Monday Monday open wide dev fans get ready to stuff your face with JavaScript CSS node module barbecue tip get workflows Break dancing soft skill web development the hcs the karaisius the tastiest web development treats coming in hot Here is where Sarah kuda boss and Scott El Toro local Tiolinsky Welcome to syntax in this Monday hasty treat we're gonna be talking about hosting and web servicing web services pricing explained So a lot of times we had to a new service and it says this is gonna cost you 0.3 cents per who's it's and what's it's and you I just be like well, I don't know what that is so we're gonna be talking all about the different types of pricing that different services Can charge you what they all mean and how that affects your bottom line? My name is Scott Wensky I'm a web developer from Denver, Colorado and with me as always is the West boss Hey, I'm excited about the show. It's not gonna be the most fun show ever, but this is really My mind is to be well, but like I never like especially with like things like a haroku. They say like a how many Dinos do you need?
I don't know what I was like one dinosaur place and it's gonna be really cool, okay? How many do you know dinos did do you know? So like I it's pricing sometimes you look at these pricing pages like I don't know how much is it gonna be? Yeah, you know and now that I'm a I understand a little bit better.
I thought let's uh, let's let's tell the people how it works Yeah, some of it was like with even with AWS is just sort of like well sign up and see how much it cost after the end of the first month Yeah, I'm not gonna be using that much of it So it's not gonna bring the bank so let's get into it the first topic that we had here would be a lot of places charge via the minute Or time that you're going to be using something and this is oftentimes with servers that gets spun up for several functions because those functions that are Run or only run for that period of time and then there's that computer interface is able to be used for something else Right the classical must like shared server type of thing But just different and so because of that you're paying for the amount of time that that function is running and that amount of time But that service is being used rather than the fact that that service needs to exist 24 seven Yeah, you can do this one's for me at least the probably easiest to estimate other than just paying a certain amount per month for a Specific amount of resources and that's just because like you can literally run your functions and then you can do some quick back of the napkin Math is like how long did that take right three hundred milliseconds or a hundred milliseconds? And then how many times will that be hit? Maybe a user will hit that page a hundred times a year and then you have 40 users and you can pretty quickly do that This is pretty popular in serverless space because you were literally paying for time You just a couple of seconds of a server and then somebody else gets used that server after you It's also popular in using graphics like you can you can also do this for graphics cards AI machine learning things like that You pay by the minute or by the second for the amount of time that you're using on those servers Yeah, and those scale with the amount of loads you're putting it under you're asking it to do a big heavy thing It's gonna cost you a bigger heavier dollars than if you were doing something that was really light because it's inherently going to Take less time, but in the same way this one is also kind of the same thing I mean they're all facets of the same thing if you think about it But in this regard at the next one is to be by resources and how many resources not be a time will you be charged? And this can be the common VPS model that you've seen for a long time and that stands for virtual private server or something like Digital Ocean where you're paying for the price of the virtual private server and that you are paying for the stats on it You're paying for the resources as in how much CPU can this thing handle?
How much RAM does this thing have how much storage space does this server have and then as you need more you can always scale up and many other container based things This is how level up tutorials hosted rush down media galaxy and we pay by the resources We have auto scaling in case we get hit too hard and it can scale up our containers to use more resources If we need it on all that good things that you are used to with that sort of flow Yeah, if you are used to also like a digital ocean droplet or let's the other one Linode is another popular one space rack space things like that You say all right need a gig of RAM and this much GPU and disk space is a not necessarily a big one anymore because disk space is It's so cheap, but one thing you do want to look at there is are they SSDs Yeah, because when they do read the file from that disk it needs to be fast, right? That was that's how digital ocean sort of got on to the scene is that they started as a SSD first hosting company Where did you host before? Digital ocean I was on media temple. Yeah, yeah Yeah, me to temple was a really big one and then I had a I had a go daddy server for a long long time I still have a blue host server.
I do too. Yeah, that those those like go daddy blue host companies that have just like PHP lamp stack They like once they get somebody in there. It's gravy because it's hard to move Yeah, and I think they know that because they yeah, they had a decent amount for referrals It's not all the companies. Yeah, I think like with blue host I'll often I used to have affiliate links before I denounced them and They would be like a hundred dollars per sign up and they know that's because somebody that pays is gonna be with them for Yeah, that's what they're banking on the next one is per Dino This is popular with Heroku and you may you may hear like I think other hosting companies have the similar similar vein and essentially It's just a virtual Linux server like we were talking about earlier But then they will give you a specific amount of CPU and memory as well I'm not sure why they call it a Dino and not just what you're getting what does a Dino even stand for in a Heroku?
