
Ask HN: What is the hardware of Hacker News? - r2dnb
I&#x27;m curious about the hardware used to run Hacker News. My guts tell me that despite its popularity it is running on modest hardware, but I&#x27;d like to confirm.
======
dang
It's (edit: almost) the same since Nick posted
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222006).

~~~
pbreit
I'd be curious what AWS/DigitalOcean setup would be able to run HN. Any
educated guesses?

~~~
technion
Playing around with the calculator, you're roughly on track with an r3.x4large
- most of the Linux options happily bundle far less RAM.

Getting 9TB of EBS on top of that puts the bill at $1516 per month. None of
that accounts for traffic, of which we know nothing about.

The thing is in an Amazon world, you could optimise the setup for an Amazon
deployment. For example, you'd probably move parts of that data, like database
snapshots, onto S3.

Those costs are still nothing to sneeze at, and very likely suboptimal.

~~~
goldenkey
It just goes to show that cloud prices are somewhat of a ripoff if you have
the knowhow to use CDNs and setup a single server in a colocation center. That
machine can be built for less than 5k.

~~~
gregmac
Of course -- if you know your traffic well ahead of time. If you start growing
quickly, it's not quite as simple. (And if you don't have the traffic/growth
anticipated, you wasted a bunch of money).

You also aren't accounting for redundancy. If the machine totally blows up,
how quickly can you build another? Or do you spend +5k to have a second
sitting as a standby? If the hardware does fail (whether it's a single drive
in RAID or the whole system), who fixes it (or deals with getting it fixed)?
For that matter, is the person who built or sourced the hardware's time worth
$0?

Cloud IS more expensive, but it's not as simple as comparing to the up-front
cost of one piece of hardware.

~~~
goldenkey
This is true but cloud can still be a redundancy mechanism for a colocated
server.

------
mbrock
I'm curious about the total byte size of all HN content.

~~~
lukeHeuer
The mirror I keep of all HN items (posts, comments, jobs, polls, etc.) in JSON
format is at 5.32GB uncompressed.

~~~
mbrock
Cool! Did you mirror everything from the API? Does it go back to the first
test posts or whatever? :)

~~~
lukeHeuer
Yeah, it came from the API which goes back to item id 1. It's all here if you
are interested:
[http://silo.lukeheuer.com/mirrors/news.ycombinator.com/](http://silo.lukeheuer.com/mirrors/news.ycombinator.com/)
Post items are organized by month so you can check out the byte size
progression over HN's lifespan.

------
hakanderyal
IIRC, 2 servers - 1 production, 1 standby, running FreeBSD.

Detailed specs have been written before, try searching.

------
nailer
Hrm it's behind a web app firewall (server:cloudflare-nginx) so harder to
tell.

------
ekr
My bet is on AWS, but I'm also rather curious about this.

~~~
avikalpa
You're rather mistaken my friend. Hacker News existed a long time before AWS.
It has 2 servers - 1 production, 1 standby, running FreeBSD.

FreeBSD is the OS of choice for them.

~~~
smokel
Perhaps I misunderstand your remark, but AWS (2006) predates Hacker News
(2007). According to Wikipedia, that is.

~~~
thematt
EC2 was only in limited beta back in 2006. It wasn't in full production until
2008.

------
jaflo
While we are at it: what language is HN written in?

~~~
retube
I believe it is Arc, a lisp dialect that Paul Graham developed

[http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html)

~~~
talles
Is Arc used for anything else besides powering HN?

~~~
blatant
Not really, it is still being "developed."[O] But some HN clones or forums
built like HN use it.

[O] [http://arclanguage.org](http://arclanguage.org)

