What hosting provider are you using for your startup ? • Hacker News Board

Re: What hosting provider are you using for your startup ?

#31

Post by scaz » Wed, May 02, 2007, 1:55 AM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #10

I use SoftLayer http://www.softlayer.com/ .. I used to use EV1 but since they merged with The Planet they've not been as good. SoftLayer is made up of many of the "old" The Planet guys and offer some amazing stuff like free private LAN between your servers. Of course you're going to start at no less than $150 per month, and I spend almost $1000 a month, but.. this is business and you have to pay to get the goods. Peo…

SoftLayer is indeed very good. The virtual LAN is awesome - you can even setup a PPTP VPN connection and access your virtual LAN from it.

VPN in your gateway box at home and it is almost like having the servers in the other room. They don't charge you anything for data that goes over the VPN, so you can upload/download from your server without using your bandwidth quota - it is a great for pulling off site backups.

Re: What hosting provider are you using for your startup ?

#32

Post by scaz » Wed, May 02, 2007, 1:57 AM UTC

sabat wrote: post #21

spiralhead wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

problem with the $8/mo-type services is that you're limited as to what sort of tech you can use

True, although some providers are more liberal than others. Dreamhost lets you run your own stuff, like ruby, php, rails, etc. But yeah, it's a limited environment, and you're sharing. When you're first starting out, you may not care about that. But eventually ...

If you use FastCGI/Rails with Dreamhost, as soon as you get any traffic they will shut down your account for "Excessive CPU Usage". I've seen it happen to a lot of sites hosted there that are linked from Reddit/Digg.

Re: What hosting provider are you using for your startup ?

#33

Post by scaz » Wed, May 02, 2007, 2:31 AM UTC

mattculbreth wrote: post #27

Future Hosting at http://futurehosting.biz

I have to advise against these guys. Hate to do it, because the support is good, they seem like nice guys, and they are reselling SoftLayer servers, so the network is amazing.

But I've had VPS's on three different physical servers with them and they were all starved for disk IO. They take quad core servers with 16-32GB of RAM but only put two 7200 RPM IDE drives in them. A 7200 RPM IDE drive is good for about 120 I/Os per second, so if the server has 20 users you get a whopping 6 I/Os per second.

Check it out:

$ time ls -l /etc /dev/null

real 0m12.530s user 0m0.004s sys 0m0.046s

12.5 seconds to list a directory with ~150 files. This is from a VPS account I have with them with nothing running on it.

To be fair, most VPS hosting probably sucks just as bad.

Re: What hosting provider are you using for your startup ?

#34

Post by phuson » Wed, May 02, 2007, 5:59 AM UTC

dawie wrote: post #26

I went with MediaTemple. They are cheap and seem to offer scaling possibilities. Some people have warned me about them here on YC. I haven't launched yet, so I can't really give you feeback on them

Just wondering...what's wrong with MediaTemple?

Re: What hosting provider are you using for your startup ?

#35

Post by PStamatiou » Wed, May 02, 2007, 7:21 AM UTC

phuson wrote: post #34

dawie wrote: post #26

I went with MediaTemple. They are cheap and seem to offer scaling possibilities. Some people have warned me about them here on YC. I haven't launched yet, so I can't really give you feeback on them

Just wondering...what's wrong with MediaTemple?

I'm on a (dv) 3.0 rage and it's great. With plesk and root ssh I can do anything, even install another OS. default is RHEL.

Re: What hosting provider are you using for your startup ?

#36

Post by plusbryan » Wed, May 02, 2007, 7:39 AM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #10

I use SoftLayer http://www.softlayer.com/ .. I used to use EV1 but since they merged with The Planet they've not been as good. SoftLayer is made up of many of the "old" The Planet guys and offer some amazing stuff like free private LAN between your servers. Of course you're going to start at no less than $150 per month, and I spend almost $1000 a month, but.. this is business and you have to pay to get the goods. Peo…

likebetter.com's on softlayer and we're happy

Re: What hosting provider are you using for your startup ?

#37

Post by create_account » Wed, May 02, 2007, 1:32 PM UTC

PStamatiou wrote: post #35

phuson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wondering...what's wrong with MediaTemple?

I'm on a (dv) 3.0 rage and it's great. With plesk and root ssh I can do anything, even install another OS. default is RHEL.

So you control the entire server as root, you get 1 TB of bandwidth, and it's $50 a month?

Wow, that's the best combination so far... they do skimp on RAM and HD size, compared to some of the others.

Is it too good to be true? What disadvantages or problems have other people seen?

Re: What hosting provider are you using for your startup ?

#38

Post by mattculbreth » Wed, May 02, 2007, 2:11 PM UTC

scaz wrote: post #33

mattculbreth wrote: post #27

Future Hosting at http://futurehosting.biz

I have to advise against these guys. Hate to do it, because the support is good, they seem like nice guys, and they are reselling SoftLayer servers, so the network is amazing. But I've had VPS's on three different physical servers with them and they were all starved for disk IO. They take quad core servers with 16-32GB of RAM but only put two 7200 RPM IDE drives in them. A 7200 RPM IDE drive is good for about 120 I/O…

Hmm, never noticed poor disk performance. I'm not doing much with the server besides web and SVN right now, but it's something to keep in mind. Thanks.

Good guys though.