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Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers

serverhunter.com

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Re: Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers

#41

Post by markbnj »

pheeney wrote: post #37

Is there a tech writeup on how the site was built? What software is behind the faceted search? The site and search experience is fast and I'd love to learn more about how it was built.

It looks to me like the default result set has 11k or so documents, which is very small. A couple of years ago I helped build a specialized vertical search engine that provided faceted search over a similarly-sized dataset. We used django on the front end with elasticsearch on the backend, and it was blazingly fast. I credit our talented django developer with the speed and fluidity of the front end, and I credit elasticsearch with providing amazingly fast aggregated results across that admittedly tiny set of documents.

Re: Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers

#42

Post by ServerHunter »

pheeney wrote: post #37

Is there a tech writeup on how the site was built? What software is behind the faceted search? The site and search experience is fast and I'd love to learn more about how it was built.

Not yet! We've actually switched stacks and rewritten the backend a few times already, which might make for a great future story. I'll try to make some time after our upcoming server migration. :)

Re: Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers

#43

Post by tomaspollak »

ServerHunter wrote: post #23
tomaspollak wrote: post #14

Looks good, congrats! It would be awesome if you could include links for testing speed and latency for each provider (when available).

Thank you! Unfortunately, I haven't found many providers offering this, but I'll look into adding it for the ones that do. In the meantime, you could ping their domain name to get a rough idea (if they don't use CloudFlare or block ICMP) and contact their sales team to see if they can hook you up with something more accurate.

Generally the "serious" ones do, and if not then we should try to encourage them to do so. A few examples after a quick Google search:

- https://www.linode.com/speedtest - https://www.futurehosting.com/network-test-files/ - https://speed.hetzner.de/ - https://turnkeyinternet.net/speed-test/

Re: Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers

#44

Post by fxfan »

Question for hosting and db experts- should one go for ssd or HD when hosting? I'd think HD is better because you can anticipate failure using smart. Ssd has the advantage of being faster to load data.

On that note- are database systems now able to make better use of ssd's? Most optimizations centered around contiguous storage in hdd era.

Re: Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers

#45

Post by ServerHunter »

fxfan wrote: post #44

Question for hosting and db experts- should one go for ssd or HD when hosting? I'd think HD is better because you can anticipate failure using smart. Ssd has the advantage of being faster to load data. On that note- are database systems now able to make better use of ssd's? Most optimizations centered around contiguous storage in hdd era.

You'd always want some kind of RAID mirroring with off-site backups, regardless of HDD vs SSD. If you take care of that, you can safely go with SSD. :)

Re: Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers

#46

Post by pheeney »

ServerHunter wrote: post #42
pheeney wrote: post #37

Is there a tech writeup on how the site was built? What software is behind the faceted search? The site and search experience is fast and I'd love to learn more about how it was built.

Not yet! We've actually switched stacks and rewritten the backend a few times already, which might make for a great future story. I'll try to make some time after our upcoming server migration. :)

Is there a TLDR version to tide me over in the meantime?

Re: Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers

#47

Post by pheeney »

haggy wrote: post #40
pheeney wrote: post #37

Is there a tech writeup on how the site was built? What software is behind the faceted search? The site and search experience is fast and I'd love to learn more about how it was built.

With only ~11,000 entries and what looks to be a pretty defined set of searchable fields, it should be a simple setup. I'd guess the search is powered by either Elasticsearch or Postgres/MySQL. I think the more interesting part of the product is going to be the procurement of available servers which I don't have any guesses outside of public API's + web scraping to do that.

What was interesting to me is the search ID, https://www.serverhunter.com/?search=157-857-0B2 for example. Each change results in a new search ID. If you toggle the same option on and off, the search ID is different every time. I originally thought it was a way to reference a unique combination of the facets but it seems to create a new search session for each query.

Re: Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers

#48

Post by pheeney »

markbnj wrote: post #41
pheeney wrote: post #37

Is there a tech writeup on how the site was built? What software is behind the faceted search? The site and search experience is fast and I'd love to learn more about how it was built.

It looks to me like the default result set has 11k or so documents, which is very small. A couple of years ago I helped build a specialized vertical search engine that provided faceted search over a similarly-sized dataset. We used django on the front end with elasticsearch on the backend, and it was blazingly fast. I credit our talented django developer with the speed and fluidity of the front end, and I credit elas…

Doesn't elastic search require a decent size server just to run with no data? Curious about the costs of running elastic search for a small number of documents compared to the low cost of running django. For example the frontend could be static and hosted on S3 for pennies while elastic search seems to recommend at least 8 GB of ram which would be $40/mo on some lost cost VPS providers. Pretty big price difference for a smaller site with a small record set that wants a fast search experience.

Re: Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers

#49

Post by jmngomes »

ServerHunter wrote: post #17
tmikaeld wrote: post #13

Most VPS hosters "share" CPU time between users on a host server (Which mean CPU type/speed doesn't mean much). So it would be great if you could filter for that on serverhunter to paint a fair(er) picture, because a few hosters give dedicated cores by default. When we tried benchmarks on the Hetzner Cloud we found that some servers had as low as 10% max CPU on a crowded host server, which makes sense as to why they…

That makes sense! Unfortunately, it'll be hard to obtain benchmarks for every plan with every provider, and it'll be even harder to get enough benchmarks with each provider to paint an accurate picture. Even with the same provider, there can be massive differences between VPSs, it just depends whether you end up on an idle host node with no noisy neighbors or one where everyone is busy mining their favorite cryptocur…

Perhaps you could partner with https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/ , they have different benchmark data for major providers.

Re: Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers

#50

Post by superasn »

ServerHunter wrote: post #12
rambojazz wrote: post #10

How did you collect all this data? How do you keep it updated?

Custom crawlers, API implementations and lots of automation. Like most search engines, it's not flawless, but it's getting better every day. :)

Yeah, some info seems to be incorrect. Like it shows vmhaus has Windows instances but after signing up I could only find *nix.
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