That's a good question because that's the first time that I had ever heard that that language and I wonder if it is just like marketing We need our you know AWS is so heavy and that where everything is the AWS version of whatever it is Yeah, and the coolest thing about Heroku and all these other platforms is that you can just add more dinos And it will just make your app faster because the way that Heroku works is your apps are stateless and you can just run your app on Multiple servers and that's why like if you try to use Heroku and you upload an image You might come back to find out like a week later that your images are gone And that's because they don't have any state if any files that are uploaded Heroku will just be cleaned up You have to put them somewhere else like a s3 bucket or something like that And that's great because they will they will launch more versions of your app and then they'll run it on a load balancer for you Maybe that's why they have a special name for it. My understanding is it might be that because Heroku was like the first big Primarily used one to do the container based scaling up and scaling down I think they just called them dinos before they were called containers And then after they got started calling containers I see in quotes it says that on their site is as I know it which is isolated lightweight Linux containers So it doesn't explain it as being anything other than that. Yeah, one other thing that Heroku has is they have free dino hours So that was another weird thing to me when I was coming from a traditional server You pay for the server you get a box and where it's running and then they would be like how many hours do you need? And I'd be like all of them 24?
Yeah 24 I never understood it and now I get it because the way that it works like I said is that it very similar to serverless functions is that That box will spin up it will turn on when people are visiting your website and then when you're no longer using it It will turn off and then when somebody hits the website again, it will turn on and that's the cold start that you hear often And that's good to know because sometimes you have you have a website You can also 100 websites on there and you might not get any traffic to them because they're just side projects things like that And if they're not getting a whole lot of traffic then they're not costing Heroku really anything in terms of resources to run them Next is by bandwidth and bandwidth is the amount of data that is transferred because we often think about like data in terms of like storage But we do work in a medium that's primarily on the web and on the web One of the biggest things that you you track is how much data is sent and that's really what bandwidth this is Is if you have big heavy files and you have to send them then you're going to be paying more in bandwidth fees because it costs money to send them ISPs are currently exploiting by data caps of non-bandwidth that is being traveled is what's going to be the thing that's tracked there What what services in your mind do you see as companies offhand? Do you know that charge by bandwidth the one that I use is backlays B2 which I use yes do all the downloads for my My video courses and so they have a couple things like I pay to have my video files on their server So for a terabyte, it's five bucks a month And then if you're uploading a terabyte it's another five bucks a month and if you're deleting a terabyte It's another five bucks a month So they charge you for any time that you either hold data you upload it you download it or you delete it Or you sometimes they're for two as ingress where that you're transferring data to them like I think mux is another one that will charge you for ingress and so that's another thing to think of because like yeah It might cost me I'm not saying that specifically for mux but for one of these platforms It might cost me a hundred dollars a month to do this But you know if I wanted to move over everything I've got terabytes and terabytes of data that To move in especially like if you think about like a hosting platform like cloud and airy Right like I don't know what cloud and air uses behind the scenes Whether it's Amazon S3 but like let's say they wanted to move from Amazon S3 to whatever the azure image hosting version is Then they would have to calculate. Okay. We've got we've got 70 terabytes of photos from the last year If we wanted to move those all over that would that would be a pretty penny just to get it into the server Let alone people requesting these images and downloading so that's only that probably most people potlessness pockets Don't have to necessarily think about that But if you have a large application with loss of user content then you would be probably thinking about that Yeah, and some of these things you need to take an entire course on to know how much you're gonna pay for the thing because it is funny I'm looking at like mux's payment page and granted they do a good job of this But it's for encoding mux's 0.5 Dollars a minute so five cents a minute to encode and then for storage It's 0.3 cents a minute to store them and then to stream it.
It's 0.13 cents Per minute so like that's three like fractions of a dollar spread out over three different things and so you might be like oh I have no idea how I'm gonna pay for this like what I'm gonna pay for the service But that's why a lot of these things end up giving you video calculator So like mux has a really neat video calculator where you can say all right my average video is let's say my average video is 10 minutes long I'm gonna get 25. I'm gonna do 25 monthly uploads and then the average video view count I don't know the default is 75,000 So that's fine and then you're gonna be paying 550 bucks a month to do that So like hey that tells you pretty explicitly what that's going to cost but you have to know that information going into it You might be able to do some like calculations to say okay Maybe in the future this is what it will look like but at the end of the day You do need to have some information about what your traffic should look like to be able to calculate a lot of these Yeah, or even like another way to think about it is if you think about like what a user would do like an average user would use in terms of traffic You can think about that and then and then you hopefully if you have a business you can figure out what is a user worth to you And then you can say okay, the like for me, I know Users are priceless. I cannot put a price on users there Yeah, like if a user watches an entire course I know how much that's gonna cost me and I know how much I'm making And that allows me to make calculations based on other things like based on like how much free course is gonna offer to stream as well Because I have to pay for a ban on that as well. What else we have here by database calls If you've got like a database service They will often charge you either by entries like how many entries do you want to store in a database or how many calls will you be making to that specific database?
