

Ask HN: How do you decide how much hardware to assign to a project? - underrated

Is there a formula or a chart that corresponds expected number of users to a hardware profile? Yes, one way around this is to use cloud resources and scale as needed, but that&#x27;s often not as cost-effective as a good hosting deal, or building and hosting your own servers.
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tlack
That's a tough question.

In my case, it's just a bunch of gut-feeling leaps. It's impossible to predict
in advance exactly how taxing an app can be to a system, but you do have some
things you can look at analytically: estimated amount of data (start with # of
tables and # of rows, per user), how peak-y the traffic will be, what can be
cached vs what must be recalculated often, what kind of inbound traffic you
can expect to receive based on your marketing strategy.

My advice: start small ($100/mo can buy you quite a bit of hardware these
days), plan for caching (but keep your code simple to start), structure your
systems to be flexible, and always use SSD (saves you a lot of optimization
engineering time).

