
Pinboard 2014 Expenses - hodgesmr
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au7yiR802qQmdE5seXMzTlFDTl80QTFNaWpmTHBfdlE&usp=sharing#gid=0
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patio11
He runs a really, really right ship. Off the top of my head I think the SaaS
budget alone at my companies is larger than that.

That said, by the standards of physically extant businesses, it is ridiculous
how far you can get on $1k or $2k a month.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I am actually jealous of the level of control. I need to work harder !

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Sorry that was meant to comment on the top, not yourself.

Edit: And was barely worth commenting at all, let alone this comment only
drawing attention to the information-free nature of my opinions.

Oh dear ...

But the OP has shamed me into realising I do need to upgrade my financial
controls - "worrying" does not seem to count as a system!

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pjc50
I wonder what other services would suit this small, "artisinal", paid-for
internet service model?

There's some RSS readers and email providers. Photo hosting and blogging are
too "bulk" and high-profile for this business model, probably.

I suspect the abuse/takedown request workload is tiny, which helps a lot in
keeping the cost down.

~~~
adventured
There are a lot of niche opportunities in larger segments. The hard part is
always getting attention / traction, getting those first thousand customers to
pay, getting enough money to afford some marketing and support (if necessary).

Just a simple example: HomeAway's huge vacation rentals business. Within the
larger super category ('for rent by owner'), there are long term rentals, and
that's a niche compared to the much larger vacation rental market. Several
years ago, you could have created a modest business around that smaller niche,
charging $30 or $50 per year for a listing. 10,000 listings at $50 per year
becomes a nice, likely quite profitable, small business.

Real estate listing concepts are great if you can get traction and listings,
the costs of hosting and serving up the data and images might as well be zero.

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continuations
They use Hetzner for dedicated servers, slicehost for VPS, 2 colocation
services, and AWS cloud.

For a relatively small site, why do they need so many different hosting
providers?

~~~
idlewords
I run admin + staging stuff and my own email on the dedicated servers. The
Hetzner box has some offsite backups, too. I want something that won't die at
the same time as the website.

I use two colos for redundancy. One is in Sacramento, and it mitigates the
earthquake risk of the one in Fremont.

The AWS costs consists of stuff I'm too lazy to go find and delete. Everyone
has an unused EC2 instance or S3 bucket somewhere; that's what keeps Amazon in
the black.

~~~
sushimako
Interesting. Are colo prices generally that high in the US? May I ask what's
included at 600$ for 2(-3?)U of rack-real estate there?

    
    
      * What level of support do you have (can you call someone at the 
           DC at 4am and have him hot-swap a failed HD for you)?
      * How many shared or own gigabit or 100mbit uplinks are included? 
           (if >1: can do bonding on your interfaces?)
      * With how many other servers do you share the same circuit-breaker?
      * I guess you have at least 1 UPS + 1 non-UPS power supplies?
      * exceptionally good peering?
      * network/power SLA?
      * 24/7 access to your server?
    

I worked for a DC in europe some years ago and i'm genuinely intrigued how the
price in your spreadsheet for colo-hosting is so much more than what i was
used to (~100-150$/U).

~~~
idlewords
$600 is for an entire cabinet, 15A, 100 Mbps bandwidth. HE doesn't offer half-
cabinets in that facility, or I would have gotten one.

Note that 15 A is nowhere near enough power to fill it to even 1/3 capacity.

~~~
sushimako

      > Note that 15 A is nowhere near enough power to fill it to even 1/3 capacity.
    

Yes that's pretty standard, afaik. The dc I worked at had individual circuits
even for quarter- and half-cabbinets (2x 16A each), but i don't know how
common that is in general. (instead of just putting 4 quarter-cabinets on the
same circuits and have 1 customer blow his and 3 others' power)

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lreeves
I've read so many terrible budget spreadsheets that I first I assumed it was
all in thousands. Nice work on keeping the costs down!

