Pop Answers is now running on its own server at Slicehost
I've always said that I wish there was a web hosting provider out there that offers bare bones, load-ready boxes for sensible prices with features like redundancy & backups out-of-the-box. Last Friday I was scrambling to find a new host for Pop Answers, which has now broken 3000 users per day and many, many impressions & API calls, and was doing 100% CPU easily. There were times when I couldn't even SSH into the server because it couldn't allocate the memory. So I set off to look, and I came across Slicehost, and after talking to another developer in the Facebook forums, he recommended it as a very reliable and sensible solution for Facebook applications. For $38, I got a slice with 512 MB ram, 200 GB of bandwidth and 20GB of storage, on RAID 10 hardware, and for $10 more, I have daily and weekly backups. This slice came completely bare; just a basic install of CentOS 5.2, my OS of choice. I then followed the installation guide in the Slicehost articles, with a few tips I learned when I wrote my setup/upgrade guide for (mt), and when I was done I had a server with PHP 5.2, MySQL 5, and APC, plus all the basics like iptables for security. No email software, control panels, etc. that I don't need eating up my resources, and with a few quick steps importing my database and changing my configuration file for my app, I had it running from Slicehost in no time. In the future, if I want to scale to support my users (and I do hope it becomes a necessity), I can scale horizontally by buying more slices and configuring them to my needs, without breaking the bank. Plus, I don't have to worry about the horror stories I had in the past dealing with Amazon EC2, where instances can disappear off the network without even so much as a warning.
If you are hosting high-load games, applications, etc (maybe a backend server for your iPhone application), then I recommend checking out Slicehost. And if you wish to put me as a referrer, enter my email at the signup: montoya[dot]christian[at]gmail[dot]com.
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~$50 a month isn't bad at all for that kind of setup but how do you plan to actually monetize on the app and recover the costs? Is it generating any revenue?
Looking through their FAQ I came across this:
So a 512 Slice would get a guarantee for 1/32 of the their "Quad core, 64-bit machines (8+ ghz)". That doesn't amount to a lot of CPU considering you were running at 100% CPU on your previous setup. How are things holding out on the new servers?
aleem: I monetize through standard display ads. The app makes $10 a day on average. So in 5 days, I've covered all my hosting costs.
Things are holding out just fine on the new server. I think part of the problem I had with my (mt) setup was that I had a lot of things running on one box: multiple apps/websites, various server software (including Plesk), etc. The same box still runs everything except the live version of Pop Answers. The new box at Slicehost just has a database for Pop Answers, some shared memory space for APC caching, and the scripts that run Pop Answers. So with the dedicated resources, when I run "top" I see about 5% CPU consumption, and when I run "free -m" I see almost all the memory being used. There's a good chance I'll need to get a secondary box for caching soon (with Memcache), but that's more because my daily users on the app keeps going up… I just passed 4k/day, so I'm nearing 60k impressions/day now!
Going from 3k to 4k daily hits in a span of 10 days has got to have you excited! Thanks for sharing. I have a lot of free cycles and am asking myself the very question right now… should I invest my time in building a Facebook app?
A bunch of questions. Did you use any 3rd party frameworks for your app? How many hours did you put into it and when did you launch it first? You mention $10 for 4K impressions–are you getting paid per click or on impressions? And if so what sort of clickthrough rates are you seeing (I calculated 25 cents per click @ 1% clickthrough for 4K hits = $10).
Heading over to Facebook to check out the app…
No, though I do know people using Kohana PHP. I started out writing from scratch, and it allows me to keep my games really lightweight. At this point I have a handful of standard classes that I re-use between projects.
Pop Answers took a week, at least 40 hours, to get version 1 out the door. I was unemployed at the time so it worked out. Since then I put anywhere from 1 hour to 5 a week on it, whether it's adding quizzes, adjusting ads, or building new features. The ROI right now is not enough, but I'm hoping the app keeps growing.
I'm getting an eCPM; my payment is on clicks. The payouts fluctuate because the ad demand fluctuates, but I'm keeping up a consistent $10/day at this point. Your calculations are reasonable, I won't give away the exact numbers beyond that.
My advice is this: make a simple game, and learn the viral channels to reach Facebook users. Facebook's platform is not a goldmine, nor is it easy territory, and you have to learn the ropes, but there are good returns if you can make applications that users enjoy. If I can find two other people that enjoy the game I've built, then I know it has potential.
Thanks for sharing, I'll explore the platform in my free time. Looking forward to another update when you reach 10K hits / day =)
I'm a huge fan of Slicehost. Their support is fantastic. They're innovative guys. I've had some of the sites I host with them get absolutely nailed out of the blue and the servers didn't flinch. I've got a 512 and a 256. Admin panel has gotten a lot better in the last few months too.
Slicehost are pretty awesome and quick to respond, although i've had a few problems with them. For example, the 10 Mbps throttling that they do was awful once we hit 1.9 million unique requests per day (those that got through, was probably much higher). Although, I have seen somewhere that they can increase that speed. For the app I was working on (Facestat it seems as well) we moved out media to a dedicated box to handle scaling problems. We went with Bytemark who offer 100 Mbps + speeds, which alleviated the issues and offered us to have more control over the box.