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by japhyr 5142 days ago
Do you mind sharing a little of your hosting details? How are you hosting it? How much traffic/ how many users do you think you can manage at this hosting level?

I am asking because I expect hosting costs to be my most expensive item while in the MVP stage, and I don't have a lot of cash to throw at my project.
1 comments
devtestapp 5142 days ago
I'm hosting it on linode, using 2 vps instances at the moment, one for the site and another isolated instance to run the code. The code running VPS is disposable so I can boot up new ones / restore from a snapshot if there are any problems with it.

With this setup, I've tested 200 concurrent users with no major problems, and would support easily tens of thousands of hits per day.

Having too many users is a problem I would love to have!

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japhyr 5142 days ago
Thanks for the specifics. It's been really hard for me to sort out whether to go with a VPS, or something like heroku. Heroku is appealing but seems to get expensive quickly. VPS has a bit higher learning curve for me, but might be worthwhile. Am I correct in understanding your hosting cost to be about $40/ month until you gain a significant number of users?

Good luck, and I hope you end up with a scaling problem to solve.

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devtestapp 5142 days ago
I was really close to going with Heroku, I decided not to as I wanted full customisation options and I've been hosting rails apps for a long time and know what I'm doing.

If you're inexperienced in server administration, go with Heroku I'd say. It's a great service and works really well and if you do get a load of traffic, it's really easy to scale up. There's a guide here to using unicorn to get 4X the performance out of it:

http://blog.railsonfire.com/2012/05/06/Unicorn-on-Heroku.htm...

You're correct in saying $40 per month for hosting until I gain more users. If someone would sign up to my "pro" plan I'd be breaking even :)

However I don't think that even if it does take off it will be as profitable as it sounds. It seems customer acquisition is going to be my biggest problem and so I'll probably end up spending lots on adwords and other promotional avenues.

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luxpir 5141 days ago
It was good to meet via the chat box on your site. I've spent a little more than you, but not a great deal. Thanks for the design tips - much needed!

That marketing plan I sent you covers only the basics, but perhaps with enough consistent effort the basics might be enough to drive initial traffic.

As I said, if there's anything I can do, let me know.

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