

Ask PG: Cost and effort of running Hacker News? - knightinblue

In terms of <i>servers and hardware</i>, how much does it cost to keep hacker news up and running each month?<p>In terms of man hours, how much is needed to maintain and moderate hacker news?
======
pg
I think the server costs around $350/mo. I don't like to think how much time
HN actually takes up, but when I was traveling recently I found that checking
in for about 30 min a day was enough to keep things under control.

On a weekday we get about 350k pageviews from about 30k unique ip addrs.

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SomeIdiot
Why do you need to check in every 30 minutes?

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RossM
He said 30 minutes per day, not every 30 minutes.

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SomeIdiot
Ah, well that explains it I guess :o)

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RossM
Oh I don't know, perhaps it doesn't include the 4-projector basement
monitoring screen in the basement, relaying real-time hits and anomalous
voting patterns.

Ahem.

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babul
From <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516108>

Only one server:

    
    
        Old: 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, 4 GB RAM, 32-bit FreeBSD 5.3.
        New: 3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1.
    

_PG: "The new server seems to be about 2x as fast. The frontpage renders for
me in about 50 msec. But the site should seem more than 2x faster (for logged-
in users) because many requests will terminate before being interrupted.
There's now enough memory that we can fit all the links and comments in memory
at once again. We should be good for another year or so."_ (traffic:
<http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#15jan09>)

Not sure of how or where server is hosted or what else is used e.g.
router/firewall/bandwidth/ups/utilities/etc., but if pg/rtm billed for time
all other costs would be insignificant.

Maintainance:

A lot less than most people considering it's rtm and pg.

~~~
knightinblue
So that brings the hardware costs to about 2000-$3000 per month?

As for man hours, can 2 guys in a basement with nothing else on their
schedules maintain and moderate a site like HN?

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andrewljohnson
I don't understand how that makes the hardware cost $2000-$3000 per month.

~~~
knightinblue
Whoops, my bad. read that as 24 GB RAM instead of 12 GB RAM (which made me
wonder why they would need so much memory)

The server should come out to a little over $1000 per month then?

~~~
andrewljohnson
I don't think so. You can build out that Linux box for just a few thousand
total. Check out System76 if you don't want to build it.

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joshuaxls
I think he's referring to how much it would cost if you paid for a server like
that through a hosting provider.

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andrewljohnson
Well, he shouldn't call it hardware costs then :)

A hosting provider gives you lots of services too.

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catch23
You could get similar services from a colocation company as well. You could
purchase a fully decked 1U server for $2000, then pay $50 a month for
colocation (that's what I'm doing).

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andrewljohnson
If Hacker News is anything like my site, both of which basically need to serve
up little bits of text to lots of people, then hosting is cheap.

I bet you could serve 20,000 people a day on an HN-like site for well under
$1,000/month on AWS, assuming you are smart about caching and you don't thump
the database with every request.

So, even if you were totally clueless about ads and just ran random ad sense,
the thing would more than pay for itself.

It's incredibly cheap to run a site that doesn't need much bandwidth.
Basically, if you are serving no pictures or media, you should be able to
build a website at super-scale in your garage, or using some Cloud Service.

~~~
WalterGR
Is that realistic? Running random AdSense + 20,000 people a day = "more than"
$1,000 a month?

~~~
andrewljohnson
Absolutely.

20,000 people a day is definitely worth 35 dollars per day. That would mean,
if your ads were impression-based, your CPM of $1.75.

You pay $45 CPM for eyeballs on a site like backpacker.com, which actually has
a tight audience, but you're gonna get $1.75 unless your site is just spam.

CPM means cost per thousand eyeballs. I'm talking about impressions here just
to simplify things.

~~~
WalterGR
The reason I ask is that my site gets about 7,000 unique visitors a day. If
20,000 = $35 a day, 7,000 = $12.25 a day. I make about half that.

I don't recall seeing any articles on HN about advertising options (AdSense
vs. AdBrite vs...) or optimization. (Though it's possible I've simply missed
them.) Any good resources I should investigate?

~~~
andrewljohnson
What's your website?

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WalterGR
<http://onlineslangdictionary.com/>

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andrewljohnson
It does seem to me like "you're doing it wrong."

I don't know why you are showing adsense ads for dictionaries on your site. I
can't imagine your audience is the sort that buys dictionaries. Given you are
a slang dictionary, I imagine your users are young. And most young people get
their dictionaries online.

It seems like such an oxymoron that you would have an ad to buy something
printed on your dictionary website. Your ad sense literally show ads for a
printed competitor to your site.

It seems to me you have your adsense set up wrong, or naively. If I go to a
page and look up a word slang for a word like girlfriend, you should show me
ads for dating! When I look something up in your dictionary, then you start to
know who I am and you can show me relevant ads.

As it was, all I get is banners for online colleges and slang dictionaries and
a Google ad for Ask.com.

You just need a bit better ads... I guess I was wrong about being able to put
up random ads, but I think you could make more if you thought about it more.

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wenbert
I think he just needs to place the ads properly. Those link ads, in my
experience, are wonderful.

~~~
WalterGR
Do you think the ads are improperly placed?

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wenbert
In my own opinion, yes. If I were the owner of the site, I would use a Link Ad
just below the The Online Slang Dictionary with the same background color and
white text color.

And I would add another Link Ad below Welcome to The Online Slang Dictionary
this time with a white background.

Then I would remove the big vertical ad and place it in a box similar to the
"Subscribe to updates" and "Bookmark or share" boxes and label it with maybe
"Other Resources" -- after all Google text ads are relevant :P

Just my own 2 cents... :)

~~~
WalterGR
Thanks for the feedback!

I actually used to have the big vertical ad ("wide skyscraper") in the right
sidebar (where the "Subscribe to updates" etc. boxes are) but it performed
terribly. Putting it where it is now increased clickthroughs by something like
10x.

BTW, Google's AdSense terms "[prohibit] placing ads under misleading headings
such as 'resources' or 'helpful links.'"
[https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...](https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=136881)

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knightinblue
<http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html> \- over 25,000 ips per day

<http://ycombinator.com/images/2yeartraffic.png> \- Maybe I'm reading this
wrong, but does that image show 300,000 pageviews _per day_?

~~~
javanix
Sure looks like it to me - the peaks on the graph are too close together to be
going by months.

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huhtenberg
If it were a very cool clustered, load-balanced setup with analog monitoring
gauges set up in a nuclear bunker, then I'm guessing we would've heard about
it by now :) So it's probably just your good old boring rack server.

Anyone else care for a guess ?

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rams
What time zone is the hosting centre located in ? I always wondered about
those posting times (x hours ago, y minutes ago, etc).

~~~
knightinblue
Time zone doesn't matter. The clock starts from when you submitted an article
or posted a comment and it's the same for everyone.

So if you submitted an article 10 min ago, it shows as being posted 10 min ago
for you _and_ everyone else.

