How PeerJ's architecture keeps costs down for academics - PeerJ Blog

"PeerJ was effortlessly able to support a 2000% increase in traffic on launch day with zero down time or any slowing of the site. A typical day also sees several website updates for enhanced features or bug fixes at the click of a button. How? Even 5-10 years ago, starting a new online company, particularly a publishing one, meant hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in upfront capital expenses. Not only would you have to buy all of the hardware yourself, but you had to maintain it (more salary costs) and upgrades were just as expensive and time consuming. Ultimately, that cost was then recouped by charging more for subscription fees, author processing charges, or grant funding allocations. Translation: it was more expensive to communicate academic research.  Things have completely changed today with the arrival of on-demand computing that is priced by the hour and can be near instantly scaled based on traffic loads. There are many reasons why PeerJ can afford to charge just $99 to publish for your entire career. Our backend architecture is one of those reasons and we’ve asked Senior Engineer in charge of our tech stack, Patrick McAndrew, a few questions about that technology. (Warning: be prepared for some slightly detailed tech talk!)..."