Ask HN: How much do social networks spend on hosting and storage per user?
6 comments
Your first cost saving is avoid AWS unless you want to bankrupt yourself. They're great for backups but bandwidth costs will kill you.
That might or might not be true, and can change either way. Don't build for AWS only, but as a startup outsourcing all those details to AWS saves you the effort of figuring them out. When you are facebook scale you will have a whole department to doing what AWS does, but when you only have two users putting dedicated redundant computers in a datacenter is more expensive than AWS even before you get into the admin costs.
I witnessed that myself, but what alternatives exist for a company that is concerned about security, long term support, and general dependability ? I don't see my managers allowing me to use a small company without a significant plan of record
Facebook won't allow numbers to be given, but if you read between the lines of various CppCon videos a 0.1% speedup in some of their core algorithms can make the costs go down by several hundred thousand dollars a year. A lot of that is the power bill because they don't need to run the AC is much to keep the data centers cool. (they also need to buy less computers, and less air conditioners to keep them cool, and eventually more building to keep the computers in)
You can’t answer this question without both a technical design and projected user behavior/access patterns. And I don’t think you’re going to get data on this from these platforms themselves. Unfortunately, this question is impossible to answer in this format. If you want to build a “clone”, first design it and then estimate the costs of that design.
Probably better off using a service like https://bunny.net for cdn and storage.
I know that these companies garner tremendous value from this data and user engagement, and view these offerings as profitable, but I’ve never seen details about what the server costs of an Instagram power user might be (both in the unlikely scenario of paying market price for cloud storage, and in the per-user cost of running replicated data centers)
So my question is: if I put down a credit card in AWS, started up an Instagram clone, and had thousands of power users uploading images and videos daily, how much would I likely be paying per user?
As a follow up, what would be some of my first cost-saving and mitigation strategies?