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Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?

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Re: Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?

#21

Post by raghus »

raghus wrote: post #19
mdasen wrote: post #7

AWS, no hesitation. AWS isn't that hard to configure. ElasticFox puts a nice GUI to it and while it will take a short while to get used to the AWS way of doing things, you're better off. With AWS, you have a nice spray files everywhere storage in S3, EC2 provides lots of RAM and CPU muscle, EBS provides RAID-level reliable persistent storage for EC2 that can be backed up to multiple data centers with a single API cal…

I use and recommend Slicehost. I'll tweak just one thing and that is that SH offers backups only for slices upto 2GB - for the 4/8/15G slices, there is no backup option. I am not sure why though.

I asked Slicehost and they say that because of the way they currently do backups, they can't guarantee that backups of slices larger than 2GB will get done in a reasonable amount of time

Re: Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?

#22

Post by timf »

anotherjesse wrote: post #8
jawngee wrote: post #3

Hosting on EC2 is stupid, it's way more expensive than linode or slicehost. I accidentally left one of their extra large slices running for a month, and it cost almost $600. You can get real metal for those prices. That said, if you have no problems setting up dedicated servers, than you won't have any problems with EC2. Use rightscale's free interface to manage instances, the rest is what you already know.

Hosting on EC2 might not be cost effective when you only need one server, but once you start need multiple servers the advantages quickly add up. I'm currently a customer of Amazon, Softlayer, Serverbeach and few cheap VPS elsewhere. I find that each has their advantages. Need cheap bandwidth - nothing beats Serverbeach (youtube ran their CDN on serverbeach boxes until they went to google). If you need a small number…

Do you have any experience with 10tb.com (or heard anything about them)? Their bandwidth prices list as better than serverbeach.

Re: Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?

#23

Post by shimon »

tdavis wrote: post #16
shimon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a very unusual configuration. Can you explain why you chose it? If you control the hardware and software, how does the VM layer help you scale better? Why not just install whatever packages you need on whatever servers you have, and skip the added complexity and performance cost of virtualization? Is there an assumption that at some point you'll move part of your operations to AWS or a similar service…

Sure (I really should do a real write-up on this...): So the main purposes are simple horizontal scaling and efficient use of hardware. Virtualization makes horizontal scaling simple because it's just a matter of cloning a particular machine (or machines). It makes efficient use of hardware because there's no need to have a dozen physical machines for a dozen different purposes, unless they all use a full machine wor…

Thanks! That's a pretty thorough reply, and I have to agree that it's hard to imagine an easier way to deploy new server instances than copying a VM. I think you can get pretty darn close with a package system like DEB or RPM, but in terms of being able to bring up and test an environment on a development machine, and then be assured the same environment will work exactly the same in production, this is a reassuring approach. I think it makes a lot of sense if you are expecting to require rapid scaling at some point in the future.

I'm a little unsure why you wouldn't just use EC2 in that case, although it might make sense to use a dedicated box for as long as you can and supplement that with EC2 instances when appropriate. Obviously you can get a lot of EC2-instance-equivalents out of a 16-core 32gb box, and your approach would likely be easy to integrate with EC2 when the time comes.

I'm not sure what your load trends look like, but if you're not likely to surpass what your dedicated server can handle within the next few months, this would seem like overengineering. I know you said it "ruins encapsulation" and makes a "clusterfuck of a server" but I don't quite see it. If this is a web app running on a modern gnu/linux distro, with maybe some DNS and cron jobs and email and blogs, we're talking about a very common setup that's running successfully on zillions of boxes. On the other hand, two or three times in five years I have had buggy Apache modules bring down a machine by leaking processes, and it would have been nice if that didn't take e.g. email down with it.

I think my biggest reservation about your approach is that it's weird. It's basically hand-made custom EC2, right? Is there an open source project somewhere to package up the tools to do this on one's own servers? (If not, maybe you should start one... :)

Re: Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?

#24

Post by VonGuard »

Two more things that AWS has that no other hosting company offers: Queue and Billing. The Amazone Message Queue service handles all those messages you pass from virtual machine to virtual machine. Companies far larger than Amazon have spent years working on message queues for proper scaling (RabbitMQ, AMQP), and Amazon just has one there that works for you off the bat. It makes scaling a lot easier.

Also, they have a bill pay system for charging credit cards for access to your systems. Just another boring bit of code you don't have to write yourself included free with the AWS service.

Re: Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?

#25

Post by mattmaroon »

raghus wrote: post #19
mdasen wrote: post #7

AWS, no hesitation. AWS isn't that hard to configure. ElasticFox puts a nice GUI to it and while it will take a short while to get used to the AWS way of doing things, you're better off. With AWS, you have a nice spray files everywhere storage in S3, EC2 provides lots of RAM and CPU muscle, EBS provides RAID-level reliable persistent storage for EC2 that can be backed up to multiple data centers with a single API cal…

I use and recommend Slicehost. I'll tweak just one thing and that is that SH offers backups only for slices upto 2GB - for the 4/8/15G slices, there is no backup option. I am not sure why though.

