Sites like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok host a large amount of space-intensive, user-generated content that’s made available for years. Image crops and different video resolutions need to be persisted and made accessible in ways that would quickly add up to expensive S3 buckets.
I know that these companies garner tremendous value from this data and user engagement, and view these offerings as profitable, but I’ve never seen details about what the server costs of an Instagram power user might be (both in the unlikely scenario of paying market price for cloud storage, and in the per-user cost of running replicated data centers)
So my question is: if I put down a credit card in AWS, started up an Instagram clone, and had thousands of power users uploading images and videos daily, how much would I likely be paying per user?
As a follow up, what would be some of my first cost-saving and mitigation strategies?
by new_guy on 1/19/21, 3:25 PM
Your first cost saving is avoid AWS unless you want to bankrupt yourself. They're great for backups but bandwidth costs will kill you.
by bluGill on 1/20/21, 2:10 PM
Facebook won't allow numbers to be given, but if you read between the lines of various CppCon videos a 0.1% speedup in some of their core algorithms can make the costs go down by several hundred thousand dollars a year. A lot of that is the power bill because they don't need to run the AC is much to keep the data centers cool. (they also need to buy less computers, and less air conditioners to keep them cool, and eventually more building to keep the computers in)
by jaredcnance on 1/20/21, 2:27 AM
You can’t answer this question without both a technical design and projected user behavior/access patterns. And I don’t think you’re going to get data on this from these platforms themselves. Unfortunately, this question is impossible to answer in this format. If you want to build a “clone”, first design it and then estimate the costs of that design.
by mattbgates on 1/20/21, 12:30 AM