"It grew week-over-week to well over 1,000,000 concurrent connections (chat + notifications). Luckily, Pusher worked well and was fairly inexpensive" I'd love to find out what they mean by inexpensive because from pusher.com/pricing 10,000 connections is $399/month. I have no idea what 100x connections would cost (hopefully not $39,900/month). Frankly, the pricing of pusher and other competitors seems insane to me. I was considering pusher for my startup, but I realized that if my startup became mildly successful, I'd be stuck with a bill that would force my business to rapidly build another solution or take on excessive debt. Why begin with prototype technology that could lead your startup (if successful) to become insolvent?
It's not as if there is a shortage of available tech for handling socket connections. It took about a week for me to learn enough node.js and build a service with socket.io that did everything I needed.
10,000 connections is $399/month is about the price of a dedicated server just for chat.
Depends on your application. Generally, if you have 1,000,000 concurrent users, shouldn't you be making some money or have investment to tide you over?
My app has ~3000 concurrent users, which comes out to 250,000 users per day making in the order of $XX,XXX per month.
At 1,000,000 concurrent, we'd expect to have 83 million users per day visiting the site. At that rate, we'd be making at the very least hundreds of thousands of dollars per month and could easily afford a $39,000/mo chat service.
Some apps have lower profit margins than others. Also some companies need to be able to integrate with their realtime channels on the backend (E.g. for doing custom realtime analytics, integrating with third-party services, applying transformations/filtering to messages in realtime, capturing certain messages for storing in your database, launching various realtime-based background tasks, etc... You do lose a lot of flexibility by going with a service like Pusher. Though it is well designed and very convenient.)
"10,000 connections is $399/month is about the price of a dedicated server just for chat." So you're saying that pusher is breaking even on their service and that a custom socket server should also expect to require similar hardware in order to serve 10,000 connections? If so, I highly doubt either is the case. I've seen 50,000 sockets served on a $20/month VPS using socket.io without issue.
For those who think Pusher $399 for 10k concurrent is a lot you have Realtime (http://framework.realtime.co/messaging) with $250 for 25k (including 251 million messages every month). Just saying...
$399/month is a tiny drop in that bucket. It is almost certainly not a good use of engineering resources for Secret to build their own in-house Pusher alternative, even if it would only take a single engineer a few days.
It's not as if there is a shortage of available tech for handling socket connections. It took about a week for me to learn enough node.js and build a service with socket.io that did everything I needed.