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by jarebear6expepj 1180 days ago
> Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps?

I don't know... from what I've used of Python it is pretty memory heavy and doesn't do well left alone unsupervised. I could be wrong but that was my experience trying various Py web frameworks.

My app servers were all $5 VPS with only nginx, PHP/php-fpm, and Memcached. PHP was cached, nginx assets were cached, and data was cached in RAM with Memcached which was updated from remote DB server on cache expire.

I would then stack as many of those behind a load balancer as needed (nginx as reverse proxy basically) and scaled up to serving 100's of terabytes of data monthly and billions of page views.

So while it was "$5 VPS" it was really a small cloud of them behind another $5 vps as a load balancer with a $25 database server supporting the data. Still cheaper than Amazon for equivalent loads.
2 comments
anyfactor 1180 days ago
Thank you very much. The only thing I can think of while reading your comment was, "wow this is elegant."

Have you consideres productize/templatize this stack and selling some kind license/supporting deal? Although a more marketable solution will be a redis + node based stack.

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jarebear6expepj 1180 days ago
> "wow this is elegant." > Have you consideres productize/templatize this stack and selling some kind > license/supporting deal

uhhh it's really just a basic install of freebsd and a bunch of shell scripts! As far as I'm concerned anyone with a bit of time could google fu themselves in to production.

I am always happy to, and have, contracted to build similar setups for other people for CDN delivery, etc, but that was just another day in the life of a sysadmin basically.

Email in profile if you have any other questions.

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anyfactor 1179 days ago
Thank you very much for the inspiration. I appreciate your insights.
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batmaniam 1180 days ago
Did you use a dedicated database from the start of your project? Or did you use a simpler one like sqlite and then scaled up to your current architecture when you got more users/load to your site?
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jarebear6expepj 1179 days ago
I started with MySQL from the beginning because it is the DB engine I knew.

Over the years I have played with sqlite and postgress. I keep coming back to Mariadb for my web apps.

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