A Short Rant About Hosting

Post by ethank » Fri, Aug 26, 2011, 3:17 AM UTC

pmcginn wrote: post #22

ethank wrote: post #3

"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." My god that is good. I spent two weeks about three years ago going around the country looking at data centers to move our systems to (30+ servers that were currently in a co-lo and we were looking to go to managed/leased). We'd get pricing estimates that c…

Why do people think a spreadsheet is less likely to rip them off than a person? I mean, sure, if you want to, feel free to walk into a car dealership and pay sticker price. Go to the mall and buy that hardcover book at MSRP.

Post by chopsueyar » Fri, Aug 26, 2011, 3:20 AM UTC

gks wrote: post #4

jakewalker wrote: post #2

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…

Post by chopsueyar » Fri, Aug 26, 2011, 3:22 AM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #29

utunga wrote: post #10

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?

"When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine." - Pablo Picasso.

Post by dendory » Fri, Aug 26, 2011, 3:50 AM UTC

Post by timf » Fri, Aug 26, 2011, 4:01 AM UTC

jeremyw wrote: post #36

joshu wrote: post #34

I wish there was something with the flexibility of AWS (scriptable machines, disk, etc) but for whole machines and networks - no multi-tenancy.

If you can stomach month-long commits, many shops will give you bootp/dhcp visibility in your private vlan, so you can burn/update machines however you like. I managed 140 systems at Softlayer with ~500 lines of provisioning script.