

Ask HN: Technical cost of a web startup? - typicalday

I am working on a social networking concept and I'd like to make a prototype. I've got most of the know-how, but my problem is, I'm not sure how much capital to allocate to running my test.<p>Setting aside certain logistics (assume I pay myself nothing and I pay nothing for marketing/advertising) how much would you estimate it costs to maintain servers (using AWS for example) and scale to a reasonable level (200 users, 1k users, 5k users) per month? How quickly will that change?
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samgro
There is probably close to zero technical cost or risk associated with your
social network. I have no idea what stage your concept is at, but from my
brief flirtation with building a social networking concept, I would urge you
to consider the following if you haven't already:

What problem does this solve? Who are your first 100 customers? You'll be
surprised at how little time even your best friends will spend humoring your
service. Who are your first 10,000 customers? Why would any of them spend
their precious time on your service? How do you solve the chicken and egg
problem? Most social networks won't be interesting until they have millions of
users. How do you keep people engaged before then? How do you make money? If
you have a general audience, unless you have hundreds of millions of unique
visitors per month, don't say advertising.

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jagira
Back of the envelope calculation -

A passenger instance for a typical small app takes 30-40 MB. You will be able
to run 4-5 passenger instances on a small 512 MB slice.

Assuming that the slowest request in your app takes 100 ms, one passenger
instance can handle 10 requests/sec. 5 instances can handle 50 requests/sec.

Tweak the numbers according to your app and get a rough idea of the hardware
requirements.

A 512 MB VPS on Linode costs 20 dollars.

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rauar
+1 to the VPS for small (early) web apps. These VMs can handle more than one
normally assumes. Especially if the load does not come in bursts.

Running my app (<https://addresspush.com>) now since 9 months and the smallest
slice with Apache and 2 balanced nodes works perfectly. 1 unnoticed down-time
for a few hours. I bet that happens with cloud services as well (hi AWS!).

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namank
Depending on how you are going about it, Google App Engine may suit you the
best..uses java, python, or go

One huge advantage - its free till 5,000,000 hits or some given # of cpu
cycles

That said, you would need to carefully evaluate your requirements first. App
engine uses Big Table for database, and they recommend it for apps that have a
lot more reads than writes. Google it!

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whiskers
For the level of users you mention the costs would be very low assuming you're
not talking about storing huge quantities of data per user.

AWS offers a free instance when you register an account - it sounds like it
would cover your initial needs. You would probably want to bind a larger
volume to it (perhaps 20GB or so?) which would cost $2 per month.

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petervandijck
AWS, think 1 small instance (80$/m) for, say, 1000 users. Depending of course.

