
Ask HN: How many servers did you have/need at your startup's launch? - akos
Did you have enough disk space and bandwidth at your launch? How much space did you have?
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druiid
I would say it depends on enough factors that pinning down an answer here is
going to be difficult. I would recommend however, that if this is a web and
SQL type data focused site, that you split those services if at all possible.

You can get a single beefy box and run apache/nginx/lighttpd(what???), mysql,
memcached and anything else all on one system and there are certainly people
that make it work... but given the number of times I have been called in to
fix these kinds of scenarios and make them work properly, I can say from
experience that if you expect any amount of traffic you invest in the ability
to abstract these various services away from a single machine with ease (or
just have them separate to start with).

Perhaps if you do not have a lot of operating capital to begin with,
virtualization/cloud options would be a good place to start. You can have with
virtualization that single beefy machine and still separate out the various
pieces of the infrastructure and then allow to add additional virtualization
hosts to the cluster usually with a click or two.

I am happy to answer other questions to scaling (within reason) if you post in
response or mail me. I'd rather you start things in a good direction and give
away free advice than see a company fail because of architecture decisions
which hobble expansion in the future!

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tzaman
We're launching in January with a dedicated server (quad core, 32GB RAM) on
which we have a single VPS (with _only_ 8GB RAM) - this gives us plenty of
options going further, either I can set up load balancing, add resources to
the VPS, make more of them with distributed concerns (database, app,
session...), etc. And with Hetzner, it's also very cost effective, like 60
euros per month.

Not sure that is the best way to go, but that's how we'll roll.

~~~
Goranek
Hetzner has crazy prices. Compared to AWS, one does ask himself if amazon
cloud is the right solution

~~~
Turing_Machine
I'm not familiar with Hetzner, but another thing to consider is whether the
"crazy prices" are sustainable (and they may well be -- again, I'm not
familiar with the company).

~~~
buster
Hetzner exists since 1997, it's a well known provider at least in germany for
many years. So it's not like they will go bancrupt. They probably just know
how to be cost efficient out of experience.

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lmirosevic
At Qard.at we used 3 Heroku dynos for: web server, mobile API, and our CMS. We
used MongoLab for our MongoDB database. We also used Amazon S3 for static
assets like CSS and images. The system was tested with Blitz.io and could
scale to 7M hits/month. Our monthly fees were less than $1. The takeaway from
this is not that you should run your company on free services, but that you
can get started for (as good as) free with a scalable architecture which is
then easily transferrable to AWS or similar once the need arises.

~~~
yuvadam
7M hits/month is 2.6 hits/second. #justsaying

Also, how are 3 Heroku dynos less than $1/month? 2 non-free dynos are $40
right off the bat.

~~~
andrewmunsell
My bet is they are set up as three apps, in which case, you get 1 free dyno
per app (all of them).

~~~
lmirosevic
Sorry typo. 7M hits per day. It was tested with 250 concurrent users, and page
load times consistently stayed below 300ms (measured end-to-end).

Andrew is right, we set up three different apps and so each is free.

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greglindahl
blekko needed 700 servers at launch for our web-scale search engine. We
figured an index of a few billion webpages was the minimum needed to give
reasonable results.

This is definitely not a one-size-fits-all sort of question!

~~~
druiid
Hah! Yeah, I imagine that this answer is probably outside of the question the
OP is asking, but I do always enjoy hearing about scaling requirements for
projects outside of those I have dealt with. Do your requirements (If you
don't mind me asking) require a more disk, memory or CPU focused
infrastructure?

~~~
greglindahl
To let our programmers be a bit lazy, we want fat (2-socket) nodes. That
allows us to do things like have gigabyte-sized tables in memory on all nodes
for instant access.

At that kind of server core count, it turns out that we can keep 8-12 disks
busy, when crawling and indexing. For serving results, it turns out that we
can keep 2 ssds busy, and, 96 gigs of ram seems to be the sweet spot.

The one thing we don't stress so much is the network. We're very conscious of
locality, and we can get away with having 1 gigabit to all the nodes. We use
beefy 10 gig switches in the middle to give high bisection.

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edowling
It depends hugely on what you are doing. At Kickfolio, we needed to think
about dev ops and infrastructure right from the start. Kickfolio launched with
13 servers in place (10 Mac Mini's, EC2 load balancers, Heroku front end).

Having been featured on a few large sites, it was enough. We spun up 3 dynos
on Heroku for the front end, and in the first week of launch we had gone
through a few hundred GBs on bandwidth (not including static assets hosted on
Cloudfront).

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pcowans
Super-obvious answer here, but if you only have one of something you can't
upgrade things, reboot, etc., without downtime, and you have a single point of
failure if things go wrong. Having N+1 of each component, ideally with
automated failover, makes a huge difference to how easy it is to maintain your
system. You'll also enjoy life more when you can wait until the morning to fix
something falling over in the middle of the night.

