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A comment on A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M Users on Amazon's AWS (2016).

Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M Users on Amazon's AW... by chmod775 on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @11:27AM (#18762916)
Here's some anecdata from someone serving 1.5 million monthly users with a realtime (chat etc.) web app. Disregarding the file serving functionality, this is the entire infrastructure:

- The frontend is running on a 30 bucks/mo VPS with cycles and RAM to spare. - There's 2 DB servers for 5 bucks / mo for redundancy.

This thing would scale pretty linearly in theory, so for 10 million users just add like 4 servers.

So about 200 bucks / mo to run your average startup's web app at 10 mil users.

Alternatively write bad software and throw 50k/mo at AWS I guess.

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Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M Users on Amazon's AW... by maxxxxx on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @11:55AM (#18763109)
It always amazes me how much load servers can take these days.

I guess the only thing you couldn't handle well would be large spikes in demand.

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Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M Users on Amazon's AW... by chmod775 on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @12:13PM (#18763219)
There was some spikes that brought the site down. A notable one was when I submitted the site to HN back when that kind of traffic was still a lot. You learn something each time...
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Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M Users on Amazon's AW... by komali2 on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @11:38AM (#18762980)
Do you have more details? How did you write your app in such a way that isn't "bad?"
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Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M Users on Amazon's AW... by chmod775 on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @12:01PM (#18763146)
It's a node app that tries to keep things simple, i.e. no big frameworks. I put thought into performance as well and it has seen a significant number of re-writes. I didn't just get there from nothing. The project is about 6 years old.

Edit: I should add that I ran into performance hurdles now and then, causing me to upgrade to more expensive hardware until I had resolved them. It was mostly memory leaks or inefficient IO/websockets. Nothing took longer than a week to fix so far though.

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Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M Users on Amazon's AW... by stygiansonic on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @01:24PM (#18763648)
What’s the typical QPS like?
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Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M Users on Amazon's AW... by chmod775 on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @01:52PM (#18763870)
Since it's essentially an one-page app I can do a lot via persistent websocket connections (of which there are usually ~25k concurrently).
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Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M Users on Amazon's AW... by Thaxll on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @01:39PM (#18763755)
It was probably pretty low.
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Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M Users on Amazon's AW... by aicioara on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @11:43AM (#18763021)
Curious about the $2.5/mo database deal. What is that service?
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Re:A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M Users on Amazon's AW... by chmod775 on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @11:57AM (#18763119)
It's $5 per VPS, each just running a redis database. One is with OVH, the other is with ip-projects.
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