This is good but let's look at from slightly different perspective. The author (Ewan) is so good, so I'll assume his hourly cost runs anywhere between $50 to $80 an hour on sys op.
Taking the least denominator - $50, if he spends just 5 hours a month trying to keep his server alive, active, update and making sure it's not down, responding to it if anything happens - that will cost him $200 + $15 per month to maintain his setup.
If you're about running a well maintained popular Wordpress powered blog, why go to the extend of doing it yourself when you can spend a little more, let the people who runs such services handle it. That way, you can keep doing your more productive work.
Unless, of course, he does nothing else but earns via the website, does it full-time and is happy spending his 4-hour a week on running the server.
You're absolutely right (except about me being good, I don't know about that), and if someone asked me about hosting Wordpress for a serious business, I'd probably just tell them to use WPEngine or similar.
But as a learning experience for me, I think this has been pretty priceless, and I enjoy it, bizarre as that probably sounds to the people who don't read HN :)
I agree with your reasoning that it might not be worth the time, but I think spending five hours a month on server upkeep is a little steep. I've got two Linodes running and I rarely spend more than an hour a month on server-related issues. Of course, I don't have millions of views, but if that's the case, my assumption is that this high traffic would come with enough revenue to make it worth my time.
So yes, I agree with your sentiment, but once you have servers up and running with good tools they don't take that much effort.
My blog is not that popular with millions of visits of a month but it's decent enough to choke and die under most shared hosting. Well, I once setup my Wordpress Blog to run on Linode's cheapest server with nginx, wp-cache, and all the jazz. But then I kinda remained tense most of the time and even minor instances at the wrong time give me the bumps.
Now, I use Page.ly and CloudFlare in the front (WPEngine is an equally good host and I'm considering for another Wordpress Setup of mine) and I don't even care about the host, I just care about my blog and how to update it with articles. It's costlier but it comes with it's reward.
If a blog is generating that much traffic it's probably generating a good deal of revenue as well. $200 doesn't seem like much if it is getting him consulting gigs.
Taking the least denominator - $50, if he spends just 5 hours a month trying to keep his server alive, active, update and making sure it's not down, responding to it if anything happens - that will cost him $200 + $15 per month to maintain his setup.
If you're about running a well maintained popular Wordpress powered blog, why go to the extend of doing it yourself when you can spend a little more, let the people who runs such services handle it. That way, you can keep doing your more productive work.
Unless, of course, he does nothing else but earns via the website, does it full-time and is happy spending his 4-hour a week on running the server.