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Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

The primary bottleneck for most startups isn't money, it's time.

Also for most startups (assuming you're not doing something CPU/bandwidth heavy) the actual cost of hosting is going to be a relatively small part of the budget. If your burn rate is a million dollars, reducing 10k of hosting costs to 1k isn't really worth the effort.

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Kind of depends

There's the "two guys in a dorm eating ramen" and there's the YC backed "startup" that already has a couple of hires

So if your monthly budget is of hundreds of dollars, using a VPS instead of Heroku makes sense

Let say your average http request takes 200ms to serve, then with 5 heroku worker dynos you can serve about 10 million requests a day which should comfortably cover the requirements of most startups.

How much do those dynos cost ? - $143/month. That's less than three hours salary for a developer.

If your monthly budget is hundreds of dollars I'm guessing your traffic is low enough you can just use the free tiers of heroku, appfog, etc.

Well the point of all this is that simple scaling math like that doesn't add up because of the queuing latency introduced by heroku's routing layer. But still at that scale your point is valid.

Yes, but there's a step before

$143 is money that is missed by a college student, for example.

Better go with something cheaper or the free tiers of Heroku, AWS, etc

You're probably still developing the system, or having only a small amount of requests.

10,000,000 requests each day are 115 requests per second. I don't follow your math here with a 200ms CPU time per request.

Heroku customers don't typically do math when they do capacity planning. That's part of the Operations toolchest they're buying. They just up/down dynos.

115/30 is almost 4, which is almost 5; 5*200ms = 1 second;

I guess he meant 10M/mo, not 10M/day.

Yes, my mistake.

And the real problem is the non-uniformity of the load. If your 10M/mo request start concentrating around weekends, you've got a problem... Except you haven't, as your infrastructure is elastic, and this is the real bonus.

Also, I'd be very afraid to get accidentally hit by HN traffic if I'd host my own server.

Money can buy time in various forms. I think PaaS is one abstraction level too much to remain flexible and efficient as you grow.

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