HACKER Q&A
📣 delamain

How much do you spend on hosting? Share traffic/user metrics


I’m curious about the different hosting costs and traffic levels people are experiencing for their projects. Hosting options vary widely, from shared hosting plans to VPS, dedicated servers, and cloud-based solutions like AWS, GCP, and Azure. I’m particularly interested in understanding the cost-to-traffic/user ratio across different setups.


  👤 1ilit Accepted Answer ✓
I have a project that has the frontend hosted on Vercel and a small simple service on Render both on the free plans. Vercel analytics is off at the moment because I've hit the limit for the free plan, but as of last week we got 1600-1700 unique visitors daily on average. In the last 30 days, my deployment has had 1.6 million edge requests and consumed about 146GB for fast data transfer. You can probably get away with the free plans for a moderate amount of traffic and then scale as needed.

👤 bravetraveler
Nothing I personally host gets that much traffic. I'm extremely capable of writing the automation to do things one would pay for with a cloud. I've worked on/built three at this point.

I stick with dedicated or VPS. Shared hosting ties my hands too much and clouds do everything they can to get you hooked.

Generally speaking, the more control you have, the more you may influence capacity/scaling. The cost/performance/reliability triangle applies. Clouds offer no value to me.


👤 ipaddr
22. 3 digitalocean 5 dollar instances and + backup storage. 2 vultr 2.50 instances and 4 free oracle boxes.

I could move everything to Oracle and pay nothing but I would rather pay digitalocean and know it won't be shutdown one day.


👤 nicbou
I get thousands of visitors a day on a 6€/month VPS. It's just a static website so it could be completely free. I just need the VPS for the dynamic bits. It has been rock solid.