In terms of <i>servers and hardware</i>, how much does it cost to keep hacker news up and running each month?<p>In terms of man hours, how much is needed to maintain and moderate hacker news?
I think the server costs around $350/mo. I don't like to think how much time HN actually takes up, but when I was traveling recently I found that checking in for about 30 min a day was enough to keep things under control.<p>On a weekday we get about 350k pageviews from about 30k unique ip addrs.
From <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516108" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516108</a><p>Only one server:<p><pre><code> Old: 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, 4 GB RAM, 32-bit FreeBSD 5.3.
New: 3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1.
</code></pre>
<i>PG: "The new server seems to be about 2x as fast. The frontpage renders for me in about 50 msec. But the site should seem more than 2x faster (for logged-in users) because many requests will terminate before being interrupted. There's now enough memory that we can fit all the links and comments in memory at once again. We should be good for another year or so."</i> (traffic: <a href="http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#15jan09" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#15jan09</a>)<p>Not sure of how or where server is hosted or what else is used e.g. router/firewall/bandwidth/ups/utilities/etc., but if pg/rtm billed for time all other costs would be insignificant.<p>Maintainance:<p>A lot less than most people considering it's rtm and pg.
If Hacker News is anything like my site, both of which basically need to serve up little bits of text to lots of people, then hosting is cheap.<p>I bet you could serve 20,000 people a day on an HN-like site for well under $1,000/month on AWS, assuming you are smart about caching and you don't thump the database with every request.<p>So, even if you were totally clueless about ads and just ran random ad sense, the thing would more than pay for itself.<p>It's incredibly cheap to run a site that doesn't need much bandwidth. Basically, if you are serving no pictures or media, you should be able to build a website at super-scale in your garage, or using some Cloud Service.
<a href="http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html</a> - over 25,000 ips per day<p><a href="http://ycombinator.com/images/2yeartraffic.png" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/images/2yeartraffic.png</a> - Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but does that image show 300,000 pageviews <i>per day</i>?
If it were a very cool clustered, load-balanced setup with analog monitoring gauges set up in a nuclear bunker, then I'm guessing we would've heard about it by now :) So it's probably just your good old boring rack server.<p>Anyone else care for a guess ?