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thinkbohemian
Why do you want servers? Are you building a server centric product? Why not
use a PaaS like Heroku and some monitoring tools? Then you've got your
scaling, your deployment, your security and log aggregation solved -- and you
don't have to wear a pager while you sleep.

Each app and service is different, more info about what yours does and it's
known bottlenecks would greatly influence answers.

~~~
patrickgzill
Heroku, being on top of AWS, doesn't really have the greatest uptime, do they?
There are plenty of dedicated hosting and VPS companies that have better
uptimes than AWS at this point.

~~~
lazerwalker
For many early-stage startups at launch, ease of development/ops is much more
important to optimize for than uptime, and Heroku excels at that compared to
dedicated hosting or VPS. If a quarter of the internet is already down because
of an AWS outage, people will survive without being able to access your shiny
new "AirBnb for Pets" startup. When you're successful, build out manual
infrastructure, sure, but at initial launch it's often worth the tradeoff of
potential downtime for the savings in manpower.

Naturally, if your startup is a backup service or something else where having
as close to 100% uptime as possible is a truly key feature, then it's probably
not in your best interests to rely on Heroku/AWS.

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JimmyL
One of my favorite stories about this was from the guys at 500px.com.

When they first launched, their only server was a Mac Mini in a second-tier
colo that was run by a friend of theirs. After about six months, they did
their first major server upgrade - buying an external USB hard drive for more
storage. They bought another two (and a USB hub) a month or so later. This
lasted them another four months, until the got to the point where the USB bus
was being constantly saturated. Only then did they move to some more
enterprisey hardware.

Moral of their story was to use only as much hardware as you need now (while
having plans on how to scale up in the short- and medium-term which don't cost
you money now), and to worry more about getting users and building a product.
Worry about scaling after you've got customers (and data that will show you
actual use patterns), as opposed to paying for a complex scaling
infrastructure before you've got any users.

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bsenftner
We started with 1 RackSpace Cloud Server, their most powerful offering, for
our development. Our thinking was we'd use cloud servers to scale. Well,
RackSpace's top of the line cloud server is, for our application's needs, a
total dog. Getting reasonable performance required a server 8 times more
powerful than RackSpace offers. And at the rate RackSpace charges for their
top of the line dog, we can buy the server we need in 3 months. So, at launch
we had 2 servers: one for DEV, one for LIVE; each being 32gigs RAM, 32 cores,
& 1.5T disk. Now, 1 year later we've expanded to 6 servers in a half rack with
hardware firewall, fully raided up fileShare and passable redundancy.

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smadam9
I'm not sure there is a one-fits-all answer here - specifically regarding disk
space & bandwidth.

Are you saving HD video files? Then you will probably need a data store
connected to your web server.

Are you just allowing people to post text, small images and such? In that
case, 1 server could easily cut it.

With proper software configuration, and a _decent_ hardware config, you can go
quite a long way with 1 machine.

Can you provide any details? Maybe someone can help out with your specific
question, since the general question you've asked is quite difficult to give a
proper answer to.

~~~
andrewflnr
I got the impression he was looking for anecdotes to get a broad impression of
what it "usually" takes, instead of advice specific to his situation.

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svachalek
Many problems have two solutions, the solution for "one" and the solution for
"two or more". If you really want to be ready to scale I would be a lot more
confident with two servers than one. On the other hand, if you are coming out
with a true MVP and don't expect the world to come rushing in, then one seems
like the right answer if it saves time.

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jerryji
At the moment we have 5 small Linode VPSes (1.5/1/1/768/768) for
app/db/solr/redis/async-jobs and paying around $200/month.

I've been looking for alternatives, preferably hybrid dedicated/cloud with
good RAM/IO for app/cache/db and cloud based storage. Rackspace seems to offer
something like this, but at a higher price. Any other suggestions?

~~~
ohashi
Linode is one of the cheapest providers of VPSes that are mainstream. I think
you will have a hard time finding something comparable. I track web hostign
companies for my startup ( <http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting> ) and the only
company that jumps to mind is RamNode. But I haven't collected enough data on
them to say anything meaningful. They seem to be offering high ram + ssd
drives which would match what you're after.

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james-singh
One Amazon EC2 'micro' instance when I launched <http://www.nepaladz.com> That
too was running on a free server (for the first year). And it was delivering
around 200k requests per day at around 40% server load. It is however
configured to auto scale as per the load.

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makyol
Only one. I think, simple shared hosting will be ok at launch, depending on
your application. But most probably one will be enough at first.

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bdfh42
We are starting with just one - with the option to push the database service
off to a second machine more or less on demand.

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tibbon
A few Heroku web and worker dynos.

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chinmoy
Not sure but I think I read somewhere that Buffer was launched with only one
Linode.

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catshirt
1

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schoash
we also started with just one dell 4gb box from leaseweb.

