
Ask HN: What would it cost to build and maintain a Facebook clone? - herodotus
If you take advertising out of the equation, there does not appear to be complex technology behind Facebook. That got me wondering what it might cost to replicate and maintain a Facebook full-stack clone.
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everdev
Running a web agency, I got asked this a lot. "Can you add X feature? I don't
want anything complicated, just like they have on Facebook."

The trick is that behind a simple feature like adding friends there are all
kinds of use cases: removing friends, blocking friends, removing banned
friends, Unicode/ language support, optimizing/caching friend queries, etc.

In Ruby on Rails, you can have a bare bones social network up by the end of
the day and run it on Digital Ocean for $5/month. But when you scale to
millions of users, you'll be paying millions in bandwidth, storage and staff.

Basically, there's a reason why sure sites like FB need millions in VC cash.
And the story if a kid in a basement making a hit site is only the first
chapter.

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ccajas
All you, and they, need to know is, "the devil is in the details". Knowing the
solution can be simple, but the process complicated.

Ironically, FB all started with a couple of college students coding PHP. A lot
of web agency clients probably figure it is the same. I would have like to
have been there during the time where FB needed to scale rapidly to
accommodate for its rise in popularity. For me, those are the most interesting
times to work for a company.

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rajeshpant
It would cost you more than what it costs facebook to run facebook. The
initial cost barrier to run and scale something at that level would be more
for a new company/startup than it costs facebook. Also, any new startup would
have to spend a huge amount of money before they even know where to optimize
costs. As per this article[0], Facebook has around $3 Billion in datacenter
investments.

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aphextron
>If you take advertising out of the equation, there does not appear to be
complex technology behind Facebook.

You're gravely mistaken.

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relaunched
Complexity comes with managing what they do at the size, scale and
responsiveness that they operate.

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thomasthomas
add up all their expenses on all their 10k's and you have a baseline starting
point.

