Ask YC: Server cost estimation
7 comments
I think that trying to gauge user load for a startup is about as accurate as figuring out the financials five years in advantage.
There are lots of questions: what will the servers be doing? Transcoding video is going to take lots of horsepower. Serving static pages is going to take less. Where are you going to cost? Managed hosting like Rackspace or doing-it-yourself Amazon S3.
In the story you linked to, they share this info: '2k active users/compute server, 20k active users/disk server'. I'd grab a number like 2k/server, factor in some Rackspace boxes and you're off to the races.
There are lots of questions: what will the servers be doing? Transcoding video is going to take lots of horsepower. Serving static pages is going to take less. Where are you going to cost? Managed hosting like Rackspace or doing-it-yourself Amazon S3.
In the story you linked to, they share this info: '2k active users/compute server, 20k active users/disk server'. I'd grab a number like 2k/server, factor in some Rackspace boxes and you're off to the races.
Around $2k per year isn't unreasonable per server in a large data centre. This also roughly correlates with what a colocated server would cost.
The way fishtrain has based these figures is all around capital expenditure - most companies wouldn't actually do this.
Facebook is running order of magnitude 10k servers. So in that respect his "servers required for the load" figures are about right.
Taking $2k, then fishtrain's annual estimates for ~10k plus servers is too low - it would be more like $20m. Again, the way fishtrain has gone about it wrt to CAPEX is different.
The electricity consumption seems a bit high, but for a business plan it might not be unreasonable.
Bandwidth - well that depends totally on your application.
Commissioning a server isn't necessarily cheap - there is the cost of the server itself, the labour, networking, test, etc, etc. This can be a fairly significant one-time cost (and isn't capitalised).
People tend to worry about the ongoing cost of storage a bit too much, particularly if you're retaining a lot of data (e.g. keeping people's images). The fact is that the cost of storage steadily decreases, so this usually amortizes this in reality. So I'd say you'd only need to worry about the increments in most cases - unless your application is horrendously storage hungry.
The way fishtrain has based these figures is all around capital expenditure - most companies wouldn't actually do this.
Facebook is running order of magnitude 10k servers. So in that respect his "servers required for the load" figures are about right.
Taking $2k, then fishtrain's annual estimates for ~10k plus servers is too low - it would be more like $20m. Again, the way fishtrain has gone about it wrt to CAPEX is different.
The electricity consumption seems a bit high, but for a business plan it might not be unreasonable.
Bandwidth - well that depends totally on your application.
Commissioning a server isn't necessarily cheap - there is the cost of the server itself, the labour, networking, test, etc, etc. This can be a fairly significant one-time cost (and isn't capitalised).
People tend to worry about the ongoing cost of storage a bit too much, particularly if you're retaining a lot of data (e.g. keeping people's images). The fact is that the cost of storage steadily decreases, so this usually amortizes this in reality. So I'd say you'd only need to worry about the increments in most cases - unless your application is horrendously storage hungry.
I would suggest you think about
1. Web Cache Server $3k
2. SAN $4k
3. A nice Database Server $7k
4. 1u dell machines for web serving $1.5k ea.
5. Load balancer $3k
You need affordable bandwidth and sever colocation.I am not sure about in Ohio, but I utilize calpop.com with a half-rack and 10mbps bandwidth but they are in California.
1. Web Cache Server $3k
2. SAN $4k
3. A nice Database Server $7k
4. 1u dell machines for web serving $1.5k ea.
5. Load balancer $3k
You need affordable bandwidth and sever colocation.I am not sure about in Ohio, but I utilize calpop.com with a half-rack and 10mbps bandwidth but they are in California.
Ever heard of Amazon Web Services?
Sure but if you are transfering terabytes of data around I am not sure if that is the right system to use. Better to have a dedicated line and a SAN.
But then again I live 10 years behind the times. One day I will stop using font tags, center tags, tables, Windows 2000, and ASP 3.0. But then again no need to change what works.
But then again I live 10 years behind the times. One day I will stop using font tags, center tags, tables, Windows 2000, and ASP 3.0. But then again no need to change what works.
The closest model for server usage in my opinion would be Pownce or Facebook. The product will be storing user submitted web content including photos, audio, and URLs.
I found an article that tries to estimate Facebook's server costs. These numbers seemed somewhat high to me, however: http://fishtrain.com/2007/11/07/facebook-valuation/
Are there any online resources for estimating server capacity and cost? Any educated guesses for the startup to use?
Thank you!