Falling from the Sky 2020 Self-Hosting Still Pays

[Patrick Kennedy]

In this article, we update our "Falling from the Sky" series where we break down our self-hosting costs on AWS versus using colocation.

The post Falling from the Sky 2020 Self-Hosting Still Pays appeared first on ServeTheHome.

Continue reading...

 

[BoredSysadmin]

@Patrick - Could you save on data transfer/bandwidth charges if you would use a CDN, like Cloudflare?

 

[amalurk]

Fun article but I find it hard to believe you need anywhere near the cost of equipment to run this site.

I know nothing about Xenforo but does it have an effective page cache? Most big threads are much greater than 90% views versus replies and even adding in some edits and likes it is still going to be a good hit ratio on a cache. Can Xenforo backend talk to a page cache to purge individual urls when they are updated without dumping the cache for all? Lots of CMS can do it or have plugins that can. Maybe not though.

 

[Patrick]

First off, this was an extremely tardy response to @PigLover who said many quarters ago that he likes this kind of content.

@BoredSysadmin we were focused on AWS. CloudFront does not make a big difference in terms of cost. Compared to colo bandwidth, CDNs are better in many ways due to geographic dispersion, but it would cost more since it is an adder versus what we have now.

@amalurk you are correct here. A lot of the hardware is being used for redundancy/ burst capacity. I am a bigger fan of having midrange core count nodes with 192-256GB of RAM than having 1-2 bigger machines. One of the biggest lessons learned through years of colocation has been managing simplicity with capacity. Too simple, and sometimes you run out of capacity. Too complex and things break.

XenForo, WP, and other bits we run to make the site work we effectively place data where it is best suited.

 

[kapone]

Fun article but I find it hard to believe you need anywhere near the cost of equipment to run this site.

I know nothing about Xenforo but does it have an effective page cache? Most big threads are much greater than 90% views versus replies and even adding in some edits and likes it is still going to be a good hit ratio on a cache. Can Xenforo backend talk to a page cache to purge individual urls when they are updated without dumping the cache for all? Lots of CMS can do it or have plugins that can. Maybe not though.

You'll be surprised.

@Patrick - I'm with you. I do tend to focus on simplicity though. To me, hardware cost is marginal, as long as the revenue justifies it. I'd throw (even) virtualization out the window and run bare metal, with more nodes/servers, if it's easier to maintain.

 

[awedio]

@Patrick Are all your co-lo servers running on Proxmox?
What "GUI'd app" is used to manage all the servers?

 

[BoredSysadmin]

@BoredSysadmin we were focused on AWS. CloudFront does not make a big difference in terms of cost. Compared to colo bandwidth, CDNs are better in many ways due to geographic dispersion, but it would cost more since it is an adder versus what we have now.

I wasn't 100% clear I guess. My question goes now what you hosting the site/forums/media on your own servers/colo, wont use 3rd party CDN to be cutting costs on bandwidth?

CDN Calculator - CDNCalc - CDNPerf

Calculate the monthly pricing of all CDN providers and find the cheapest CDN that offers best performance and uptime

www.cdnperf.com

 

[MiniKnight]

Great article. Brings me back to classic STH.

@BoredSysadmin I think their cost for bandwidth in colo is already factored in so CDN doesn't help with cost but maybe performance.

 

[T_Minus]

I wasn't 100% clear I guess. My question goes now what you hosting the site/forums/media on your own servers/colo, wont use 3rd party CDN to be cutting costs on bandwidth?

CDN Calculator - CDNCalc - CDNPerf

Calculate the monthly pricing of all CDN providers and find the cheapest CDN that offers best performance and uptime

www.cdnperf.com

A CDN cost > $ in general than bandwidth, and much more than using what you already have\included in existing cost.


In my experience even on a small forum doing 500-1000 unnique\visitors\day XF is a hog for resources. I upgraded another VB forum recently, and they're constantly hitting CPU limit with 4C and also run 2GB\RAM 24\7, these are cores that go to 3.xGhz too. Not to happy about the upgrade and then resource hit! @Patrick have you done anything to mitigate XF resource utilization via plugin or ?

 

[Patrick]

Exactly right on the CDN side.

@T_Minus just throwing hardware at it. Optane for the db works great.

 

[Jeggs101]

I love these articles. STH is way faster than anandtech and toms
AT GTmetrix Performance Report
STH GTmetrix Performance Report

 

[Stephan]

@Patrick Any circa ETA on that AMD Milan piece? ;-)

Also in the videos please speak more slowly, like 30%. And why not try some speech improvement tricks that TV anchors use. I've seen an anchor stuff a 2 inch diameter lollipop candy into their mouth and read a piece out loud with that in the mouth. Of course this sounded funny and you might think wth. But apparently the human brain tries to compensate. Next try without the lolli, speech was markedly cleared up and improved. There are probably 50 youtube videos talking about such techniques.

 

[T_Minus]

@Stephan it actually sounds fine if you slow down to .75 I just tested this

Personally I don't like watching\"listening" to videos so his speed is awesome for me to zoom through, grab info, then zoom through.
However, I mostly just read to finish quicker anyway lol

I'm curious about the voice improvements from a personal angle as I am doing audio\video myself for clients and projects now too. Do you have any courses you suggest or blogs to read up on improving this?

 

[Stephan]

Do you have any courses you suggest or blogs to read up on improving this?

Sadly no, I don't, all I had to contribute was this anecdote and my surprise about its effectiveness. A quick search revealed this: How to Enunciate Instead of sugar candy they recommend a pencil sideways. I'd suggest a pure wooden one, a painted one might give off unhealthy molecules when exposed to saliva...

 

[BoredSysadmin]

I'm curious about the voice improvements from a personal angle as I am doing audio\video myself for clients and projects now too. Do you have any courses you suggest or blogs to read up on improving this?

Are you asking about audio reproductions and improving speech intelligibility? (aka understanding spoken words played thru speakers)

 

[Evan]

I love to see the comparisons and agree generally. For sure in the context of STH it makes sense to self host.
Of course as you point out many reasons for outsourcing the workload as well especially for small installs with more limited internal IT knowledge.

 

[Patrick]

I think the stranger thing is that people still assume that all we do is self-host. I look at this as more of a component of what we do.

@Stephan This is speaking slowly for me! I have heard some people speed me up, others slow me down in the YT playback.

When we edited much less tightly, we got feedback that the pace was way too slow and I needed to speak faster. Right now we have pretty tight edits even for short pauses and I am trying to speak more quickly. I think this is a style thing, but the enunciation bit is also good feedback. I will work on this.