Understanding Cost for running a community website
Hi Friends,
I am in the process of building a community centered website where I will be hosting informational articles and other resources to help the users with a single topic related. Consider it similar to Indie hackers.
I am trying to understand the cost side of such a site from an infrastructure point of view.
I will be looking to leverage Algolia for search and implementing the generic post, comment and like features.
Would love to get some insights on how to plan for this.
Many thanks in advance
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It really depends on your choices. For me, a site like that would run on a VPS for $5/month, plus a few cents a month for emails until it had hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors. But, I have to set up everything and act as my own sys admin.
Many others who are used to building for the US B2B will spend 10 times as much for a site that goes down the first time it hits the front page of HN or similar.
Still others build sites that will never crumple under traffic but will cost them tens of thousands of dollars in cloud fees if they get sudden traction.
There are tradeoffs.
Thanks a bunch for the response. Which VPS service are you using? AWS/Google/Microsoft? Any recos there or are they pretty equivalent?
Also - in terms of breakdown between
Is there any other infra cost that is to be considered?
I believe I have only listed hosting and operational costs up here - But should I consider data manipulation (SQL server), visualisation costs etc?
Just trying to wrap my head around the flow
Would appreciate any inputs
I'm using Digital Ocean. Linode would be another similar option. For Agolia, check out their pricing page!
Until your app is large, you don't need a separate DB server. You can just run the DB on the VPS. Not sure what you're referring to about "visualisation costs".
start as cheap as you can. scale from there. fig ure out how to use the free versions of stuff and then add as you need. don't over-engineer these first moments.
Agree with your thought process.
Do you have any recommendations from your experience? Which services worked best for you?
It seems that a lot of the services are on the pay as you go model anyways..
But still open to some good suggestions / lessons learned/ what to go for and what to avoid.
Thanks again
digital ocean is someone we're using even today.
Hey @minimoe, do check out my product habitate.io. White labelled SEO friendly community platform.
We can talk, and if you like what we working on, I will do my best on pricing. We are powering 15 plus communities, engaging 1500 users every week.
There's a free tier plan to get started with.
Thank you so much. I will check it out