Yeah, I can see that. If it's no secret, how much RAM you would've needed to run Hubski RAM-side full-time at the moment and how big is an average post? You say "HDD", and I immediately think of SSD. It's no RAM, but it's much faster nevertheless. More expensive, too. Have you considered SSD? I do see that it's better to use faster software than buy faster hardware, but still. Would using SSD instead of HDD make that big of a difference, even? Do you see any of the possible programmatical constructions you've mentioned being used as a base for Hubski some time later?It isn't slow when loaded in RAM. But we don't want to keep it loaded in RAM, because paying for hosting with a lot of RAM is more expensive.
We currently pay for a VM with 16G of RAM. The app is currently using 2.5G. In the past it's used over 8G, so we feel the need for at least 16. We are running Hubski with everything in RAM at the moment. I've made a few small tables load dynamically, but +95% of our data, all publications (posts and comments) are still loaded into RAM on startup. Again, that's one of the things I'm working on fixing, and one of the primary motivations of moving to SQL. Moving to SQL doesn't get things out of RAM automatically. We still have to do additional refactoring to make things load as-needed from the HDD. I said 'HDD', but our host uses entirely SSDs, so we get that for free. Probably not. One of these days I'll probably spend a weekend configuring Wordpress to look like Hubski, and see what it looks like. But, we want an API anyway: the most likely scenario is, once all data is in SQL, creating an API that serves all data needed by every page on hubski.com, and then "rewriting" hubski.com as a static html page that queries the API, and the "main app" goes away.Do you see any of the possible programmatical constructions you've mentioned being used as a base for Hubski some time later?
Oh, so you rent it. I thought you were hosting it on your own equipment. 2 x 8 GB is less than $100 on Amazon. I'm sure it's increased by the electricity costs but not so much as to justify outsourcing it (though I have no idea whether it's true in the US). Why not set up your own server?
There's more than just the cost of the RAM to factor in here. You would of course need an entire server capable of hosting Hubski, but even that isn't the expensive part. When you pay for a host, you're doing more than just renting hardware (though of course that's part of it). For Hubski to get the same quality of service on their own hardware as they do from a source they would need: - The hardware itself -Space to store the hardware - High speed internet, which probably means you want that space to be in a datacenter - Someone to be around all the time to guarantee the electricity stays on & the hardware is fixed if anything goes wrong I don't think you could do all of that yourself for Hubski's funding goal of 2.4k / year. Even then, it would be hard to beat the reliability & flexibility of using a hosted server. If Hubski wanted to upgrade their server, they'd have to do it for each piece of the puzzle. You have to get to a massive scale before you even hit the break even point of maintaining your own hardware - even then some companies (Netflix) still opt to use hosted providers.
Yes, we don't host ourselves. Bandwidth is the big cost, not electricity. Almost all ISPs here forbid 'servers' on residential connections (though many don't strictly enforce it, unless the traffic is noticeable). It'd be at least $100-150/month, much more than hosting should be.