Much appreciated my friend. I honestly didn't opt for the cheapest server because I wanted it to run well. I don't want to constantly fight for resources or worry about it. It was supposed to be fast and be able to handle traffic well.
And it is. It's not falling apart from the HN traffic and it has a lot of head room. Plus. It's doing 400k messages a day already easily.
Anyway. Thank you so much for your generosity. I am humbled and thankful for your support.
I think its because this is a hobby project and for a lot of people the cheaper a hobby project is the more they can keep running before the money runs out. It's also that for some people optimizing costs and making things run on as few resources as possible is fun.
But if you don't find it fun spending time performance optimizing to the extreme, and can afford it, then there's nothing quite like massively over-provisioning hardware. It makes a lot of performance and reliability problems go away.
Probably some truth to all you said. I spend way more money on my hobbies.
For this creator, his hobby is well into the realm of "could productize some component", even if just creating derivatives of this for some commercial purpose. I'd much rather spend time on that than the optimization part. My thought is HN has skewed more technical than entrepreneur over the years and the folks who are into the optimizations are more vocal in the thread. Could also just be the cohort of HN that was attracted to this article. "Send push notifications to your phone" sounds pretty technical. Or, the tech recession is changing mood about money and I'm not in tech.
I appreciate the dogged pursuit of efficiency, but spending a lot of time optimizing for the current scale and getting costs from $24 per month to $10 per month (or whatever) is likely wasted time if this grows significantly. You have to be able to recognize there’s a lower bound where your costs are low enough it doesn’t matter and even saving 75% isn’t worth thr effort. The author has obviously drawn that line somewhere above $24 per month and that’s perfectly reasonable.
That's a good point. I guess many of us were suggesting cheaper VPS because we assumed this is a new project, just launched. (Most inexperienced developers / start-ups tend to over provision). With current hosting technologies, it is quite easy to scale with need, with minimum downtime, so it makes sense to start with the minimum server requirement and then go for a powerful server as required. This give you valuable data on the bottlenecks (where you can do future optimizations), as you scale, while you temporarily fix the issue with more money (by requisitioning better servers) as you work out the cost-benefit analysis (as you did) of spending money on optimising vs server upgrade.
