Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

I thought I&#x27;d answer some of your questions, as the person that pays the bill.<p>1. This can be cheaper on AWS. We&#x27;ve been meaning to move to reserve instances, paying a year at a time, for a while and simply haven&#x27;t done it yet.<p>2. Fastly has already donate CDN usage to us, but we haven&#x27;t fully utilized it yet as we&#x27;re (slowly) sort out some issues between primary gem serving and the bundler APIs.<p>3. RubyCentral pays the bill and can afford to do so via the proceeds generated from RubyConf and RailsConf.<p>4. The administration is an all volunteer (myself included) effort. Because of that, paying a premium to use AWS has it&#x27;s advantages because it allows more volunteers have help out given the well traveled platform. In the past, RubyGems was hosted on dedicated hardware within Rackspace. While this was certainly cheaper, it created administrative issues. Granted those can be solved without using AWS, but we get back to again desiring to have as low of friction on the administration as possible.<p>Any other questions?

While one could probably knock a couple thousand bucks off that if one cared to (which is probably penny wise and pound foolish but invariably comes up in HN discussions of hosting costs), the amazing thing is that hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are able to use core infrastructure which costs less than the fully-loaded cost of a single billing clerk in your local municipal water department.

BTW this is paid for by : <a href="http://rubycentral.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rubycentral.org&#x2F;</a>

At a glance, this looks like AWS being used like a dedicated host, which as demonstrated, isn&#x27;t exactly cheap.<p>There&#x27;s no spot or even reserved pricing, just a bunch of on-demand instances that were up 24&#x2F;7 for all 28 days in February.<p>Seems like a genuine dedicated host, reserved instances or an architecture that leverages the elastic in elastic compute cloud would be worth considering.

Right now we&#x27;re a top 25 grossing iPhone game developer. The last AWS bill I saw was January&#x27;s, a little under $200k.<p>I&#x27;m not on the server team, so I don&#x27;t know exactly what contributes most to it. But part of me really thinks it could be reduced!

Package Control is a far cry from the scale of RubyGems. PC uses a little over 2TB a month, whereas my calculations show RubyGems using around 50TB.<p>That said, early on I chose Linode because of their generous bandwidth that is included with the boxes. For the price of less than 1TB of AWS bandwidth, I get 8TB, plus a decent box. The bigger boxes have an even bigger proportion.<p>I&#x27;m not posting this to give any suggestions for RubyGems - I know nothing of the complexity of that setup. Mostly just figured I&#x27;d share the research I did for finding reasonably priced bandwidth.

The thing is there are many providers who can do the same and most of them will do it for less than half of this. Some less than 1&#x2F;5th. I think they should move this to Digital Ocean and save $5000.<p>The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.

There&#x27;s already 30+ comments on this thread and no one has pointed out the obvious: this is all for the peanut gallery to laugh at Npm, Inc.<p>If the bill remained relatively consistent they could host Rubygems.org for ~28 months with 200K.

We run into the same cost-related problems for our CDN. What we did to solve it was to rent dedicated servers that are near AWS regions. We used Route53 latency based routing to route traffic to that dedicated servers + Nginx + LUA. We&#x27;re serving 300+ TB of traffic per month and the total price is just a percent of the RubyGems AWS Bill. There is some maintenance included with this solution and the problem is finding the right dedicated server providers.

That&#x27;s not as bad as I was expecting. I was once working with a startups infrastructure (&gt;100 servers) and it was near 20k&#x2F;mo (mostly reserved instances)

Since it can take a bit of time to read through the invoice, here&#x27;s a summary of the bill:<p>CloudFront $1,071 Data Transfer $3,597 EC2 $2,184 S3 $ 228<p>While &quot;bandwidth&quot; costs equate to ~$4,668&#x2F;month, only $1,071 is CDN (CloudFront), with the balance just raw Data Transfer.<p>Since lots of folks are commenting, and not everyone realizes the difference it&#x27;s also a good time to point out the CloudFront vs. Data Transfer distinction.<p>Using Amazon&#x27;s terms... Data Transfer means anything directly served&#x2F;coming from EC2 or S3 (or a few other services which aren&#x27;t relevant here), but NOT anything for CloudFront (which is, obviously, a separate line item, as shown above).<p>The bulk of CDN (CloudFront) usage ($735 worth or 69%) is US.<p>The bulk of Data raw bandwidth (Data Transfer) usage ($2,931 ~80%) is US East.

