Creating a social networking website and wondering what's the cost of hosting my comments myself.
I've no experience with this, but I would say that hardware is usually a very small part of the budget of a software business. The hours needed to maintain, update, configure etc could be more substantial. Especially if you want some customization, if you need things like spam detection, or if hosting is just hard (i.e. not just a Docker image).
I've not reached this area as of yet so its quite new to me about the comments part as I had no idea there was even 3rd party ways of doing this.
I built a social networking site on WordPress, his is how it led to me becoming a full stack developer but this is one of things towards the end of the project made me question. At the time I was on a shared simple hosting package and when I wanted to upgrade for more traffic just in case.. that's when it starts costing.
If you are unsure what it might cost you depending on the traffic I would suggest going with NGINX and AWS, Google servers which offer these scale-able solutions. However it can get expensive I would imagine if you're getting as many comments like Facebook.
I would ask the owners of Hashnode as they might be able to point you in the right direction :)
After a quick google, this gave me a bit more clarity - hongkiat.com/blog/3rdparty-comment-discuss-system…
I do recall someone writing about a similar product called Disqus
Hope it helps and thanks for the invite! :)
Bridget Sarah
Full Stack Mobile App Developer
Gergely Polonkai
You have to believe in things that are not true. How else would they become?
I don’t know about Hashnode, but let’s go through the whole picture.
1. hardware
You will definitely need some storage space that holds those comments. However, unless you allow image uploading to comments, this should not add too much to your budget.
2. software
This seems obvious, right? You need to add this feature to your code base. And, as it is the case with every piece of code, you will have to maintain that code.
3. moderation
And finally we arrived at the most important, and arguably most expensive part. Like it or not, you will face spam and harassment sooner or later. You either need an awesome community to fight this for free (in terms of money), or you have to pay some moderators who do it for you. Either way you will need a properly written Code of Conduct, and you should prepare to make changes to it often.
There are also some legal issues around here, but if you are creating an actual, open-to-everyone social network site you already have a lawyer to cover these, do you?