Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 94 posts

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

#71

Post by rphlx »

lsc wrote: post #54
ericb wrote: post #40

What users notice most is latency, not bandwidth. For example, if every page asset has an extra 1 second latency, then you are adding several seconds to your base page load time as all those 1 second delays stack up. First the main frame has to load, then if you have a subframe, the subframe has to load, then finally the content in it. Nest frames or other content, and suddenly your site seems sluggish for a single u…

the latency difference between fios and co-lo is going to be tiny. 10ms vs 50ms at most. (yeah, 5x difference, but it's still fifty friggen milliseconds)

Same for cable.. on TWC I can ping 1,500 miles away in ~60ms.

L3 latency is usually a small fraction of the initial website load time. Inline the js + css, strip whitespace, enable gzip, use memcached, get a server that can fit the whole DB in RAM, etc.

Preventing packet loss is very important, though (a TCP retrans adds 2-3 seconds). I do think datacenters have a real edge there.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

#73

Post by fierarul »

lsc wrote: post #56
Zak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One-time setup fees seem like one of the dumbest things a hosting company can do. I can think of few more effective ways to keep me from trying a service.

speaking as a hosting company, setup fees are /really really nice/ - I've got to go buy a rather expensive server and get it to you - now, obviously, I've priced it so that I make a profit long term, but I need to go buy another server /now/ not long term. Personally, I address this by having pre-payment discounts. cover your account for a year and I knock off 20% (and usually use the cash to go buy a new server) - I…

I wouldn't know what the margin is in this business but I assume you buy a bit over the capacity, specifically to allow new customers to come in.

Perhaps setup fees /kinda/ make sense if you are some high-quality name in the business and people will know they are staying long-term. But if I see a well-known company without setup fees and your company with a setup fee it won't take long to decide.

What you mentioned is far more decent: a bonus for payment in advance but I don't see how they expect to charge me the equivalent of 3 months in advance just to test them out.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

#74

Post by iamelgringo »

fierarul wrote: post #7

Over an year this costs you about $1200 for bandwidth + $500 for hardware + electricity/service. Let's say an even $1600 or ~ $135 / month. $135 / month buys you two 1.5GB Linode instances or one 2GB Slicehost instance (I use Slicehost but they seem to be much more expensive compared to Linode). The reason I see renting VPSs, especially at the beginning, as a smart thing is that you are postponing the actual hardware…

It's not really about cost, although that's part of it. I didn't mention it in my original question, but I also need quite a bit more performance than I'm getting with EC2.

It's about getting an order of magnitude more CPU ( Quad ore at 3 Ghz rather than single compute instance on EC2, which is spec'd at a single core 1.0 to 1.2 Ghz Opteron or Xeon from 2007. Ref: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Compute_Unit_.... I need the extra CPU for what I'm doing.

But, the killer feature for me is about getting several orders of magnitude better on disk IO by using SSD's. I'm doing a ton of relational queries for my site, and the IO speeds on EC2 are killing me. Linode or Rackspace Cloud might be a bit faster than EC2, but the speed differential between SSD's and rotating disk is huge.

Running my datastore off of SSD's rather than spinning disks allows me to stick with postgres as my db. While sexy and quite fun, I'm very leery of choosing a NoSQL solution. I really don't want to spend the extra development time bolting the relational features I need onto a non-relational database.

So, while it might take me time maintaining the server, it's going to save me a crap load of time.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

#75

Post by zwetan »

lsc wrote: post #67
zwetan wrote: post #63

why oh why people does not look around for dedicated host price before going into that much trouble ? see this for example http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ks/ (note: I don't work for OVH) that's about 25$/month, look at the specs for yourself. the pros: * if the hardware go down in flame they replace it. period. * a nice choice of distrib (Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows) * the f cking bandwidth (agreed it would be mainly f…

That box has only one disk, which is inappropriate for most uses. Sure, they'll put up another server for you, but that's not the hard part; the hard part is restoring your backup. Until you are large enough to have redundant everything, mirrored disk, I think, is a must.

so ?

there is a 100MB extern drive accessible via FTP, and rsync is your friend

at the very worst, when your server is on a 100MBps link then it's dirt cheap (in time and money) to do the backup on the cloud

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

#76

Post by lsc »

zwetan wrote: post #75
lsc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That box has only one disk, which is inappropriate for most uses. Sure, they'll put up another server for you, but that's not the hard part; the hard part is restoring your backup. Until you are large enough to have redundant everything, mirrored disk, I think, is a must.

so ? there is a 100MB extern drive accessible via FTP, and rsync is your friend at the very worst, when your server is on a 100MBps link then it's dirt cheap (in time and money) to do the backup on the cloud

if you do that, and you test your backup, and you are okay getting paged, waking up, following the procedure, then dealing with the half day of downtime, sure, that's fine.

but a mirror is still a whole lot easier. it just keeps chugging through the drive failure.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

#77

Post by iamelgringo »

kitcar wrote: post #19

Because you are in the software business, not the hosting business. Over the long run, a hosting company should be able to keep your website up and running "in less time", "higher quality", and "cheaper" than you can. If your business can host websites more efficiently and effectively than a hosting firm, maybe you are in the wrong business and should become a hosting company for other firms?

