You're right, page count is not the best metric. Instead you can just look up the hosting costs in their yearly report and find out it's a pittance compared to all their other spending and declining in relation.
I don't know much about wikipedia or WMF but the spending growth in that table is not exponential. And surely the correct way to measure the scale of the service provided is page views rather than number of pages.
> Our single <$5,000 box handles about 4M pageviews per day without moving the cpu above 5% steady state. That's the sort of baseline I'm used to from the Microsoft stack
You realize how meaningless a statement like this is, right? You just can't go around talking about "pageviews" as if they were some uniform measure of workload.
This is a great way of explaining it. I've often wondered why such claims have a bit of a cringe factor to them, and you nailed the reason why. Great distinction b/w nebulous claims and hard numbers. (Although I would exclude page load time which tends to be just a metric football in many companies.)
It's definitely too low, and we're tweaking it. Patrick McKenzie (patio11) had some great things to say on this topic recently[1].
We have no plans to build our own platform. Right now Shogun helps people to build pages, but not measure or improve their performance. These are areas we're interested in exploring.
I hate such titles with a passion. I wonder if people will ever realize that "X monthly users" means absolutely nothing. That's by far the most useless metric people have come up with. This is the exact equivalent of "costs of living healthy":
1. How do you define "healthy".
2. Genetic abilities.
3. Overall health.
4. Eating habits.
5. Your geographical location.
6. Your daily routine
.....
X^60000. {Factor number X^60000}
There are an infinite amount of buttons and dials that will determine how much "X monthly users" will set you back. Back in 2011 I used to own a blog that had something along the lines of 25k daily visitors. My annual bill was less than 100 bucks, domain included. And keep in mind that this was way before AWS, GCP and Azure came into the picture and costs were much higher than they are now. But I had spent months investigating the cheapest and most efficient ways to cut down costs. And it's the same with cloud providers - they can be brutally expensive or dirt cheap for the exact same thing if you don't take your time to see which and what is the best solution for your use case.
Regardless, it seems like they managed quite okay with 65x less staff. I guess doing image/video hosting and running a mobile app drastically increased their cloud cost.
I'm not convinced that such a number could be calculated in such a way that wouldn't be utterly meaningless to all but the biggest nerds.
The resources a 'web app' 'should' use is highly context dependent. As a web developer, I can determine some of that context, as I know what functionality is resource intensive. I don't think that you can distill that down in any useful way.
It isn't even true there. This is one of the common misconceptions that show up in blogs. There's no such thing as a minimum metric for an A - SaaS or otherwise.
My first thought is that that figure seems somewhat low for an established company with 750k users (even if a significant proportion are not paying customers).
It also seems strange they dont know their Traffic Numbers.
>Note that 80TB is the number they tried to sell us, I don’t know if it is accurate since they removed all our access to historical analytics.
I mean you dont need accurate Data but surely most would know by heart their traffic in rough figures? Or am I the old dog where every new Web Dev are so used to Cloud and Serverless they have no idea what they are using?
FWIW your off the cuff estimate for AmaGooBookSoft servers is off by an order of magnitude (possibly 2 orders if you're talking about all 4 companies combined).
5 million is not a lot, especially if you're just counting the number of users in your DB. Something like MAUs would be a better metric, but would still include things like Steam.
Except those numbers are…wrong? I mean, they’re not far off, but they’re not actually right either. You should probably never trust ChatGPT outright with facts.
I always get the feeling that I am not good with big numbers.
Like a public library spending USD 50k+ per month(?) to Oracle seems outrageous to me but I guess it isn't so outrageous given the annual budget is over USD 100M?
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