Comment by jampekka
7 hours ago
$15 is not exactly zero, is it? If you don't need more than 1GB, why pay anything for more than 1GB?
I recall running LAMP stacks on something like 128MB about 20 years ago and not really having problems with memory. Most current website backends are not really much more complicated than they were back then if you don't haul in bloat.
It is. With 10k MRR it represents 0.15% of the revenue. Having the whole backend costing that much for a company selling web apps is like it’s costing zero.
You probably don't make 10k MMR on day one. If you make many small apps, it can make sense to learn how to run things lean to have 4x longer runway per app.
Overspending for the sake of overspending is not smart in life or business.
Saving 15 USD on 10k+ USD MMR is ridiculous.
Saving 15 USD on 0 USD MMR while still building the business is priceless. Virtually infinite runway.
Given how much revenue depends on the experience of a web app and loading times, I’d be happy to pay 100$ a month on that revenue if I don’t have to sacrifice a second of additional loading time no matter how clever I was optimizing it.
That 1 second of loading time probably has more to do with heavy frontends and third-party scripts, than the backend server's capacity.
$100 is peanuts to most businesses, of course. But even so, I'd rather spend it on fixing an actual bottleneck.
Not all businesses depend on milliseconds being shaved off the loading times
For example: Ticketmaster makes a ton of money and their site is complete dogshit.
There’s a happy medium and $5 for 1GB RAM just isn’t it.
Be sure to inform the author of the article who is currently making money on his 1GB VPS that he hasn’t found a happy medium
Not a very strong argument now is it?
if the project already has positive revenue then arguably the ability to capture new users is worth a lot, which requires acceptable performance even when a big traffic surge is happening (like a HN hug of attention)
if the scalability is in the number of "zero cost" projects to start, then 5 vs 15 is a 3x factor.