N/A

for starters, will your application actually be using 8GB 24/7?

Btw a good thing to mention is that I dont need database, I already have that somewhere else (im using mongoDB atlas)

Well, not 24/7 but… maybe about, idk, lets say 12 hours of the 24 hours, since will be many people using, like on average, maybe half the time yeah, maybe even more.

so then let's say an average of about 4GB ?

yeah

lets say that for now

and 1 CPU as well just to say something decent there

then that's $60 before you factor in egress and seat costs

so the resource usage is calculated with this, and only this? no "hidden surprises" then?

i mean that, and the plan, right?

the only hidden surprise would be not understanding how pricing works I guess

but yeah, that usage based pricing, and the seat cost for pro

right

About network usage, I expect each user will spend about 1 GB per day or so, and lets say I have like 500 users

unlike a VPS, on Railway you only pay for the resources you actually use, so if your app uses 0.1 vcpu and 500mb of memory, 99% of the time, then you are going to pay significantly less than $60

it's not about users, it's about how much YOUR app uses

ah right, nice

so you will be paying to talk to atlas

in the form of egress

about network usage, what if some hacker basically spamms my app as much as possible, can I somehow set up a hard limit for network? so that I dont get charged crazy

you can set a hard limit on spend, you can't set a hard limit on network usage though

yes I think mostly this will be, mongoDB atlas data fetching will be 90% of network activity, correct

so how do I do if theres some hacker actually?

you don't pay for ingress, so there's no cost in getting data from atlas, but you will pay to send data to atlas

ah… wait, ingress and egress

Its first time I hear about this

use Cloudflare and setup some rules so no bad traffic makes it to your app

so basically i only get charged for "sending" data to DB, not fetching data from DB?

cause if so its fine

cause im caching most of the data once its sent to DB once per hour

but they might request the DB data (already cached once per hour) like idk, 100 times per hour lets say idk, big ingress activity, that no extra charge you tell me, right?

basically, in reality fetching data from the database still has a little egress since you are still sending outgoing traffic to the database to tell it what data you want, but for all intensive purposes you can ignore that cost since it's little

correct, we do not charge for ingress

right, lets say I bring cached data from the DB, lets say its 500 mb of data. How much would it be approximately then, maybe like 1 MB of data egress there?

far less than 1MB, if your call to the database uses 1MB you're doing something really wrong lol

oh okey, so normal request less than 1 MB, nice. Idk im asking cause im new to hosting providers heavy deployments in general

well heavy in my terms, my app is heavier than any other i done before int erms of data processing etc

may I ask what tech stack?

yes 🙂

express JS with mongoDB atlas (talking backend only)

frontend is react

but frontend will be somewhere else

here I wanna put backend

the most important is backend surely

what does the backend do to make you think it will be using on average 4GB?

well, it takes 3 million auction house objects with like 20 fields each of the objects. then does multiple filtering and stuff like that

virtual economy stuff, cryptocurrency games, an API for getting prices, its very heavy tho yeah you see, huge amount of data

maybe it wont average 4 GB idk

but Im expecting lets say 250 users a day on average

lets say they use the app on average for 8 hours

and each hour the data is cached so data processing wont be that crazy but still some custom filters will be applied and they will be fetching each hour like 500 MB of data to the frontend, thats assuming they dont reload the page, if they do a few times, then re-fetch the cached data, imagine.

something like that, what you think would be realistically good to go for?

and what expcted cost?

cache is definitely gonna reduce costs for sure

I'd say under a $100 but that's not a promise

ah right sounds ok

yeah sure thanks good cache exists man

otherwise i be selling my leg or something 😄

hahah

but I will say your usecase is pro, not hobby

right

pro sounds powerful it has up to 32 GB of RAM, and 32 CPUs, that sounds epic but, im scared of the cost

you can still set a $100 spend limit

I would rather limit the RAM to 12 or 16 GBs to make sure it doesnt get bruteforced by some guy spamming the page on 5 different devices or some sht xD

you can do that too

and probably 4 CPUs is more than enough i think

just know that your app will crash when it reaches the memory limit you set

yeah thats fine, i mean rather that than 500$ bill

well a $500 bill would be impossible given you will set a spend limit

how much could an app cost with these settings: 16 GB of RAM, 4 CPUs, and if total goes over 100$ per month (whatever it is, either RAM, CPUs, network, etc.) just automatically close the server, like, crash it. will that even work?

not sure of the CPUs tho, how powerful are they? theres many typesof CPUs nowadays

well over $200, but if your application is using that much then hopefully with that amount of traffic it equates to a good amount of revenue haha.

if you hit a spend limit your application will be shut down.

they are xeon cpus

right 🙂 i mean long story short this works on % of users which makes sense

what xeon cpus may I ask? i mean what model so I can look up the specs

I don't know off the top of my head, sorry

ah

but do you have maybe some reference with like the year they got released or the Ghz they are using… i mean how fast/slow they are, some sort of reference

I know they are Cascade Lake @2.8GHz

oh okey

so anyways what happens if I start little?

lets say I start with hobby plan so its max 8 GB of RAM and 8 CPU

can I then if in the future I get more people, just click on pro and it changes plan instantly or is it complicated to change plans?

if I move on to pro I would still be limiting 100% to like, max 16 GB RAM and probably still 8 CPUs or something

yeah you buy pro and then it will ask you what projects you want to put on the pro plan

and then it will re-launch my hobby plan project with pro instead and thats it?

i mean, that simple is it?

