Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


Server for Mini Facebook.
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

Server for Mini Facebook.

edited December 2015 in Help

First time on "any" chat forum.

We found a spiffy network builder from peepso.com for WordPress that we'd like to use to build a network, but are a bit scared about the network getting too popular and having run-away server costs. Our main business (which will take public via an IPO) is a mobile dating app.

We are also building a companion lifestyle destination web site (similar to the Thrillist.com) to drive traffic to the dating app download. We have a pretty good idea how much those will cost and how to monetize. But as I mentioned, we have no clue what's involved in running a social network.

We are bootstrapping and all of our Santa helpers (lawyers, accountants, PR, etc) are working for shares in the company. Our goal is to keep outgoing cash flow low - to help the stock go high.

We read these two articles, but it's way above our paygrade. And only added to our fears.
**
The Key to Snapchat’s Profitability: It’s Dirt Cheap to Run.**
http://www.wired.com/2014/01/secret-snapchats-monetization-success-will-surprise/

Service storage and bandwidth cost calculator.
http://www.vijayp.ca/blog/2014/01/service-storage-and-bandwidth-cost-calculator/

Specifically we are wondering what it would cost (monthly server cost) to have 10,000 members, 100,000 members and/or 1 million members.

I guess the first step would be to determine how much data a single "average" member would consume by chatting, messaging and posting photos (which we could limit to five - if that creates a bandwidth issue). Then we can multiply out and come up with a budget.

Then we'll need to learn about servers - dedicated or cloud etc. We've looked at Codero and OneProvider and can't make heads or tails.

The Codero people we talked to wanted to know what our budget was - and I replied "that's why we're calling you LOL."

**
This article drew us into Cordero dedicated vs AWS.**
http://www.codero.com/blog/dont-believe-the-hype-dedicated-hosting-is-3x-cheaper-than-amazon-web-services-aws/

Anyway, any tips would be much appreciated. We will do something small on one of the KickStarter and SeedInvest type sites to let smaller investors participate.

Comments

  • netomxnetomx Moderator, Veteran

    Low price? Start,with Delimiter.

  • Why is this in reviews?

    Also KS/SYS/OVH will be your best bet for a lot of power on a budget. AWS will rape you.

  • What should it be in ? General ?

  • Moved to help

    Thanked by 1netomx
  • Avoid resellers who add no support to your servers.

    rolandrickperry said: Anyway, any tips would be much appreciated.

  • edited December 2015

    Firstly, do not go with AWS. It's ridiculously overpriced. Use dedicated servers.

    Some initial things to think about:

    Are your users located far away, or are all in a geographic location? Both need different server setups. For example, a user who uploads a picture in moscow while the network spans through the whole europe. Does the picture get served from the moscow server, or does it get replicated via geo-replication to the server that another user views at? Or is all of the data just simply served from one location?

    You can easily get redundancy/HA with server setups today. What you will need to decide on is how much HA you will actually need. Should you have one storage replica for each picture (i.e. can handle 1 server failure), or multiple. Take a look at HAProxy, GlusterFS/Ceph Replica Sets, and Percona XtraDB Cluster/Galera.

    Scaling out is cheaper than scaling up. For initial services, buy just a few servers for the setup, and design it so that you can simply add more servers to increase the amount of storage/computing power/etc. There is no need to pay for servers you don't use. If your managing a large amount of servers, consider using a configuration management system like salt/chef/puppet/ansible.

    That being said, snapchat has cheap infrastructure costs simply because metadata does not need redundancy. Using a "plugin" for wordpress instead of something like phpfox makes it harder for custom database setups to produce this.

  • Thanks Ninja, including phpfox tip.

  • @rolandrickperry said:
    Thanks Ninja, including phpfox tip.

    if your considering using another framework, might as well have a look at these as well:

    • elgg
    • dophin
    • jomsocial (joomla)
    • communitybuilder (joomla)
    • e-friends
    • dzoic handshakes

    Some might not be suitable, or not scalable enough, these are just off the top of my head

    Thanked by 1rolandrickperry
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    Given the true likely size of your social network, shared hosting would probably suffice.

  • @raindog308 said:
    Given the true likely size of your social network, shared hosting would probably suffice.

    Did you not see his post. They are going to IPO bruh. :P

    Thanked by 1raindog308
  • I liked Dolphin Ninja (thanks) and just found moosocial at Capterra. Insane live demo. It actually looked better than Facebook.

    But back to potential server costs, our "feeder" site, a live streaming video mobile app got 1 million downloads in its first nine months. Unfortunately this was before sufficient funding and before monetization and now the stock is being punished. I don't want a repeat since the social network would be built to drive traffic to our mobile app, not eat it alive.

  • try OVH/sys ?
    if this for streaming videos then leaseweb maybe ?

  • edited December 2015

    @rolandrickperry said:
    I liked Dolphin Ninja (thanks) and just found moosocial at Capterra. Insane live demo. It actually looked better than Facebook.

    But back to potential server costs, our "feeder" site, a live streaming video mobile app got 1 million downloads in its first nine months. Unfortunately this was before sufficient funding and before monetization and now the stock is being punished. I don't want a repeat since the social network would be built to drive traffic to our mobile app, not eat it alive.

    This is exactly what devops/docker is for. You start with a few servers, and monitor capacity. Then you add additional servers to the setup to spread the load. With coreos/fleetctl, adding a new server is easy as installing coreos, adding it to the cluster, and poking at fleetctl to spin up docker containers on the new VM.

    Basically, not having the same thing hapenning comes down to planning ahead and preparing to scale. It doesnt matter if the provider can get you a server. If they can, you now have a server that takes you a 10h to get running while ironing out bugs that pop up. In today's world, being down for 5h because your storage grid is full and it takes 10h to add a new server while everything is being filled up will bring the clients hammering on your door.

    Servers are quite cheap these days, so any decent provider should do. There are a lot of good providers out there and a lot have been mentioned in this thread that are at a reasonable price while providing excellent service. You will want to talk to them about what stocks they have of servers, their deployment times, SLA, on hands pricing, dedicated bandwidth/etc. Do some calculations as well, see if its cheaper to Colo and expand to quarter/half/etc cab. I don't work in a data center, but someone like @MarkTurner should be able to provide you with more info on what a data center will require to do such a setup

    As per storing photos, you can always imagick them into a lossy smaller format before storing on your servers to calculate how much storage you are going to use.

    PS: my fingers are way too large for this screen. Pls excusev typos.

    Thanked by 2MarkTurner vimalware
  • Thanks again, Wall Street is a lot easier than tech street.

  • edited December 2015

    @rolandrickperry said:
    Thanks again, Wall Street is a lot easier than tech street.

    A bit, yes.

    The best thing to do now is likely hire a consultant/infrastructure planner to design the infrastructure to your requirements.

    In my view, management doesn't need to know the specific details on how such a site will run (i.e. software/hardware/etc). What they will need to know instead is what issues the setup can have (i.e. 3 server loss = 10% of photos lost/etc), how much money it takes to run the site per person, or how many users the current site can handle/etc.

    Those are design decisions that management should be aware of and have control over (i.e. feeding more money means 5 server loss = 10% of photos lost/etc).

  • @rolandrickperry said:
    Thanks again, Wall Street is a lot easier than tech street.

    What's your Wall St experience? Please, do tell.

    Thanked by 1GCat
Sign In or Register to comment.