Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
“You wrote a Python crawling script?” asked Wang Xiaodong when he heard Lu Zhou’s statement.
Lu Zhou explained, “Technically speaking it’s a ticket-buying app. I want to buy a server to try it out. Do you have any suggestions…”
“Stop screwing around,” said Wang Xiaodong as he interrupted Lu Zhou rudely. He said, “Do you know how to set up the server? Do you have a place to put it? If you tried to put it in your dorm, the entire floor’s circuit breaker will trip.”
Uh?
Is he exaggerating?
But listening to his tone, it seems that he has tried it before…
Wang Xiaodong continued to talk through the phone with a cold tone, “If you want to make some money, you can do some freelancing work. There’s no need to make an app. If you have money to spend, you can try renting a cloud server, which is definitely easier than owning your own server. You don’t have to worry about electricity and heat dissipation. It charges you by the amount of traffic and there are monthly and hourly prices.”
“Oh really?” replied Lu Zhou.
“You’re not an expert. Why are you trying to do this?” sighed Wang Xiaodong. He then continued patiently, “Also, did you even think about registering a domain name for your app?”
“Can’t I just use the server’s IP address?” asked Lu Zhou.
“No,” replied Wang Xiaodong immediately. He said, “For example, if you developed an app on IOS and you set a fixed server IP address in your code, once the cloud service operator changes the server device, not only would you have to rewrite the code and upload it again, but you might get rid of half of your users directly. Not everyone turns on automatic updates.”
The f*ck?
Lu Zhou had never heard of this before.
Wang Xiaodong paused for a second before he continued to say, “Also the most crucial part is that your crawler’s collection of data from the third party websites may be blocked by website administrators and they might block your IP address. This problem can be avoided with a cloud server. After all, Ali has countless IP addresses and you don’t have to bother with virtual IP addresses.”
The genius student became strangely talkative when talking about his expertise. He spoke like an endless stream. This made Lu Zhou thought about Huang Guangming. If he started to talk about the mechanics of playing Leblanc, he could go on for half an hour.
Of course, the content that the genius talked about was quite valuable.
Lu Zhou listened carefully. He even took a notebook and started to write notes.
“… If you’re crawling from 12306, the crawler itself will not use a lot of resources from the server, especially since Ali is doing a promotion for small enterprise users, there is a good discount. I think you should start with one million sending and receiving server capacity. It’s around 300 yuan a month. Wait till the number of your user visits go up, then you can upgrade the server. This is a lot more convenient than tossing out your own server.”
F*ck me, this guy really is a genius.
Lu Zhou felt like he had saved tens of thousands of yuan just from this phone call.
Of course, he still had to buy his own server, but it would have to be delayed until he received his money.
“Thank you, I’ll buy you food someday,” said Lu Zhou.
“We’ll talk about that later.”
When the topic changed from computer science to food, Wang Xiaodong’s enthusiasm instantly returned to zero and his tone became emotionless again.
However, Lu Zhou did not have any other questions nor did he wanted to talk for long either. He thanked him again before hanging up.
Lu Zhou held the mouse and went on Alibaba’s cloud computing page. He began to look for services.
Indeed, just like what Wang Xiaodong said, Alibaba Cloud was doing a promotion. The server had considerable discounts.
“A million pps 1 server only costs 300 a month, includes 100GB cloud SSD, 200 yuan to upgrade to 1TB… 0.3 yuan per extra GB. CPU, intranet bandwidth, sending and receiving capabilities can all be upgraded. 50% discount for three years…”
This price could be said to be quite attractive. If there were no unexpected circumstances, it would cost less than 1000 yuan per month to operate the app. If the user number surpasses the expected amount, he just had to upgrade the service.
“Okay, this is solved. Next up is to promote the app. I have to promote it before school begins,” thought Lu Zhou.
Advertise in Tieba to new student groups…
In short, the primary goal is to increase user volume!
Lu Zhou filled in the server renting application and went to the bathroom to take a shower. He dried his hair and returned to his dorm.
He was about to climb on the ladder and sleep when he suddenly smelled a pungent stench.
He turned around and saw that Liu Rui puked while laying on his side.
F*ck!
This kid was just sleeping! How did he vomit?
Lu Zhou did not have time to hesitate. He jumped off the ladder and took Liu Rui to the toilet.
“Go away… I can still drink,” said Liu Rui as he stumbled around. He reached out and pushed Lu Zhou.
Lu Zhou panicked and quickly said, “F*ck, Brother Rui, you can’t puke again! I’m warning you, I just had a shower!”
“barf…”
Lu Zhou: “…”
Lu Zhou showered for no reason and he could not sleep either. The dorm smelled extremely sour.
Liu Rui swore that this was the last time he was going to drink.
Liu Rui kept vomiting. When he was finally awake, he looked at the floor and Lu Zhou’s dirty clothes. Embarrassed, he quickly apologized.
They turned off the air conditioner and cleaned up the debris together before opening the door for ventilation.
After all this, Lu Zhou took another shower. When he came back, he took his mat and left for the class leader’s dorm room.
It was impossible to sleep without air conditioning.
…
The next day, Lu Zhou woke up early.
When he returned to his own dorm, Liu Rui was still snoring on his bed.
Lu Zhou did not bother him. Instead, he went to his desk and turned on his computer.
The cloud server application was quickly ready. He uploaded the script and the crawler started to go to work. It downloaded ticket, station and other information from 12306 before it summarized and sorted the data. Anyone could make an account and purchase tickets, receive sale reminders, automatic ticket refresh, etc.
It had all of the necessary features and it was also easy to use. The light blue background was boring but at least it was not annoying.
Lu Zhou downloaded the app on his phone and chose a station to test. He saw that the order was ok, so he canceled the order in the payment stage.
Then he spent an entire day to put the app on the android store. Stores such as Baidu mobile, 360 assistants, and other large Android software downloading platforms.
He looked at the number of downloads through the developer panel and saw that the number of downloads remained at 0. He sighed.
“I guess creating a successful app is not that easy. Having no users is a big problem.”
“I applied to a couple of free advertisement platforms. Don’t know when I’ll get accepted.”
Lu Zhou shook his head and turned off his laptop. He then stuffed his textbooks into his bag.
“Who cares. I’ll work on this for half a year or so. At least, I can use it as a learning experience.”