It’s been a year long break from blogging and getting back to writing and getting a so many new visitors this soon is cool. [Thanks HN!]

This blog runs on the smallest available Linode 512 instance for $20/month. It runs several sites including family blogs and hobby sites. I run nginx on the front end and reverse proxy to 5 Apache children which saves me having to run roughly 100 Apache children to handle the brief spikes of around 20 hits per second I saw yesterday.

Technologies like event-servers (Nginx, node.js, etc) and cheap and reliable virtualization may seem like old hat, but in 2005 Linode was charging $40/month for a 128Meg instance (it’s now $20/month for 512Megs, 88% cheaper) and Nginx was only going to hit main-stream use two years later. In fact Nginx only hit version 1.0 last month.

Five years ago many companies or bloggers would have used a physical box with 3.5 Gigabytes of memory to handle 100 apache instances and the database for this kind of traffic. About $300/month based on current pricing for physical dedicated servers from ServerBeach which hasn’t changed much since 2005.

With the move from hardware and multiprocess servers to virtualization and event-servers, hosting costs have dropped to 6% of what they were 5 years ago. A drop of 94% in a variable cost for any sector changes the economics in a way that usually causes disruption and innovation.

So where is the disruption and innovation happening now that anyone can afford a million-hits-a-month server?

Footnotes: An unstable version of Nginx was available in 2005/2006 and Lighttpd was also an alternative back then for reverse proxying. But it was for hardcore hackers who didn’t mind relatively unstable and bleeding-edge configurations. Mainstream configuration in 2005 was running big memory servers on dedicated machines with a huge number of Apache children. Sadly, much of the web is still run this way. I shudder to think of the environmental impact of all those front-end web boxes. I also don’t address the subject of Keep-Alive on Apache. Disabling Keep-Alive is a way to get a lot more bang for your hardware (specifically you need less memory because you run less apache children) while sacrificing some browser performance. The norm in 2005 was to leave keepalive enabled, but set to a short timeout. With Keepalive set to 15 seconds, my estimate of 100 apache instances for 20 hits per second is probably way too optimistic. With Keep-Alive disabled you would barely handle 20 requests per second with 100 children when taking into account latency per request for slower connections. Bandwidth cost is also a consideration, but gzip and running compressed code, using CDN versions of libs like jQuery that someone else hosts and running a stripped down site with few images helps. [Think Craigslist] With a page size of 100K, Linode’s 400GB bandwidth allowance gives you 4,194,304 pageviews.