Ask HN: How much do you spend on hosting?

4 pointssysk9y ago2 comments

I was recently asked to give an estimate of how much it would cost to host a PHP/MySQL website that is expected to get X monthly page views. Unfortunately, I couldn't answer and wasn't able to Google it. It seems like this sort of knowledge only comes with experience and is rarely documented.

In the spirit of transparency, it'd be interesting if we all shared how much we're spending on hosting. Of course, every application is unique but knowing what others are spending for a similar application can be valuable information.

Please include some information about your stack (hosting provider, programming language, database, etc.) and how much traffic you are handling.

2 comments

2 comments · 2 top-level

cauterized9y ago

I have a few simple (Wordpress or simpler) PHP/MySQL sites that get a couple thousand pageviews/mo apiece. They don't need more than ~99.98% uptime. I spend $5/mo apiece to host them on a shared host (asmallorange.com, if you care). I could probably find similar featured hosting for half that, but my experience is that the extra $30/yr buys you good customer service.

At work, our site serves 8 figures per month in page views and targets 99.999% uptime. We're on a Python/Django/MySQL stack with Celery, Varnish, Elasticsearch, and a few other things thrown in for fun. Between staging and production environments, and redundancy in production, I'd estimate we spend around $7k/mo on AWS for hosting, plus about $3k/mo for a couple Redshift instances for internal use. This year we might reserve some of our instances to save money.

r_singh9y ago

Using Python webapp2 on Google App Engine with Google's NoSQL datastore to run a monolithic app with 120 visits per day (20% transaction conversion) and an admin panel for data management.

Costs $10 to $18 per month depending mainly on Datastore Queries as caching is limited to 1Mb per cache and I haven't fixed a function to handle caching with multiple keys yet so the cost can be lower.