From Flickr user David StanleyThere was a terrific story yesterday from the blog High Scalability digging into the perform of scaling Tumblr’s backend architecture, which nowsupports 15 billion page views a month. The post compared the blogging platforms challenges to huge websites like Twitter and Facebook, both of which dwarf Tumblr in terms of workers and funding.
That explains why VentureBeat has been hearing from sources recently that Tumblr’s hosting fees are eye-popping large and expanding, climbing to a number of million dollars a month.
“You wouldn’t believe the amount they are spending just to preserve the site up and operating,” mentioned a source familiar with Tumblr’s expenditures. “It’s crazy thinking about they don’t have a genuine company model figured out however.”
As soon as you dig into the size of the technical challenge Tumblr is handling on a every day basis, it’s not as surprising as our source created it seem. Tumblr is expanding at 30 percent every month and as High Scalability points out, has 500 million page views a day, a peak rate of ~40k requests per second, ~3TB of new information to retailer a day, all operating on 1000+ servers.
The special follower model set up by Tumblr presents a 1 two punch: data rich posts full of pictures, music and video, considerably like Facebook and a Dashboard that lets users follow along in a manner similar to Twitter, with actual time updates coming from hundreds of blogs they stick to. This massive quantity of media is all stored on Amazon internet services.
“This is the fascinating thing about constructing a startup these days,” stated Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, an investor in Tumblr who sits on the board, speaking with VentureBeat by phone. “With the elastic cloud, you can reach a fairly enormous scale on a restricted amount of capital.”
But when a startup goes from getting a scrappy, fast expanding organization to a massive, top twenty property on the internet, the expense of having a third party like Amazon supporting your infrastructure can begin to outweigh the benefits. “Building our personal data center is something Tumblr will do at some point,” Sabet mentioned. “We raised a considerable quantity of capital with these challenges in mind.”
Tumblr raised $ 85 million in September of 2011, back when it had just 13 billion pageviews a month, a round that valued the business at $ 800 million dollars. “This is not a organization with a large burn rate,” Sabet insisted, pointing out that Tumblr nonetheless had funds left over from the $ 30 million it raised in December of 2010.
Sources say that with 60 staff and mounting expenses on the backend, Tumblr’s total burn rate is a number of million dollars a month and growing rapidly. That would still give it plenty of breathing space, nonetheless, at least two years based on their last funding.
Tumblr is experimenting aggressively with new income streams, lately rolling out highlighted posts, which let users spend $ 1 to attach stickers to individual blog posts. But so far founder David Karp has adamantly resisted the notion of injecting any classic brand marketing into the website.
Filed under: cloud 