Interesting point. But, I don't think it applies. We're in the computing business. Computing is not just software. It's hardware. Developer time is expensive, hardware is cheap. Throwing cheap hardware at a problem rather than spending weeks or months coding around a VPS's performance limitations seems like a no-brainer to me.

My particular use case is that I need performance and cheap computing power, and I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of reliability to get there.

And, I'm sure that over the long run, you're right. A hosting company will be a better choice.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

#78

Post by lsc »

fierarul wrote: post #73
lsc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

speaking as a hosting company, setup fees are /really really nice/ - I've got to go buy a rather expensive server and get it to you - now, obviously, I've priced it so that I make a profit long term, but I need to go buy another server /now/ not long term. Personally, I address this by having pre-payment discounts. cover your account for a year and I knock off 20% (and usually use the cash to go buy a new server) - I…

I wouldn't know what the margin is in this business but I assume you buy a bit over the capacity, specifically to allow new customers to come in. Perhaps setup fees /kinda/ make sense if you are some high-quality name in the business and people will know they are staying long-term. But if I see a well-known company without setup fees and your company with a setup fee it won't take long to decide. What you mentioned i…

Yeah, well, I did what I did mostly 'cause i recognize that I don't have the name recognition to carry off the setup fees... your points as to the customers perception of setup fees are all very valid.

Really, it's less about margin, though, and more about credit. If I had more, it wouldn't really matter... but I don't, so it does.

for a while I was renting out whole servers at nearly co-lo rates... with the catch that the customer needed to pay a setup fee that would cover the parts cost of the server up front.

It was pretty popular, actually; I only stopped doing it because it put me in a bad place as a provider... thing of it is, sometimes you really do need to fire your customers. I don't want to be in a position, though, where I get a bonus for firing my customers.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

#79

Post by fierarul »

iamelgringo wrote: post #74
fierarul wrote: post #7

Over an year this costs you about $1200 for bandwidth + $500 for hardware + electricity/service. Let's say an even $1600 or ~ $135 / month. $135 / month buys you two 1.5GB Linode instances or one 2GB Slicehost instance (I use Slicehost but they seem to be much more expensive compared to Linode). The reason I see renting VPSs, especially at the beginning, as a smart thing is that you are postponing the actual hardware…

It's not really about cost, although that's part of it. I didn't mention it in my original question, but I also need quite a bit more performance than I'm getting with EC2. It's about getting an order of magnitude more CPU ( Quad ore at 3 Ghz rather than single compute instance on EC2, which is spec'd at a single core 1.0 to 1.2 Ghz Opteron or Xeon from 2007. Ref: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Comput…

Well, if it's very high disk IO that you need then you either self-host or colocate. Go with self-hosting and see how far along you get; you can always colocate afterwards.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

#80

Post by code_duck »

lsc wrote: post #68
code_duck wrote: post #42

I'm done with slow disk on cloud hosts. But actually the one with slow disk was Slicehost, and I AM fed up to hell with that. They caused me no end of problems until I figured out they were the problem. It's a bit deceptive, really, since you're promised your fair share of resources - then it turns out you're disk i/o is as low as 3/mb a sec. W T F. Instead of going nuts and hosting in my garage, though... I just cha…

3MB/sec isn't a fair share of a disk? I think it is. to start, your cheap sata disk is going to max out a 100Mb/sec for /sequential/ transfers. Now, cut that in quarters, because two different guests streaming data to the disk make sequential random. so you have 25MB/s. double it, as they are probably raid-10ing the disk (at least, that's what I do) so we have a best case 50MB/s to share. Now, they are probably in a…

Your calculations assume I am talking about bog $20/mo VPS. Nope, I'm talking about a $160 a month system with 2GB ram, 72 MB HD space, etc. As far as I know 4-8 of those fit on one of their systems. If I had a 256/384 slice, yeah, I doubt if the rest of the system could handle enough traffic that the I/O would matter.

My 2 year old, nothing special home desktop gives me 72 mb/s. I expect that a pricey VPS will perform at least as well. If not, I could get a dedicated server for $40 more.

Running hdparm, slicehost gave me 3-48 mb/s. When it was down under 20, my server was choking doing the simplest tasks - like say, logging into ssh while actually serving HTTP requests. Performance was sucking. Customers complained. I tried tuning my DB. Nope, it wasn't my fault. System load ranged from 3-50 for no apparent reason.

The same test on Linode yields 98-165 mb/s. I moved the server to Linode (saving $80 a month!!), have added new features and increased usage, and performance remains excellent. No mysterious slowdowns, no high system load. Everything hums along without a hitch, proving to me it is Slicehost's problem, not mine. Thank god it is theirs to deal with now. This caused me a lot of stress and I'm so glad to be on a host that is giving me what I am paying for.

I'm sure you know more about this from that side, but this is my experience as user.

3mb/sec is unusable for a moderately busy server. The fact that other hosts give better performance says all I need to know.

If they gave a steady 30-40 mb/s, from your calculations, that's what I'm paying for and yeah, that's probably all I need. The unsteadiness, though, and the dips to near nothing - that is unacceptable. I'm not a hobbyist. This is a business, other businesses depend on us.

Post reply on HN