

Ask YC: Server cost estimation - JimEngland

I am working on a startup's business plan and am having trouble estimating server costs per active user.<p>The closest model for server usage in my opinion would be Pownce or Facebook.  The product will be storing user submitted web content including photos, audio, and URLs.<p>I found an article that tries to estimate Facebook's server costs.  These numbers seemed somewhat high to me, however:
http://fishtrain.com/2007/11/07/facebook-valuation/<p>Are there any online resources for estimating server capacity and cost?  Any educated guesses for the startup to use?<p>Thank you!
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bprater
I think that trying to gauge user load for a startup is about as accurate as
figuring out the financials five years in advantage.

There are lots of questions: what will the servers be doing? Transcoding video
is going to take lots of horsepower. Serving static pages is going to take
less. Where are you going to cost? Managed hosting like Rackspace or doing-it-
yourself Amazon S3.

In the story you linked to, they share this info: '2k active users/compute
server, 20k active users/disk server'. I'd grab a number like 2k/server,
factor in some Rackspace boxes and you're off to the races.

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jwilliams
Around $2k per year isn't unreasonable per server in a large data centre. This
also roughly correlates with what a colocated server would cost.

The way fishtrain has based these figures is all around capital expenditure -
most companies wouldn't actually do this.

Facebook is running order of magnitude 10k servers. So in that respect his
"servers required for the load" figures are about right.

Taking $2k, then fishtrain's annual estimates for ~10k plus servers is too low
- it would be more like $20m. Again, the way fishtrain has gone about it wrt
to CAPEX is different.

The electricity consumption seems a bit high, but for a business plan it might
not be unreasonable.

Bandwidth - well that depends totally on your application.

Commissioning a server isn't necessarily cheap - there is the cost of the
server itself, the labour, networking, test, etc, etc. This can be a fairly
significant one-time cost (and isn't capitalised).

People tend to worry about the ongoing cost of storage a bit too much,
particularly if you're retaining a lot of data (e.g. keeping people's images).
The fact is that the cost of storage steadily decreases, so this usually
amortizes this in reality. So I'd say you'd only need to worry about the
increments in most cases - unless your application is horrendously storage
hungry.

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gscott
I would suggest you think about

1\. Web Cache Server $3k

2\. SAN $4k

3\. A nice Database Server $7k

4\. 1u dell machines for web serving $1.5k ea.

5\. Load balancer $3k

You need affordable bandwidth and sever colocation.I am not sure about in
Ohio, but I utilize calpop.com with a half-rack and 10mbps bandwidth but they
are in California.

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jcapote
Ever heard of Amazon Web Services?

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gscott
Sure but if you are transfering terabytes of data around I am not sure if that
is the right system to use. Better to have a dedicated line and a SAN.

But then again I live 10 years behind the times. One day I will stop using
font tags, center tags, tables, Windows 2000, and ASP 3.0. But then again no
need to change what works.

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SwellJoe
_One day I will stop using font tags, center tags, tables, Windows 2000, and
ASP 3.0. But then again no need to change what works._

Words fail.

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gscott
If your webpages work in Netscape 3 they are likely to work in all browsers.

