Our current AWS balance runs into about $600 a month for the main site, or something like $6k-$8k annually. This is of course fine for us to pay, given that our staff costs are much higher, but I would of course be a bit hesitant to pay this much for hosting a blog. My guess is to hit your targets, you could maybe pay half of that, so about $3-$5k annually.
To give some perspective on what someone might expect to need for a personal blog, a minimum virtual private server (VPS) runs about five dollars a month, and can easily handle 20k qph / 2k qpm if you bake your site. That’s how my site is configured, and I have no problem when one of my posts hits the front page of HN.
(To be fair, my blog is far simpler than LW, entirely a hobby project, and being light on resource usage is an explicit goal)
This number is on the money for me actually. With the traffic above (5k visitors day average plus front page HN + front page of some mid-sized subreddit spikes… which end up in the low x0,000k/hr)… I pay a grand total of ~30$/month (CDN included), but I use the same machine to run coordination scripts for my GPU machines and to host friend wordpress blogs.
Then again, I optimized the website quite a bit, and the comment+auth system (remark42) is also a monster in terms of minimalism and caching.
To give some perspective on what someone might expect to need for a personal blog, a minimum virtual private server (VPS) runs about five dollars a month, and can easily handle 20k qph / 2k qpm if you bake your site. That’s how my site is configured, and I have no problem when one of my posts hits the front page of HN.
(To be fair, my blog is far simpler than LW, entirely a hobby project, and being light on resource usage is an explicit goal)
This number is on the money for me actually. With the traffic above (5k visitors day average plus front page HN + front page of some mid-sized subreddit spikes… which end up in the low x0,000k/hr)… I pay a grand total of ~30$/month (CDN included), but I use the same machine to run coordination scripts for my GPU machines and to host friend wordpress blogs.
Then again, I optimized the website quite a bit, and the comment+auth system (remark42) is also a monster in terms of minimalism and caching.