[zpe]

A few years ago my side project (and my second ever ruby/rails project) unexpectedly became quite popular.

Last couple of years it's been doing about 50,000 (user facing) api requests per second during high load, with almost a million concurrent users. It's 99% rails.

We (me and a second guy) have ran this system on ~10 (cheap) servers, five of which run the actual rails app. The rails app has probably been the easiest component to scale for us. We obviously do some caching - but it's not like our database could live without that caching anyways.

And even though we have been an ad-financed bootstrapped company the hosting/hw costs has been very manageable. There are probably many valid reasons to chose something else than rails, but I wanted to share my experience w.r.t. making it work for our non-SAS needs.

[zer00eyz]

I love stories like this, as they can be Illuminating, and I'm curious for more answers.

1. profitable? Is it your day job or Side job or a "lifestyle business", Pays for my beer...

2. I would love a number next to cheap ($5? $20)

3. Where are you located, and is that the market your serving.

Because I live around Silicon Valley, my perception of what your saying might be really different from what it actually is... is cheep $20 a month, or is it $5?

[zpe]

1. Employing twenty people and making a profit.

2. Per app server we paid less than the cost of a macbook pro. Between 0.001 and 0.0015 USD in hardware costs per thousand ad views, which makes it irrelevant to the company bottom line.

3. Europe, global-ish market.