<story><title>Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?</title><text>How much cost to run Hacker News monthly?&lt;p&gt;These costs could be cloud costs as well as any engineers assigned to upkeep.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pifm_guy</author><text>Buuut...   The Aws+kubernetes approach is very scalable.&lt;p&gt;If overnight, HN became the new Facebook, the single server model wouldn&amp;#x27;t work, and the business opportunity would be lost.&lt;p&gt;However, the kubernetes model probably would scale (probably with a few hiccups still, but doable), and HN would suddenly be a 100x business.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;That&lt;/i&gt; is why business leaders pick the more expensive &amp;#x27;best practice&amp;#x27; setup.</text></item><item><author>sph</author><text>I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard.&lt;p&gt;The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we&amp;#x27;d suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not worse.</text></item><item><author>nabaraz</author><text>I believe it still runs on one box. Xeon E5-3567 (3.5Ghz). Stack is FREEBSD with nginx as front-end.&lt;p&gt;From a quick look at M5 hosting price, cost is probably $500-$1000&amp;#x2F;month (6M requests).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sph</author><text>Reading your comment and the answers, I have a hard time telling if you&amp;#x27;re being ironic or serious here. I&amp;#x27;m going to be charitable and assume yours is some very sharp wit that flew over the heads of some that replied to you :)&lt;p&gt;Indeed it is a terrible idea to optimise any piece of software that&amp;#x27;s put online in the rare occurrence it becomes the next Facebook. No, it will not happen overnight. No, you can run on an autoscalable k8s on AWS setup and it will still break, you will have to completely re-architecture and write a lengthy &amp;quot;what went wrong&amp;quot; post-mortem anyway.&lt;p&gt;I feel the &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;premature optimisation is the root of all evil&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt; mantra is not yet being taught in DevOps school.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: How much does it cost to run Hacker News?</title><text>How much cost to run Hacker News monthly?&lt;p&gt;These costs could be cloud costs as well as any engineers assigned to upkeep.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pifm_guy</author><text>Buuut...   The Aws+kubernetes approach is very scalable.&lt;p&gt;If overnight, HN became the new Facebook, the single server model wouldn&amp;#x27;t work, and the business opportunity would be lost.&lt;p&gt;However, the kubernetes model probably would scale (probably with a few hiccups still, but doable), and HN would suddenly be a 100x business.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;That&lt;/i&gt; is why business leaders pick the more expensive &amp;#x27;best practice&amp;#x27; setup.</text></item><item><author>sph</author><text>I wonder how much it would cost to run if it were designed and run with 2022 modern best practices of Kubernetes, Helm, Node + React, on a fleet of cattle servers hosted on AWS, paired with expensive add-on services because running PostgreSQL is too hard.&lt;p&gt;The cynic in me says it would cost at least 10x that, require a full time team of 5 devops, and we&amp;#x27;d suffer at the very least the same amount of outages, if not worse.</text></item><item><author>nabaraz</author><text>I believe it still runs on one box. Xeon E5-3567 (3.5Ghz). Stack is FREEBSD with nginx as front-end.&lt;p&gt;From a quick look at M5 hosting price, cost is probably $500-$1000&amp;#x2F;month (6M requests).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amelius</author><text>I like it that HN has a built-in protection against an eternal September :)</text></comment>