justinclift a year ago

Wow. ~US$40k/mo running costs, with about US$5k/mo for server hosting:

https://lichess.org/costs

It looks like the servers are individually managed via OVH or similar, rather than running their own gear in co-location or similar. Wonder why?

  • tormeh a year ago

    Easy: If something is wrong with the physical gear it's OVH's problem rather than theirs. It also means no one has to ever go to the data center which is probably important for a geographically distributed team (I assume they are). Cheap, no-frills cloud is extremely underrated, IMO.

    • danpalmer a year ago

      Underrated? The flip side is that hardware failures are still your problem like they would be with rolling your own hosting. I think they’re correctly rated for the position on the scale of traders that they provide.

  • squigz a year ago

    Surprising numbers, and really goes to show how cheap the hardware/software side is for this sort of thing if you do it right.

    I wonder what the "Misc dev salaries" is for - only curious because it's a flat $5k

    • justinclift a year ago

      Heh heh heh.

      To me those numbers seem on the high side as I'm (personally) used to (for cheap projects) scavenging together stuff from Ebay before deploying to a data centre. ;)

      • squigz a year ago

        lichess is hardly a "cheap project" though :P It's one of the most popular chess platforms

  • benmmurphy a year ago

    its also crazy how much cheaper it is than AWS. the primary DB is around $500/month with 32 CPU and 256 GB of RAM and 7TB. AWS RDS db.m6gd.8xlarge which is 32 CPU and 128 GB of RAM costs $2150/month before paying for storage as well.

    • bryan_w a year ago

      Yeah, but you get what you pay for. That m6gd.8xlarge would never be subject to such a long network outage as once the hardware fault was detected, it would be moved to another machine

      • beaviskhan a year ago

        Yup, and you also get to make AWS deal with OS upgrades, DB upgrades, backups, etc.

hilux a year ago

I'm a patron!

I really appreciate the benefits package for patrons. Thibault is zee best.