6k visits per week * 5 page views per visit is one view per 20 seconds on average. Even very modest hardware with naively written application code should have no problem handling thousands of CRUD database queries per second (assuming every query doesn't need a table scan or something).
Modern computers are mind-bogglingly powerful. An old laptop off eBay can probably handle the load for business needs for all but the very largest corporations.
So many people don't seem to understand how efficient modern machines are.
As someone who is literally using old laptops to host things from my basement on my consumer line (personal, non-commercial) and a business line (commercial)...
I can host this for under 50 bucks a year, including the domain and power costs, and accounting for offsite backup of the data.
I wish people understood just how much the "cloud" is making in pure profit. If you're already a software dev... you can absolutely manage the complexity of hosting things yourself for FAR cheaper. You won't get five 9s of reliability (not that you're getting that from any major cloud vendor anyways without paying through the nose and a real SLA) but a small UPS will easily get you to 99% uptime - which is absolutely fine for something like this.
You're right but I'll play devil's advocate for teaching purposes:
* Usage won't be uniformly distributed and you may need to deal with burst traffic for example when a new version is released and all your users are pulling new config data.
* Your application data may be very important to your users and keeping it on a single server is a significant risk.
* You're users may be geographically distributed such that a user on the other side of the world may have a severely degraded experience.
* Not all traffic is created equal and, especially paired with burst traffic, could have one expensive operation like heavy analytical query from one user cause timeouts for another user.
Vercel does not solve all of these problems, but they are problems that may be exasperated by a $4 droplet.
All said I still highly encourage developers to not sell their soul to a SaaS product that could care less about them and their use case and consider minimal infrastructure and complexity in order to have more success with their projects.
My understanding is that DO VPS’ are underpowered (as are VPS offerings from most other VPS vendors). Dollar for dollar, bare metal stuff from Hetzner, OVH, etc are far more powerful.
That said, I completely agree-a $4/month DO VPS can run MySQL, and should easily handle this load; in fact I’ve handled far bigger loads in practice.
On a tangent: any recommendations for good US-based bare metal providers (with a convenience factor comparable to OVH, etc)?
My open source service, lrclib.net, handles approximately 200 requests per second at peak (yes you read that right, it's approximately 12000 requests per minute) on a simple €13 Hetzner cloud server (4 AMD based VCPU, 8GB RAM). I'd love to write a blog post about how I made it possible sometime in the future, but basically, I cheated by using Rust together with SQLite3 and some caching.
I was surprised by the cost of Vercel in that blog post too, which is why I dislike all kinds of serverless/lambda/managed services. For me, having a dozen people subscribing to $1-$2/month sponsorship on GitHub Sponsors is enough to cover all the costs. Even if no one donates, I’d still have no trouble keeping the project running on my own.
> Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet?
How many times per second is the DB actually accessed? As far as I can tell my the metrics, they're doing ~1.7 requests/minute, you'll have a hard time finding a DB that couldn't handle that.
In fact, I'd bet you'd be able to host that website (the database) in a text file on disk without any performance issues whatsoever.
I didn't mean it quite so insultingly, but yes, even a very modest server would handle that kind of load easily. You're not particularly high throughput (a few requests per second?) and I imagine the database is fairly efficient (you're not storing pages of text or binary blobs). I think you'd be pleasently surprised by what a little VPS can do.
I think it would be fine. I run a little private analytics service for my own websites. That service isn't as busy but handles ~11k requests per month. It logs to a SQLite database. It does this on a little Raspberry Pi 400 in my home office and it's not too busy. The CPU sits at 1% to 3% on average. Obviously there are a lot of differences in my setup but I would think you could handle 10x the traffic with a small VPS without any trouble at all.
You can read a little bit more about my analytics setup here:
They have under 1k visits per day, unless it's a really heavy app for some reason just about any basic VPS should handle a Webserver + DB for that just fine.
It does feel like the tech community as a whole has forgotten how simple and low resource usage hosting most things is, maybe due to the proliferation of stuff like AWS trying to convince us that we need all this crazy stuff to do it?
ndriscoll|1 year ago
Modern computers are mind-bogglingly powerful. An old laptop off eBay can probably handle the load for business needs for all but the very largest corporations.
horsawlarway|1 year ago
As someone who is literally using old laptops to host things from my basement on my consumer line (personal, non-commercial) and a business line (commercial)...
I can host this for under 50 bucks a year, including the domain and power costs, and accounting for offsite backup of the data.
I wish people understood just how much the "cloud" is making in pure profit. If you're already a software dev... you can absolutely manage the complexity of hosting things yourself for FAR cheaper. You won't get five 9s of reliability (not that you're getting that from any major cloud vendor anyways without paying through the nose and a real SLA) but a small UPS will easily get you to 99% uptime - which is absolutely fine for something like this.
tmpz22|1 year ago
* Usage won't be uniformly distributed and you may need to deal with burst traffic for example when a new version is released and all your users are pulling new config data.
* Your application data may be very important to your users and keeping it on a single server is a significant risk.
* You're users may be geographically distributed such that a user on the other side of the world may have a severely degraded experience.
* Not all traffic is created equal and, especially paired with burst traffic, could have one expensive operation like heavy analytical query from one user cause timeouts for another user.
Vercel does not solve all of these problems, but they are problems that may be exasperated by a $4 droplet.
All said I still highly encourage developers to not sell their soul to a SaaS product that could care less about them and their use case and consider minimal infrastructure and complexity in order to have more success with their projects.
npsomaratna|1 year ago
That said, I completely agree-a $4/month DO VPS can run MySQL, and should easily handle this load; in fact I’ve handled far bigger loads in practice.
On a tangent: any recommendations for good US-based bare metal providers (with a convenience factor comparable to OVH, etc)?
fs0c13ty00|1 year ago
I was surprised by the cost of Vercel in that blog post too, which is why I dislike all kinds of serverless/lambda/managed services. For me, having a dozen people subscribing to $1-$2/month sponsorship on GitHub Sponsors is enough to cover all the costs. Even if no one donates, I’d still have no trouble keeping the project running on my own.
diggan|1 year ago
How many times per second is the DB actually accessed? As far as I can tell my the metrics, they're doing ~1.7 requests/minute, you'll have a hard time finding a DB that couldn't handle that.
In fact, I'd bet you'd be able to host that website (the database) in a text file on disk without any performance issues whatsoever.
Dachande663|1 year ago
codazoda|1 year ago
You can read a little bit more about my analytics setup here:
https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...
avree|1 year ago
explain|1 year ago
Very possible.
klabb3|1 year ago
OTOH If you want managed Postgres it seems like you always have to pay a fairy high minimum.
trollied|1 year ago
Saris|1 year ago
It does feel like the tech community as a whole has forgotten how simple and low resource usage hosting most things is, maybe due to the proliferation of stuff like AWS trying to convince us that we need all this crazy stuff to do it?
bdlowery|1 year ago
tosh|1 year ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]