While by no means insignificant, this bill is no where near what I&#x27;d imagine would warrant a HN post. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if most startups beat this regularly.<p>The startup whose backend I co-created racks up an AWS bill that hovers around a half million dollars a month. We make use of all of the ways to save with Amazon: pre-paid reserved instances, negotiated deals, etc. And we&#x27;re not even that big; imagine what Netflix&#x27;s AWS bill must cost?<p>We&#x27;ve tried other providers, toyed with co-locating, but at the end of the day the flexibility and cost benefit of IaaS outweighed the lower base price of CPU cycles when you roll it yourself.

With most of this being bandwidth costs, it seems like switching to a host like Digital Ocean would make more sense here. The bandwidth costs are a fraction of Amazon&#x27;s in comparison.<p>As for the CDN, switching to something like Cloudflare might make more sense rather than relying on Cloudfront. At the least, there&#x27;s a &quot;US and EU only&quot; option for edge locations to use which si considerably cheaper than the default option of all edge locations.

Why was this even posted? Looking for help reducing it? Complaining about the amount spent? Looking for a pat on the back?<p>I saw a talk at Ruby&#x2F;RailsConf about the work spent building and maintaining rubygems.org. It smelled a bit martyrish. &quot;Look at the thankless work we perform behind the scenes&quot;.<p>Well, if help is required building or operating rubygems.org, please just say so. As a seasoned Ruby developer I&#x27;d be more than happy to contribute development time, and as a daily user I&#x27;d be willing to commit financially in a small way towards operating costs. Not that that is required - given all the offers of free hosting this post received in response.<p>If we don&#x27;t know about a problem, we can&#x27;t help. Just ask if help is what you want. It&#x27;s not like the Ruby community doesn&#x27;t have great communication channels.

This seems reasonable to me? Why is this a newsworthy item?

How can I donate to Ruby Central? Checked out their &quot;Support&quot; page yet it didn&#x27;t help much. Any easier ways like donating via Paypal?

could easily knock multiple thousand bucks off of that by just reserving the ec2 servers you know you&#x27;ll need, plus reserve the cloudfront bandwidth you know you&#x27;ll need (for the amount of data served I believe you should be able to cut CF costs by at least half).<p>3 year heavy EC2 reservations pay for themselves in ~7 months, cloudfront reserved bandwidth is just a 12 month agreement so that costs nothing up front. You might want to experiment with some different instance types though, depending on your resource utilization. Personally I really like using the new c3.large instances for my web servers and anything else that needs more CPU than memory, proportionately. If the standard instances suit your needs better you still might want to move to the m3 class.<p>Aside from those two items it looks like you are sending out a considerable amount of stuff from EC2-&gt;internet (27 TB transfer out from US-East to internet). I&#x27;d recommend looking at whether you could set up a cloudfront distribution with your EC2 servers as its origin.

I had no idea it cost this much to host rubygems.org.<p>The website says that hosting is provided by BlueBox?

Could it be possible to cache the version list locally and then just update it incrementally, e.g. via Git? Wouldn&#x27;t this save both download time (for us), and bandwidth (for RubyGems)?

Interesting. Looks like most are bandwidth cost.

assuming there is a direct correlation between requests and projects, we can do a guestimate on ruby developers and projects which are active

That&#x27;s it?

WHY DOWNLOAD!!! WHY