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

(spliit.app)
260 points scastiel | 1 comments | 18 Oct 24 14:35 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Dachande663 ◴[18 Oct 24 14:51 UTC] No.41879983[source]▶
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).
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scastiel ◴[18 Oct 24 14:53 UTC] No.41880001[source]▶
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.

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ndriscoll ◴[18 Oct 24 15:04 UTC] No.41880076[source]▶
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.

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tmpz22 ◴[18 Oct 24 15:33 UTC] No.41880361{3}[source]▶
You're right but I'll play devil's advocate for teaching purposes:

* Usage won't be uniformly distributed and you may need to deal with burst traffic for example when a new version is released and all your users are pulling new config data.

* Your application data may be very important to your users and keeping it on a single server is a significant risk.

* You're users may be geographically distributed such that a user on the other side of the world may have a severely degraded experience.

* Not all traffic is created equal and, especially paired with burst traffic, could have one expensive operation like heavy analytical query from one user cause timeouts for another user.

Vercel does not solve all of these problems, but they are problems that may be exasperated by a $4 droplet.

All said I still highly encourage developers to not sell their soul to a SaaS product that could care less about them and their use case and consider minimal infrastructure and complexity in order to have more success with their projects.

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1. Quothling ◴[18 Oct 24 22:13 UTC] No.41883976{4}[source]▶
Is this really playing the devil's advocate though? I know this is a simplification but Stack Overflow launched on a couple of IIS servers and rode their exponential growth rather well. Sure they added more than "a couple" of web servers and improved their SQL server quite a bit, but as far as I recall they didn't even shift to CDN until five or six years after they grew. Eventually they moved into the cloud, but Spliit doesn't even have a fraction of the traffic SO did in its early days. As such I don't think any of the challenges you mention are all that relevant in the context aside from having backup. Perhaps also some redundancy by having two $4 droplets?

Is the author even getting paid for their services though? If they aren't then why would they care? I don't mean that as rude as it sounds, but why would they pay that much money so people can use their product for free?