If you ask support, they'll tell you they've got some backup options in the works supposedly.

Re: Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?

#26

Post by ltbarcly »

I just ditched slicehost in favor of http://www.vpsfarm.com

$80 per month, 10mb/s unmetered, 2048mb RAM, 80GB disk.

Slicehost gives 400GB, 1024mb, 40GB for $70, which isn't too bad but 400GB is a garbage amount of bandwidth, and they charge $0.30/GB for overage.

vpsfarm doesn't seem to have any way to set up a backend network, so you are stuck on the one machine from what I can tell. I haven't asked about it, but for me this is fine anyway.

I've used slicehost, gandi.net, and vpsfarm's xen, and webfaction's shared hosting. I have to say, slicehost is very very nice, but the amount of bandwidth they offer is garbage. gandi.net is ok, but they seem to use raid 6, and my '2 unit' vm had terrible disk IO (otherwise it seemed ok, they charge $16 per unit, you can dynamically change it from 1 to 16, for example to use more resources during peak times. you get 5mb/s unmetered per unit, which is pretty cool, but the servers are in France, so add 100ms of latency to something in the US).

vpsfarm however gives very good cpu and disk performance, unmetered bandwidth, and it is a fraction of the cost of AWS if you want to run a single dedicated box. It is super bare bones, basically nothing is provided but a root login. So far I am really liking it.

Re: Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?

#27

Post by apinstein »

mdasen wrote: post #18
tdavis wrote: post #6

I've been setting up dedicated machines for years and looked into switching to AWS for TicketStumbler. I determined that it was actually considerably more expensive to obtain the same amount of resources (i.e. cpu/ram) on AWS because the pricing scheme doesn't lend itself well to having many always-on images. In the end I chose to run Xen on top of dedicated hardware, which has essentially bought us the best of both…

This is a very serious question as you clearly know what you're talking about from experience: how do you find it cheaper to run dedicated hardware? The reason I ask is because I've priced out 4-core servers with 16GB of RAM at SoftLayer and ThePlanet and they come out to around $700/mo with 2 drives and RAID 1. Amazon charges $750 for an Extra-Large instance (15GB RAM). There is the potential that you don't want to…

We've been running these numbers ourselves lately as well.

We find AWS much more expensive.

For instance, we bought a Dell 2950 / 2xQuad Core / 12 GB RAMB / 4x500GB RAID 5 w/hot spare for ~$4500. We have it in a colo where it costs about $150 a month for the space + bandwidth.

This is about equivalent to the $750/mo extra-large instance. There will also be additional AWS fees for transfer, storage, etc, but we'll go with $750 for simplicity.

That's a $600/mo premium, or $7200 a year. So I pay for the hardware within 8 months and after that it's $600 a month savings.

There is a lot of value in being able to provision extra server quickly, use cloudfront, etc, but it comes with a high price, IMO.

Re: Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?

#28

Post by tdavis »

shimon wrote: post #23
tdavis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure (I really should do a real write-up on this...): So the main purposes are simple horizontal scaling and efficient use of hardware. Virtualization makes horizontal scaling simple because it's just a matter of cloning a particular machine (or machines). It makes efficient use of hardware because there's no need to have a dozen physical machines for a dozen different purposes, unless they all use a full machine wor…

Thanks! That's a pretty thorough reply, and I have to agree that it's hard to imagine an easier way to deploy new server instances than copying a VM. I think you can get pretty darn close with a package system like DEB or RPM, but in terms of being able to bring up and test an environment on a development machine, and then be assured the same environment will work exactly the same in production, this is a reassuring…

Yeah, we should surpass it. As you said though, it's also very much about simplification (following the initial learning, anyway). EC2 may have simplified a little more eventually, but it was also even more expensive and difficult for me to learn up front.

As for a custom EC2, it's really the other way around; EC2 is a custom Xen setup. Having initially learned of virtualization before AWS and such cloud services, EC2 is the strange one to me. I'd only ever known "DYI EC2", so to speak.

Re: Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?

#29

Post by inovica »

What exactly do you want to do - surely you need to ask that question before deciding which route to go (or at least let us know and we'll try to help). We use AWS extensively for scaling up and down and it is AMAZING for this. We couldn't do what we now do without it - well, without a huge amount of investment anyway. It enables us to sell our products at a decent price point. If you are just wanting to host websites then a dedicated server might be your thing. How much bandwidth are you going to consume? Sometimes a dedicated account will give you a better deal for bandwidth.

Re: Ask HN: AWS or dedicated server?

#30

Post by alexisr »

VonGuard wrote: post #24

Two more things that AWS has that no other hosting company offers: Queue and Billing. The Amazone Message Queue service handles all those messages you pass from virtual machine to virtual machine. Companies far larger than Amazon have spent years working on message queues for proper scaling (RabbitMQ, AMQP), and Amazon just has one there that works for you off the bat. It makes scaling a lot easier. Also, they have a…

Yes but see here for an example of the smarter solution. That is: using RabbitMQ on AWS to get the best of both worlds. Link to AWS blog: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/12/running-everything-on-aws...
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