Again, for me, that's that's really hard to calculate because like how many database calls are you making? Yeah for a specific page sometimes it's six or seven if you have joins that's another call, right? But in most cases they're peanuts if you have crack you all could end up being 30 calls that you even knowing Yeah, yeah, it's true like you can sometimes forget about the database underneath graph you all What else users? This is more of a sass thing But I can bleed into hosting how many users are able to log into your platform and manage your specific app or whatever And sometimes you have to be on a specific tier in order to get either features or amount of users that can access specific things Yeah, and get help works that way and I would call get up Yeah, certainly sass but it is like a web service Use it for our entire pipeline and so we have to pay for more minutes in our pipeline But we also have to pay per user or our API although I don't know how many of the features we lose if we just went to the free private account thing that you can do now Because we have a team of a few people so I don't know I'd maybe you should look at that But doesn't that why also charged by uh seats?
I thought they did but I'm looking at their Because I feel like we had to pay for additional seats in our account to get team support Yeah, you get one team member on their free one And then on your your pro account it's 19 dollars per member per month So if you want more people to be able to manage your application or see logs and things like that Then you can pay for that I don't think that like every team member would need would need that though Just because you get most of the the info about a build will be put into a github comment on a pull request like that Yeah, yeah, so that's that's kind of interesting one as well The way kind of around that I see a lot of people do that is they just share the login and especially with something like firefox I was gonna say with like one password because that's what we do we share not not of all of our services granted We paying for a lot of team services, but we do share it services to some with one password And it makes it really nice because you have a team shared one password thing and everybody's got the passwords And you gotta fill in whatever I mean easy one little thing that I use is firefox containers or container tabs And it's awesome because I can just open up a container tab for something else and just go to youtube.com And I'm still I'm just signed into youtube.com as The one that I'm sharing with everybody and I don't have to like log in and log out or open up the incognito tab and log in Um, so you get all the benefits of that and I think in chrome you have to open an entire second browser But firefox allows you to have container tabs so just that one tab will be and you have your own cookies and your own sign-in stuff like that That's that's I really like that this is sort of unrelated but kind of related Do you see that like I saw a screenshot of like chrome grouped tabs? Have you seen us? I get it. It's a gray Yeah, do you have it in your chrome?
I have it every time I open chrome and I'm not using chrome as my daily driver But every time you do it, I'm like what is this gray line and then I finally figured out that's what it was I haven't opened actual chrome in a while and I know brave is like kind of different like I don't have those things in brave here So I wonder if we're gonna get container container windows in chrome You can turn it off, but I don't particularly like it. Although I don't know. Maybe I'm Uh, yeah, I wonder if it is coming to chrome because they're doing that it sort of seemed like a preface to me But I'm pulling that out of nowhere. So that's where most of our information comes from Next we have here is by apps.
How many apps can you host digital oceans app platform does this now where Instead of paying for resources, although you can you can increase the resources on a specific app It's by app. So it's like for me I can grab a digital ocean droplet And if you want to run all of the engine x stuff yourself all the certification the certs Yourself all of the renewing of the certs if you want to run that all yourself You can run as many apps as you want on a single digital ocean droplet And like if they get too popular then it will slow down, right? But digital oceans app platform is by the app so you pay for five dollars for every single app that you have And if like for me, I have back end in front end on one of the apps I was working on And in that case, it would be ten dollars and that's just the price you pay I think for all of the ease and benefits that come along With that type of thing it really bummed me out that you can't use cloud flare with digital oceans app Yeah, yeah, we should do a whole show on digital ocean app platform because it is awesome But yeah, they they're so ingrained with what they do You just can't use cloud flare and for a lot of people both for security standpoint and for just like the the stats that they give you They don't let you do that also the amount of like if you already have something that exists on a platform that's using cloud flare You might have some things that are pretty necessarily tightly integrated in but like some things that you might be relying on then Like the DNS stuff in cloud flare is way better than a lot of other DNS providers Like you can do neater things with like different types of alias records that are necessarily like real types of records Or maybe even like we have redirects set up all the way at the cloud flare level and that to me would be a bummer to lose Because I looked at I looked into this app platform. It's pretty sick other than that Yeah, it seems like I don't nullify says if you use cloud flare with nullify you lose some of the I forget what it is you lose some of the edge benefits because they don't have control over the DNS So in order to make it as good as possible I think for cell does this too, but in the in both cases you can knowing that you're giving up some of their edge Benefits then you still can use it and with digital ocean is just not not gonna work I bet they'll change that though because that's a huge huge thing for people I was gonna say also buy apps and a different sort of way to look at this There like haroku had a thing where you could add apps to your app Do you remember like you can like one click add-on services dear?
