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Ask DN: Best way to monetize Pttrns.com(pttrns.com)

almost 10 years ago from Robin Raszka, www.pttrns.com

  • Robin RaszkaRobin Raszka, almost 10 years ago (edited over 9 years ago )

    Note: we have 1.5M pageviews/month on average and most of the visitors are designers.

    3 points
    • Christoph OChristoph O, almost 10 years ago

      2k/month sounds very expensive for 1.5M page views. Have you optimized the back-end as much as you can? If you're willing to share where most the money goes, I'm sure the community would help you find ways to optimize that.

      2 points
      • Dominik SchmidtDominik Schmidt, almost 10 years ago

        Heroku is very expensive. So it could be possible. But it is not very hard to switch to his own server (Then the server would just go for no more than 300$ bucks). We have at 9elements have a service up and running that lies on a root server from the german hosting provider Hetzner.de and it is running well on it.

        0 points
      • Robin RaszkaRobin Raszka, almost 10 years ago

        It's 2k/mo since we added iPad and iOS section (3-4months). It was much cheaper before. 60-70% of it is editorial and development.

        We're still working on optimizations and the next thing is going from PNG to JPG.

        0 points
    • Martin LeBlancMartin LeBlanc, almost 10 years ago

      I ran Iconfinder with 20 M pageviews for less. You can often optimize the server setup a lot (caching), the code (more caching), database (even more caching) and save a factor 10 on server cost.

      6 points
    • Joe Blau, almost 10 years ago

      At the cost of $2k a month for that amount of views, it sounds like you need to hire a systems architect to refactor how the site is designed. The site could essentially be refactored to a static site running with a CDN. I would definitely look into optimizations of taking what is likely a bloated rails/node/ruby/java app and converting it to a static site with search powered by a third party search. You could probably cut your costs by 90% doing that.

      0 points
      • Robin RaszkaRobin Raszka, almost 10 years ago

        Probably, but for the future development and new features a static page isn't very versatile.

        0 points
        • Joe Blau, almost 10 years ago

          I've fallen into this same classic startup conundrum where I've justified over-complexity for future-proofing. If this project was architected in a way where you were cash positive every month 2k then I could see this rationale. There is a very slipper slope, one that I've fallen into many times.

          I'm not sure what your future plans are, but at current state this could be static and cost you next to nothing to host.

          One quick patch could be that you use a CDN to cache your assets. cloudflare.com is pretty good and very simple to use. The content isn't changing so you could set long TTL's which would reduce some load on your servers.

          0 points
      • Martin LeBlancMartin LeBlanc, almost 10 years ago

        I actually think you could keep the code as it is and just cache it heavily. There are few personalized elements on the site, so caching would be very effective.

        0 points
        • Joe Blau, almost 10 years ago

          Yeah, that's a great point. Without seeing exactly what is costing so much, it would be hard to tell if that would completely alleviate the problems.

          0 points