Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

I love the idea of this but, given the traffic numbers, this could run on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet and have the same result. They've burnt over a grand just to use vercel. Maybe I'm just older but I don't understand the logic here. A basic VPS, setup once, would have the same result and would be neutral in cost (it's how I run my own little free apps). Maybe the author is lucky enough that $100/mo doesn't really affect them or they're happy for it to pay for the convenience (my assumption).

Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet? I'd be very curious to see that ;)

The web hosting costs basically nothing. Most of the cost comes from the database.

6k visits per week * 5 page views per visit is one view per 20 seconds on average. Even very modest hardware with naively written application code should have no problem handling thousands of CRUD database queries per second (assuming every query doesn't need a table scan or something).

Modern computers are mind-bogglingly powerful. An old laptop off eBay can probably handle the load for business needs for all but the very largest corporations.

So many people don't seem to understand how efficient modern machines are.

As someone who is literally using old laptops to host things from my basement on my consumer line (personal, non-commercial) and a business line (commercial)...

I can host this for under 50 bucks a year, including the domain and power costs, and accounting for offsite backup of the data.

I wish people understood just how much the "cloud" is making in pure profit. If you're already a software dev... you can absolutely manage the complexity of hosting things yourself for FAR cheaper. You won't get five 9s of reliability (not that you're getting that from any major cloud vendor anyways without paying through the nose and a real SLA) but a small UPS will easily get you to 99% uptime - which is absolutely fine for something like this.

As DHH said somewhere, it's incredible that the modern cloud stack has managed to get PROGRAMMERS to be scared of COMPUTERS. Seriously, what's with that? That shouldn't even be possible?

If you can understand programming, you can understand Linux. Might take a while to be really confident, but do you need incredible confidence when you have backups? :)