~~~
nness
Those figures aren't in _thousands_? That's some good cash management!

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hodgesmr
Source:
[https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/494238943894700032](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/494238943894700032)

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aroman
Is it me, or does $60-70/month for DNS seem pretty high?

~~~
idlewords
Seems high to me too (I use DNSMadeEasy). But I'm too lazy to shop around for
alternatives right now. The current setup Just Works™ and is not a big
proportion of my costs.

~~~
ivank
CloudFlare offers DNS for free, or $20/mo if you want to pay them.

[https://www.cloudflare.com/dns](https://www.cloudflare.com/dns)

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daturkel
Pinboard is one of a few services I happily pay for. Honestly, I'd probably
pay a subscription price for it. I've got 1041 bookmarks, it's fast, searches
and tags flawlessly, the unread functionality is super useful, and I've got
some (unofficial?) android app that makes it a snap to use with my phone. Keep
up the great work.

~~~
saltylicorice
Start paying for archiving then. :)

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morkbot
Does Hetzner has any proper competitor somewhere, with similar power/price
ratio? Especially interested in some on the US side of the pond. They seem to
be a go-to company for everyone that wants to host stuff on his/her own.

~~~
pouzy
Looking at their VPS offers, digitalocean is about the same.

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zrail
This is great information on just how little it takes to run a service like
Pinboard, with hundreds of thousands of active users, on your own hardware.
Just imagine how much more it would cost on Heroku or even AWS, just so you
can avoid having to think about ops.

~~~
idlewords
The site only has about 25k active users. But I'm pretty sure it could handle
about 10x the traffic without changing this spreadsheet much.

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm. For comparison, historious has around 7k active users and I only pay
$10/mo for a 1 GB RAM linode.

~~~
idlewords
Good for you!

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timme
still happy i paid for pinboard a while ago.

the "no-nonsense, speed first" policy and the fact that it's actually being
executed are my favorite things about the service.

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esusatyo
Maciej finally bought an iPhone! When I met him last year in Australia he uses
his 15" laptop to check his tweets.

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trevmckendrick
About how much were the AWS expenses before moving to your own servers?

~~~
idlewords
I never ran the site on AWS. Here's a spreadsheet from 2011, when I was
running the site on leased servers:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au7yiR802qQmdHU...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au7yiR802qQmdHU2ZXJfVDY0c0JSbHd6aTd0M01BWEE&usp=sharing)

I had to change providers numerous times that year for various reasons, hence
the confusing number of services.

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kbar13
slicehost? :)

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adamnemecek
wat
[https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/494239839349268481](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/494239839349268481)

~~~
tnorthcutt
You've stumbled upon the greatness that is Maciej's sense of humor. Just click
the follow button, and consider yourself lucky.

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imaginenore
Don't confuse Pinboard with Pinterest, which is thousands times bigger.

Pinterest active monthly users: 60 million

Pinboard active monthly users: 24 thousand

~~~
idlewords
By all means confuse Pinboard with Pinterest if you are depositing that sweet
VC money.

~~~
logn
Just don't confuse it with pinboard-dot-com which looks pretty sketchy :)

~~~
idlewords
Pinboard dot com is run by a hilarious, crotchety Linux guy who has been
around forever. He did me a huge favor by not selling that domain despite
great temptation.

~~~
Cogito
Looks like he recently moved to pinboard.jp

pinboard.com is currently not responding, and was last cached on 29 Jul at
1:47 GMT (roughly 5 hours ago).

~~~
icebraining
It's working here (redirecting to .jp)

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linklet
I'm building a bookmark site as well and I'm looking for seed users.

If you have a such need, please try [https://linklet.io/](https://linklet.io/)

It's not officially released yet so there might have problems.

~~~
tnorthcutt
I clicked, ready to chastise you for blatantly advertising on a competitor's
thread, and for launching yet another business without charging users money.

I'll still chastise you for the blatant self-promotion on a competitor's
thread, but kudos for actually charging money!

