Geolocation queries are probably one of the bigger costs. Google is a rip-off here but to use them as an example, they charge $2.83 per 1000 lookups for the first 90k/month. You could easily spend a few hundred per month that way.
Geolocation queries are probably one of the bigger costs. Google is a rip-off here but to use them as an example, they charge $2.83 per 1000 lookups for the first 90k/month. You could easily spend a few hundred per month that way.
If you were trying to set up a replacement for this site that's cheaper to run, you could probably drop the geolocation feature, it's not really necessary.
Definitely agreed
MaxMind's GeoLite database is a good alternative to paying for ip geolocation. You don't typically need super precise data for something like this.
I work for IPinfo, and this is a tangent note on a tangent note. We offer a free IP geolocation database, and we recently started providing an unlimited API query service for free against that database.
Maintaining an IP geolocation database requires some upkeep. You have to download the database regularly (in our case, daily) to keep the data fresh, and you need a system in place to make it useful.
That’s why we created a dedicated API tier that offers unlimited requests. The data is being used by many open-source projects, so we’re simply doing our part to support them by providing both the data and the API infrastructure service. Last year, we processed over 2 trillion API requests across all our API services. There are many projects, Open Source and Enterprise, that are making billions of requests daily, and they are on a free tier plan.