Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?

Pretty sure the most expensive thing is @dang's time.

I believe it still runs on one box. Xeon E5-3567 (3.5Ghz). Stack is FREEBSD with nginx as front-end.<p>From a quick look at M5 hosting price, cost is probably $500-$1000&#x2F;month (6M requests).

Last dang talked about hardware it was on a pretty modest xeon so probably not all that much<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28478379" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28478379</a><p>Unsure if anything has changed since

Hacker News&#x27; secret sauce: no fat image nor video nor sound file serving, just the text, ma&#x27;am.<p>Something that would have made Gopher protocol proud to coexist along in this exclusive class.<p>Probably could save even more money in bandwidth cost with mostly unsecured HTTP.

E5-2637 (32nm) is from 2012, I can not encourage people enough to buy the last 1151 Xeons or 8 core Atom on Mini-ITX SuperMicro motherboard (might be hard to find new soon): In particular I have E-2124 (2018), E-2224 (2019) and A2SDi-8C-HLN4F (2017); all 14nm, those you&#x27;ll probably never have to replace for peak performance... the only question is if you will be able to afford powering them without revenues (75W&#x2F;25W)...

Text-only, No media hosting&#x2F;ops — less than $500 on a humble setup.

For the answer to be relevant I think you first need to answer how many pageviews per day.

I would be surprised if it was more than $100 per month

A request optimized HN could cache pages and essentially only dynamically load votes and comments. This would reduce the need for a strong system.