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The Five Stages of Hosting

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Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#31

Post by [deleted] »

antoncohen wrote: post #26
_delirium wrote: post #8

This is an excellent write-up; I like the metaphors, and it doesn't feel too much like it's trying to force a preordained conclusion. One option I have trouble fitting in, though, is the "run your own server locally". This might be #5, except it's often seen as actually a lower-class option than #4, rather than a step up: before you go all out with a colocated server, how about just a machine with Apache sitting in t…

> how about just a machine with Apache sitting in the office hooked up to your office's business-SDSL line? I don't consider that an option for real hosting. There are a lot of reasons why it is bad. Internet: DSL, or whatever your office has in probably not that reliable, and single-homed (your ISP goes down, so do you). Cooling: Offices are not designed to cool servers. The AC gets turned off at night and on weeken…

[deleted]

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#32

Post by LogicX »

This is an amazing article. I intended to write such a blog article myself.

One aspect I intended to cover (and will now do so here) is that of cost. I get very frustrated by cash-strapped startups which from day one are expecting to be 'web-scale' and need to turn up machines at the drop of a hat. Lets get real. I HOPE you have to worry about that... much, much later.

I'm quite pleased you started your article mentioning solutions like heroku. Unless you have some special-needs not met by a PaaS, this is where you should start. You should be writing code, not managing servers (this coming from an operations guy who has been managing servers for 12 years, and worked at a webhost). Once you scale far enough that its worth hiring someone to deal with the knowledge required to deal with the maintenance of managing your application stack, OS updates, security, etc -- THEN move on. Not a moment before.

Cloud servers are realistically not the price/performance/low-maintenance solution for MOST startups. You should get a VPS (Linode) or dedicated server (from a reputable company which can offer quick SLAs on replacing parts - like 2 hours at voxel.net). Dedicated servers are cheaper than you think. I pay voxel $180/mo for an 8GB quad core 1TB box on 100mbit/sec. It outperforms servers costing twice as much in EC2 - and thats not counting bandwidth or storage. Concerned about reliability? Buy TWO - In different datacenters. -- You're STILL saving money, and you have the exact same level of maintenance overhead as AWS (OS, Updates, full application stack); while reaping the performance benefits of bare-metal.

You do NOT want the headaches of colocation. You cannot pay your staff enough to stay local to the server 24/7 and the cost of extra parts on hand to make up the money over dedicated.

Your startup is not Google, so I won't get in to having your own datacenter. (Well done pointing out that they're not getting advice from your blog)

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#33

Post by there »

jbarham wrote: post #27
there wrote: post #14

as someone that has done colocation, dedicated hosting, and VPS, i'm a huge fan of dedicated hosting. colocation was expensive and the hardware problems were all mine. i was pretty much tied to my local datacenter because i didn't want to ship a server around (which would be at least a day of downtime). pricing can be hard to compare because of power/space/bandwidth. if the equipment i colocated didn't have IPMI supp…

> i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month. With who?

http://m5hosting.com and http://singlehop.com are two that i'd recommend.

one thing to watch out for with dedicated hosting providers is that the networks are sometimes not so great. you may get a great deal on hardware and tons of bandwidth, but if it drops packets all the time, it's not worth it.

make sure they segment you off onto a vlan (see http://jcs.org/mitm for why), make sure they are well peered, make sure they actually have staff at or near the datacenter they're running things from, and make sure they have the ability to block certain traffic from reaching you if you need them to (see http://jcs.org/sip for why) so it doesn't count towards your bandwidth total.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#34

Post by statictype »

there wrote: post #14

as someone that has done colocation, dedicated hosting, and VPS, i'm a huge fan of dedicated hosting. colocation was expensive and the hardware problems were all mine. i was pretty much tied to my local datacenter because i didn't want to ship a server around (which would be at least a day of downtime). pricing can be hard to compare because of power/space/bandwidth. if the equipment i colocated didn't have IPMI supp…

i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month.

This seems ridiculously cheap compared to something with comparable RAM/CPU on EC2.

Is there a catch?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#35

Post by fam »

_delirium wrote: post #8

This is an excellent write-up; I like the metaphors, and it doesn't feel too much like it's trying to force a preordained conclusion. One option I have trouble fitting in, though, is the "run your own server locally". This might be #5, except it's often seen as actually a lower-class option than #4, rather than a step up: before you go all out with a colocated server, how about just a machine with Apache sitting in t…

He forgot to add in #0 The parents' basement

Good: You (almost) have complete control over everything

Bad: Mom accidentally unplugged the power while vacuuming

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#36

Post by ricardobeat »

Lazare wrote: post #13

The may be off topic, but... At the moment we're mostly using option two (Linode VPS), and it's working pretty well. I've been repeatedly tempted by option option four (colo), but I'm kind of daunted by the task of getting started. I've been burnt by option three (renting a dedicated server) before - it seems like the worst of both worlds. Can anyone recommend a good guide to getting started with colo? Obvious questi…

Maybe you should test the waters with http://macminicolo.net/. I haven't used them (yet) but it's relatively cheap, and they will handle lots of things for you (including buying the mini). A dual-core mini can do a lot of work.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#37

Post by mattbee »

I wrote a similar article trying to segregate hosting stages (though beware I'm a hosting company promoting a product) - http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2011/11/03/the-cloud-is-your-inst... . tl;dr version is that I think the ultimate flexibility is in your application's install script. If you can deploy to one host, or several, and collapse or split out caching layers, databases etc. depending on resources available, you have a truly portable application that's ready to scale and/or move ISPs.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#38

Post by charliesome »

statictype wrote: post #34
there wrote: post #14

as someone that has done colocation, dedicated hosting, and VPS, i'm a huge fan of dedicated hosting. colocation was expensive and the hardware problems were all mine. i was pretty much tied to my local datacenter because i didn't want to ship a server around (which would be at least a day of downtime). pricing can be hard to compare because of power/space/bandwidth. if the equipment i colocated didn't have IPMI supp…

i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month. This seems ridiculously cheap compared to something with comparable RAM/CPU on EC2. Is there a catch?

No catch, you've just discovered how ridiculously expensive EC2 is.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#40

Post by AnthonyJoseph »

Lazare wrote: post #13

The may be off topic, but... At the moment we're mostly using option two (Linode VPS), and it's working pretty well. I've been repeatedly tempted by option option four (colo), but I'm kind of daunted by the task of getting started. I've been burnt by option three (renting a dedicated server) before - it seems like the worst of both worlds. Can anyone recommend a good guide to getting started with colo? Obvious questi…

I worked full time in a DC for a couple years, and pretty much all of the above is possible, but you will pay for what you don't do yourself. Most servers in the wild, at least where I work, are Dell or HP (both with 4 hour hardware replacement plans for about 1k/yr) If you buy your own, you should set it up, and configure it before you ship it out, and typically there will just be a racking fee (0-100$), if you just send out bare metal, the OS install etc, will be extra. Typically, colo's will have a KVM available for you to rent/use for setup or troubleshooting hardware issues (ie boot problems), if you want to go that route. EVERYTHING is negotiable. Not being a dick client goes a long way in getting things done. Ie, if the colo has a policy that any work being done is X$/hr, if you are cool, don't open tickets for inane things, and exhausted all your options, you can typically squeeze a lot of free work out of us.

How were you burnt w/ the dedicated server? IME, those are guaranteed NO downtime, and hardware failure is replaced at no charge and immediately , and a dedicated server failure takes top priority for the guys on the shift. Working in a fairly high pressure/low reward/24x7 environment is taxing, I sometimes miss it, but I like dev a lot more.

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