I'm using the word app in a totally different way here like like a database or what yeah You could pop in like an M and I always thought that was kind of interesting But I always got confused with like where is this thing like is this the ownership of my app like I think it's just a tight integration with other It's just a tight integration prism I did this to where you could like quickly create a database on another service Yeah, and I really like that because like it's still on this other service Which you like to use but you don't have to like sign up and API keys and users and all that stuff you can just do it away from one dashboard I don't think that that was anything other than that although I haven't been a huge roku user I've done lots of demo apps on heroku, but I've never posted a production app on her week I posted level up on heroku for like maybe a couple years I only moved it to media or galaxy because I wanted to help support media development group and Cost the same like I wasn't I wasn't it wasn't any more or less expensive But it's like okay, heroku has their money You know media developer group could could not necessarily could use the money But maybe that money could go back into the development of the form that I'm using rather than some other service You know last one we have here is just by work the one that pops out here is cloud nary They they do both bandwidth obviously because their images But they also give you a certain number of transforms So if you need to resize an image or convert from jpeg to png that's a transform and you do that once you have like scot.png You want to throw jpeg you transform it and the next person that requests scot that jpeg You don't do the transformer again unless you're changing something about it with the height or the quality or something like that Yeah, and that's kind of cool because if you think about like resources on there and but my favorite way Just looking at all of these different ways my favorite way that that is done is When you can just like tell me how much it's gonna be a month and just hope that me as a user doesn't cost you more money than you're bringing it Right? Because sometimes I look at these pricing pages and I'm just like I have no clue what this means to me Obviously it means a lot to you because you're trying to calculate how much a user Will cost in terms of how many resources they're using and transforms and all that stuff But I as a user just want to know how much is it gonna be per month Generally for the type of app that I want to run on it's obviously a hard thing to do But that's that's my big big fan when something just costs a certain amount You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how much it costs right here You're you've got the chalkboard out. You got all your equations. You're doing the math I actually really I love a good a good calculator in that regard and I think to shout out mux once more mux is calculators very good for what it is It tells you exactly I mean they give you sliders.
They make it really easy It like feels very helpful Like they're trying to help you make that decision and when I first talked to the mux folks They said they launched the calculator so that people would realize how cheap mux was not so that they could see how much they were Gonna be paying I mean obviously it is but like that seemed like to be the message was like that people think we're too expensive And we want you to easily see that we're not too expensive and I thought that was a really neat way to put it That's another service that's hard to calculate because they do the transition transforms sort of like cladnary does right? We're like if you ask for a 1080p version. It's transcoding chunks of that on the fly It's pretty cool. The last one I'm just looking at here is what does cloud flare workers cost because that's kind of serverless functions But it's also like edge functions as its own sort of thing Misha have an episode about like what are some projects that you could use like edge workers for essentially that would be more generally I like it and they are 50 cents per million requests per month with a minimum charge of five dollars a month So 50 cents per million requests seems seems cheap But like again requests not visits because like somebody who visits your website might have 20 requests You got you have a css files you got six versions of jQuery 18 plugins You got that every one of those is a request right?
Yeah, but and also they only have up to 50 milliseconds of CPU time So if you're doing anything that takes more than 50 milliseconds and it won't fit into a worker And that's because the workers in front of your website from being loaded I believe so cool I might be wrong on that, but I've used it a few times I thought that was interesting to see how they they price theirs Yeah, this has been very illuminating and again if you have a good calculator good pricing calculator share with us on Twitter I want to see some of these pricing calculators. They're very fascinating to me It also kind of make for fun little easy JavaScript projects too if you look at some of those pricing calculators and say Oh, this would be some simple math and some form inputs might be something neat to try to experiment with and make something fun Yeah, totally great I've been working on a mortgage calculator because a lot of the mortgage calculators out there are either they sell your soul to privacy people because and then you get ads for Mortgages all the time or they are not Canadian mortgages are a bit different than American mortgages So the math is not exactly the same so I've been trying to like make my own with like no trackers And I like bringing out calculators. It's fun. So in Canadian math do you use a for a variable rather than hex?
Yeah, a big old a and we report the amount in loonies Yeah, okay Yeah, so you could just have like a pond full of geese and every time you slide it more geese get added to the pond Yeah, exactly and there's no there's no wondering if you'll lose your house if you break your leg Yes, there's right it. Yeah, that that comes that's a little bit more on the their bleak side of things But yeah, I'll stick with the geese. Yeah, lots of geese in this one. Yeah, all right.
Uh, this I thought this was gonna be a 10-minute episode I was like, oh, we'll just do a quick one explaining the differences and it turned a little tasty. So let's wrap it up wrap it up Well, thank you so much for watching hand. We will see you on Wednesday Peace Head on over to syntax.fm for a full archive of all of our shows and don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player or drop a review if you like this show