<story><title>Minecraftwiki serving more traffic than Stackoverflow with 4 servers (and PHP)</title><url>http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/drg0n/minecraftwikinet_and_minecraftforumnet_now_serve/c12ckss</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>rythie</author><text>I think these types of stories are misleading for startups.&lt;p&gt;Many startups would do better to add server capacity in the short term, rather than spend lots of time optimizing to cut costs, when this is typically hidden from the user.&lt;p&gt;For example, a 4GB linode VPS is $160/month, so you can have 34 of those ($5440/month) for the cost of one developer (Salary of $67k based on: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.simplyhired.com/a/salary/search/q-php+developer/l-california&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.simplyhired.com/a/salary/search/q-php+developer/l...&lt;/a&gt;). Also, many startups struggle to recruit good developers, so would it make sense for them to spend all their time optimising code to perform on cheap hardware? rather than improving the product in a visible way to the user?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wheels</author><text>Possibly true, but your accounting ignores recurring vs. one-time costs.  If you can pay some external person $10k to tune your setup and save $4000/month, and aren&apos;t already swimming in money, obviously that&apos;s a smart thing to do.</text></comment>
<story><title>Minecraftwiki serving more traffic than Stackoverflow with 4 servers (and PHP)</title><url>http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/drg0n/minecraftwikinet_and_minecraftforumnet_now_serve/c12ckss</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>rythie</author><text>I think these types of stories are misleading for startups.&lt;p&gt;Many startups would do better to add server capacity in the short term, rather than spend lots of time optimizing to cut costs, when this is typically hidden from the user.&lt;p&gt;For example, a 4GB linode VPS is $160/month, so you can have 34 of those ($5440/month) for the cost of one developer (Salary of $67k based on: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.simplyhired.com/a/salary/search/q-php+developer/l-california&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.simplyhired.com/a/salary/search/q-php+developer/l...&lt;/a&gt;). Also, many startups struggle to recruit good developers, so would it make sense for them to spend all their time optimising code to perform on cheap hardware? rather than improving the product in a visible way to the user?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>citricsquid</author><text>Definitely, nobody should take us as an example for their startup/business. We&apos;re literally a small forum that inherited huge success and had to rapidly deal with scaling up, we&apos;re not a business and money is not our goal, so if someone were to base their business off of what we&apos;ve done it might not turn out too well.&lt;p&gt;The current servers we operate were paid for with donations from our users because our ad revenue has yet to arrive heh.</text></comment>