11–20 of 66 posts
Softlayer are great at this. Their sites lists prices over $1200 but talk to sales and you can get it close to cut in half and if you order enough servers you'll get it at 75% discount. I guess the value of sales staff knowing about the customer is quite high.
And I can also vouch for LeaseWeb. Their signal-to-bullshit ratio is indeed as excellent as their bang-for-buck.
I like when you do email sales and they don't get back to you ... someone lost a large order from us this month for that.
I'm now paying $405 / month for 6 servers, and they range from 2 dedicated db machines with 12GB and 16GB of memory to 1GB virtualized app and task servers that cost $10 to $20 per month.
What I've learned is that where it really matters, in terms of I/O performance, the dedicated servers make great machines, naturally. But the insanely cheap VPSs, which I use for distributed feed fetchers (task servers) and web servers, are wonderful because they are so inexpensive. I have redundant load-balanced machines, so when I need to take down an app server or it fails for some reason, nginx immediately routes around it. And it's costing me only $10 / month per machine.
And task servers have served me especially well as VPS. It depends on the intensity of the task, but for such a small expense, you get 4 cores and enough memory to go nuts. And if you're pulling off a task queue, you can programmatically spin up more to deal with a higher queue load. When you move entirely to dedicated machines, your spin up time is on the order of hours to get it prepped and connected.
I'm just thrilled that many decent hosting providers (with s for salespeople) offer both. I wouldn't last without being able to have a mixed setup.
I particularly like this nugget: > Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time.
What if the person doesn't know exactly what it is that they need? I know a lot of people who know software but aren't as solid on knowing how to scale the hardware side. For those people a table isn't really helpful. That said however, it should be an option to have that access. I personally prefer Joyent as a web host. They've shown really solid I/O numbers via their benchmarking. I've been a happy customer since i…
Softlayer are great at this. Their sites lists prices over $1200 but talk to sales and you can get it close to cut in half and if you order enough servers you'll get it at 75% discount. I guess the value of sales staff knowing about the customer is quite high.
Yes, differential pricing can be a boon to buyer and seller alike. If the seller could offer their product only at a single price point, they'd be forced to price it out of the range of some customers while leaving money on the floor from other customers for whom the expense is trivial. I get all that.
But no-one likes to feel like a chump being sized up by a con artist. Not even people with money to burn. When the default price is marked up so excessively, you're being taken for a ride, plain and simple. You should be boycotting them, not praising them. There's plenty of opportunity for differential pricing in the hosting space by offering a sliding scale of service-level agreements, higher resource limits, priority tech support, and other special features. Let's keep the douche bag negotiating tactics confined to the used car dealership lot.
As someone who runs both AWS and my own dedicated servers I'm starting to see a pattern.. MBA types talk about 'new trends', 'data centric startups' and new opportunities opened up by AWS and such. OTOH practical advice from real people with successful startups - marco arment, jakewalker, others, seems to focus more on the unseen problems of virtual and advantages of just getting your own server. Am I right?
Marco Arment and idlewords (I don't think you mean jakewalker, who is an attorney; you mean idlewords, who runs Pinboard) fit a specific profile:
They've bought dedicated servers before. So there's no learning curve required to buy more dedicated servers.
They're more than capable of serving as their own sysadmins, and in fact I believe they do so. So the economy of scale of, e.g., buying some Heroku dynos and letting one admin team administer your machine along with several thousand nigh-identical machines isn't as much of an issue.
Their services are well established. Neither Pinboard nor Instapaper are going away, at least on a timescale of years. They have a userbase and a revenue model and are well out of the "experimental" stage. They can afford capital equipment and be sure that said equipment will be utilized.
Their services aren't evolving rapidly, on a scale of days or weeks. They don't tend to beta-test features that would require lots of additional hardware if they got popular.
Their services scale fairly predictably. These are paid apps with a steady clientele that isn't just chasing fads. By this point I bet Marco can plot the rate of change of Instapaper's paid userbase on a graph and tell you within, say, 25% how big it is likely to be in six months. The service is unlikely to experience unusual usage spikes unless Marco deliberately creates those spikes by e.g. having a sale or releasing a new version. Even iPhone/iPad releases, which might drive sales, tend to occur on a fairly predictable calendar.
Their services just aren't all that large on the back end. They don't run big server farms, the kind for which you must spend a few hours per week just managing your inventory of spare parts and un-racking and re-racking things.
If your business also fits these criteria, then sure, dedicated servers are easier now than they have ever been, and there are still things you get with dedicated hardware that are harder to find in the cloud. (He's right about the predictable disk I/O.) But my company managers swear that AWS prices, full-freight as they are, are still a bargain relative to the humans and capital required to run our medium-to-large-sized datacenter with dedicated hardware.
[Disclosure: I work at an AWS-based Drupal hosting company and have never owned a dedicated server. ;)]