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Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition

jpf.github.com

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Re: Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition

#61

Post by jesseendahl »

nirvana wrote: post #60

(We're not YC funded, but we did get into Startup Chile. Just wanted to share some options for people.) Here's the choices our startup has made: EMAIL: After much investigation, we decided to host our email in Iceland. This is due to the strong privacy laws in Iceland, and wanting a hosted solution outside the USA (and which had technical support, unlike google) We chose: http://1984hosting.com/ Pretty happy with the…

Gandi.net is a great international registrar. They are based in Paris, France, and took a public stance against SOPA. They are also the EFF's registrar and have a great web interface. Their slogan is "no bullshit™"

I have no affiliation with them, aside from being a very satisfied customer.

Re: Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition

#62

Post by pospischil »

pospischil wrote: post #43
pospischil wrote: post #40

Is the data collection methodology described somewhere? I'm questioning the accuracy given an error on our data (GoDaddy is not our registrar, namecheap is). It's also a bit suspect that namecheap is not listed as anyone's registrar after so many fled GoDaddy for namecheap a few weeks back.

OK -- the data is definitely out of date for at least one company (ours, custora). I wonder how common this is? Perhaps the cache was not cleared before generating the output? I forked the repo, ran it on custora.com, and eNom was (correctly) listed as the registrar. I'm re-running the full ycombinator list now, and will update when finished.

The results are in, and there isn't a very dramatic difference.

Looks like 8 companies have switched away from GoDaddy since the data was collected.

I've issued a pull request to jf for the updated stats.

Re: Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition

#63

Post by ispivey »

To everyone amazed by the various suboptimal decisions that startups make, think of it this way: the easiest, most straightforward solution is always the best one until it's more costly than some alternative.

I'd rather have my team working on product than researching domain registrars or hosts, since the odds of your registrar having a meaningful impact on your company's success are very low. Thus "just grab a big box on Rackspace" or "Namecheap is fine, just get it done".

Re: Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition

#64

Post by jf »

bgentry wrote: post #49
jf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I'm working on updating domain-profiler to better detect PaaS providers like Heroku, GAE, and Azure. In the meantime, you can see who's using Heroku by looking for domains that have an SSL certificate with a certificate type of "*.heroku.com"

That's only if they are using the free wildcard ssl addon. If they have their own cert and domain name (most do) then they won't show up like that.

Oh, good point. I don't know how I missed that. Thanks!

Re: Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition

#65

Post by jf »

keen wrote: post #57
jf wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This topic comes up every time I run this report. The reasons why people don't like GoDaddy are covered in both of the previous discussions on this report. Well worth reading! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2080469 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=746386

The older reports are broken, for me at least. They show the same stats as this year's report.

Older reports are in the git commit history on the GitHub project for domain-profiler.

Re: Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition

#66

Post by jf »

ispivey wrote: post #63

To everyone amazed by the various suboptimal decisions that startups make, think of it this way: the easiest, most straightforward solution is always the best one until it's more costly than some alternative. I'd rather have my team working on product than researching domain registrars or hosts, since the odds of your registrar having a meaningful impact on your company's success are very low. Thus "just grab a big b…

I'm glad you mention this because that was the basically the motivation for me to build this tool in the first place. I was selecting a DNS host for the startup I was at and was wondering: "what DNS host do all my friends use?". I found myself doing a lot of dig commands, so I wrote what became domain-profiler.

I don't think you should spend a lot of time selecting hosting, but I do think you should put in a little bit of research into what you pick. It really sucks when your website is unavailable for an hour due to issues with your DNS provider - especially when your TTL's are set to an hour.

Re: Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition

#67

Post by jf »

pospischil wrote: post #62
pospischil wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK -- the data is definitely out of date for at least one company (ours, custora). I wonder how common this is? Perhaps the cache was not cleared before generating the output? I forked the repo, ran it on custora.com, and eNom was (correctly) listed as the registrar. I'm re-running the full ycombinator list now, and will update when finished.

The results are in, and there isn't a very dramatic difference. Looks like 8 companies have switched away from GoDaddy since the data was collected. I've issued a pull request to jf for the updated stats.

Merged, thanks!

Re: Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition

#68

Post by p0ppe »

jf wrote: post #18
reinhardt wrote: post #11

Interesting stats; any chance to get data about the rest of the stack (web server, db, framework, etc)?

I'm always looking for clever ways to determine that information :) Have you seen underthesite.com?

And http://trends.builtwith.com/

Re: Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition

#69

Post by ispivey »

jf wrote: post #66
ispivey wrote: post #63

To everyone amazed by the various suboptimal decisions that startups make, think of it this way: the easiest, most straightforward solution is always the best one until it's more costly than some alternative. I'd rather have my team working on product than researching domain registrars or hosts, since the odds of your registrar having a meaningful impact on your company's success are very low. Thus "just grab a big b…

I'm glad you mention this because that was the basically the motivation for me to build this tool in the first place. I was selecting a DNS host for the startup I was at and was wondering: "what DNS host do all my friends use?". I found myself doing a lot of dig commands, so I wrote what became domain-profiler. I don't think you should spend a lot of time selecting hosting, but I do think you should put in a little b…

Yeah, absolutely. Making people better aware of best practices so they don't have to think about it is a great mission!
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