you will need to do the relaunch yourself but yes

and youll need to set the spend limits up on your pro workspace again, since the personal hobby plan and pro plans are treated as separate workspaces under the same account

ah nice

and btw out of curiosity, all this was me asking about backend but do you ever deploy here like, frontend apps, or nah?

cause im wondering about the cost of deploying the frontend. the frontend codebase isnt too big its kinda small, its mostly a big datatable with pagination that will fetch like, 500 MB of data and user can play around with the data, filter it locally, etc.

should be cheaper than the backend, right?

oh yes we deploy frontends all the time on railway!
our docs site is frontend hosted on railway! -

and we even have a guide for hosting a react frontend app on railway! -

but is much cheaper than backend right?

if you have cloudflare in front for cache yes

never used cloudflare, lets assume i dont use it

i mean frontend is chill is just showing DB data for the most part, a few register and login simple stuff also but thats it

its like, 5 page app

then you only pay for the tiny amount of cpu and mem, like 0.1 vcpu and 40mb of mem (if done right), and the egress it takes to send the web page, and page assets

ah great

okey so I think im decided: first thing I wanna do is deploy my backend from my github repository on the hobby plan, to start with that 🙂

@Brody does this work as a limit?

I think I could start with 10 USD just to test around

yes it would act as a limit, but i highly recommend you sign up for the usage based plan

but why tho if I just wanna like, start doing some tests

counter question, why do you think prepaid is better for that?

cause nobody can hack the usage further

i think ive mentioned several times in this thread that you can set a spend limit

ah sorry, you meant with the other subscription as well? okey

makes sense then to go for the other

prepaid is not the way to go, its just headaches

done 🙂

how do I change name here to a more fitting name?

in the project settings

okey nice

so I try import from github repo and it throws me this error:

is the repo name longer than 32 chars?

https://github.com/RealPrivateScriptL9/WoW-Current-Content-Framework-Revamp-Backend

yeah it seems

then you will need to create an empty service and then add the repo

ah, okey

click the + create button

then you can add the repo in the service settings

okey 🙂 nice

i also added the env variables now

deploy command I see here

should be npm install right? its an express app

no build command or anything like that in express apps

@Brody

nixpacks will set a install command for you, you shouldnt use npm install

ah okey nice

i clicked on deploy

as i was waiting

it says deployment successful 🙂

pog

😄

but idk what to do now idk whats my backend url

go to the service settings and get one

on generate domain?

ooh, here I can limit the stuff yes?

yep, but remember what i said, if your app ends up reaching those limits its just gonna crash loop

I usually run on port 3500 on localhost, not sureif here will cause trouble:

yeah

okey look

as long as you point the domain to the correct port youre good

I made 1 hit to my super heavy endpoint

it took 2 minutes and 16 seconds which is not bad for a start

i will try hit it again, now it will use cached data

okay now try on our metal hardware

no no but wait lets go slow step by step

haha

this is unironically good btw

yeah

in my PC it takes like 1 min 20 seconds

but my PC is my PC, my PC is powerful anyways

so this is like positive

let me see how it does with cache now

cache might take similar time anyways but still, just to make sure it works with that too

yeah thats why i wanted you to try on metal, the metal region has a better cpu than what you are currently running on

we will get there, but step by step, we go slow, i like to test cheapest then scale progressively, lets go slow.

its the same price

okey cache took 1 min 50 s, thats not bad

oh its same price?

yeah of course

wait, better CPU but same price? whats the catch?

you cant use volumes on it yet

what are volumes?

so it reads: "Volumes allow you to store persistent data for services on Railway", but I already have my mongoDB for cache, rigth?

yeah but volumes are for file storage

not applicable to you, but you asked so i answered

ah

anyways about the better CPU we were talking, how can I get better CPU for same price sorry?

switch to a region marked metal in your service settings

oh I see

i change and redeploy, lets see, so metal always better, I always choose metal yes? 🙂

it should be better, those machines use much newer CPUs

nice 🙂

okey lets give it a moment its deploying

wait, i even have 1 doubt

how does railway know that my express file is server.js

if everyone uses app.js

i didnt mention anything but it works

i assume you have a start script in your package.json?

i have one called "server"

"server": "node server.js"

magic

what is it xD

hahah

some AI im guessing that tries to figure out the command based on what it sees

who knows

its just detected a server.js file and ran it

oh right

we dont use ai

nice

some people use it too much too xd

anyways this is deployed

ima try to hit endpoint, its gonna use cached data lets see time

previous was 1 m 50 s

i assume an in memory cache? if so, that cache is gone since you redeployed

no no

i meant my own mongoDB cache

like its not refetching all the data from some API as the first time, it just fetches from mongoDB, it still have to do some processing of the data so its normal it takes long time

i would highly recommend you deploy redis on railway and use that as cache, since right now you will pay for the cache if its in atlas

okey now it took 1 minute 38 seconds

no i dont pay any cache to atlas

im using gridFS

with free tier, and it works

egress, remember

ah right

sorry

but i.. i never used redis before

time to learn then

not the time, its time to deploy this fast as possible and start testing, customer wants to start soon

so in total i made 3 endpoints hits

can I see a chart of the hardware to see how much RAM / CPUs were used?

look at the metrics tab

like is there a way to see somehwere how much it took

ah okey

so, how bad is it? mmm, i mean 2 GB of RAM, thats quite good i think, not using that much

and 2 vCPU, not that bad either

i think reason takes so much its mongoDB gridFS, i need to improve that myself

but we can see that server is doing good, is not exploding or anything

what if 10 people request at the same time, will server crash or just go slower a bit with all the requests?