/rackspace/stormondemand etc)? Or what made you pick each option?