What Does It Cost to Host OzBargain? What is the technical Architecture?

johnwinds on 26/05/2018 - 11:17
Last edited 26/05/2018 - 13:29 by 1 other user

I'm curious as to what kind of grunt is needed for hosting the OzBargain site. From what I can tell, it's always very responsive. There are minimum ads, the forums and deals are very intuitive. The whole philosophy and culture/mindset, the way it is run is excellent. So refreshing to have a dynamic community in a world of cynically commercial websites.

Is the reason it is so responsive due to great coding of the site? Or is it really well resourced hardware-wise?

I'm wondering if they are using a cluster of servers on AWS/Azure/GCloud? What kind of load-balancers are in place? CDNs? HTTPS acceleration? What about Database? MySQL or PostGres or NoSQL? Any in-memory DB such as memcached, Redis etc?

What is the language used to develop it? It seems to be REST compliant, i.e no .html or .aspx or .php in the URLs. Does it use NodeJS, Golang or another language?

I'm aware some of this info might be proprietary/confidential but it doesn't hurt asking if there is willingness to share the information.

Site Discussion

Comments

  • Godric on 26/05/2018 - 11:21
    +2

    It's a secret recipe

  • hogwarts on 26/05/2018 - 11:26

    They are using DreamHost servers I'm pretty sure.

    • dazweeja on 26/05/2018 - 16:03

      They moved to Binary Lane in July 2016.

  • Jatacid on 26/05/2018 - 11:27

    Try

    https://builtwith.com/

    I believe they're backed by eBay now so that certainly helps - but you can pour as many resources into it as needed.
    Also the fact that it's a relatively 'light' page without too much JavaScript going on.

  • frondono on 26/05/2018 - 11:43

    Last time I heard they used the Hostgator Unlimited Plan and were thinking about upgrading to one of their dedicated servers to keep up with demand.

  • Detective Pikachu on 26/05/2018 - 11:48
    +10

    It was always in the wiki and credits page.
    TL;DR: OzBargain was powered by Eneloops.

    • Fiximol on 26/05/2018 - 12:21
      +5

      Then it was powered by Xiaomi powerbanks and balanced on a Zhiyun smooth q for a while.

    • johnwinds on 27/05/2018 - 16:36

      Thank you. Just what I was after.

  • Davo1111 on 26/05/2018 - 13:51
    +11

    previously, when i was a mod, we took turns sitting in mcdonalds hosting off the free wifi.

    things might have changed though

    • subywagon on 26/05/2018 - 17:43

      Starbucks wifi is being utilised too now?

      • Davo1111 on 27/05/2018 - 00:55

        depends which was closest. we rotated to avoid suspicion

      • Detective Pikachu on 27/05/2018 - 05:05

        I heard Apple has decent Wi-Fi.

        • scotty on 29/05/2018 - 13:51

          They don't like people with too many Xiaomi gadgets freeloading their Wi-Fi.

  • dazweeja on 26/05/2018 - 16:23

    As long as you're not a terrible programmer (eg. you're careful to keep your db queries as few and fast as possible and you cache when you can), I find the hosting provider is the biggest differentiator in speed. I currently have similar sites (to each other, not to OzB) on VentraIP, RansomIT and AWS. The AWS site smokes the others (and it's just a t2 instance). On the server side, if you have Nginx (at least for the static stuff), Redis, and MySQL/MariaDB with a huge InnoDB pool, your site is going to fly on a good host with a solid network regardless of the language/framework. That looks to be the setup here (although I don't know how they've tuned their MariaDB server).

    • Chris Topher on 26/05/2018 - 17:14

      And now for the English speaking amongst us….
      .
      [Joke Joyce, it reads very complex]
      .
      "English Speaking" = "Non Programmers"

  • resisting the urge on 27/05/2018 - 16:01
    +1

    Thing about OzB that is so nice is responsiveness and uptime.

    Love the minimal use of Borg and other such services, that exist only to suck the life out of communities and enrich shareholders. Efficient application of carefully decided FOSS over the latest and greatest fadware and .js.

    Most of all, kudos to the OzB crew for keeping it sharp, up to date, and not sitting like a lame corporation on the components that were chosen way back when. As is evidenced by the use of Maria DB instead of MySQL, recent nginx/fastcgi versions, etc. https://www.ozbargain.com.au/wiki/ozbargain_architecture

    At the end of the day, the OzBargain stack, although it is not chosen to meet corporate security standards, has a good chance of being safer than most insurance companies, banks and government systems. And that is saying a lot as community sites are built to accept input rather than using the internets to preach from the nearest mountain.

    • johnwinds on 27/05/2018 - 16:35

      Absolutely agree. There is only a handful of sites like this.

Login or Join to leave a comment
Login Join