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The Five Stages of Hosting

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Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#51

Post by cwilson »

I'd like to add that for different parts of your application, or website, it's ok to use different services.

For example, a large majority of tech startups have a WordPress blog that is totally separate from their actual web application. In many cases it also drives the marketing front-end of their website.

So while my main application may be on Heroku or AWS, I like to fire up a free PHPFog (I don't work for them, you could use DotCloud, or likely another alternative as well) account, and have my WordPress install setup there. It's insanely easy to setup (it's all Git based), and the free account will get you a long way.

It's also nice to know that the WordPress install lives on an entirely different server, so if you get slammed with great press, your entire stack isn't feeling the heat. There are security fears here as well, so I like having it separate.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#52

Post by falien »

18pfsmt wrote: post #41
_delirium wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it depends on your use case, but I don't see those as necessarily worse failure modes than other options. For example, Reddit has in the past been down for >20 hours at a time with its cloud solution. With a local solution, you would want offsite backup for the catastrophic "building burned down" failure mode, but most local failures can be solved in that kind of timeframe with the "drive to Frys, buy new s…

You've raised what I consider to be the elephant in the room, and you can see all the responses quick to tell you why can't do that> It simply doesn't fit with what most people consider acceptable, which is that one must be a user for everything internet related. Most of us have at least ~5Mbps/ 2Mbps (up/down) connections at home that are always on with minimal latency. The gaming service OnLive shows that these con…

This is against many consumer ISP ToS and they can/will arbitrarily start blocking traffic on certain default ports depending on how draconian they are about it. I agree that hosting on a home server is an option (even a good one) for some people and usecases, but you are still subject to the whims of someone else, and in this case you often have no recourse as you are violating the ToS.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#53

Post by sopooneo »

LogicX wrote: post #32

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 menti…

I think you are implying that cloud servers are different than Virtual Private Servers. I am new to this, so forgive my ignorance, but how are they different? Is it just that effectively that with standard cloud server options, you can spin up new/multiple instances, whereas with a VPS, you've just got the one?

Or is it more about how it is all handled in the background?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#54

Post by dlevine »

cwilson wrote: post #51

I'd like to add that for different parts of your application, or website, it's ok to use different services. For example, a large majority of tech startups have a WordPress blog that is totally separate from their actual web application. In many cases it also drives the marketing front-end of their website. So while my main application may be on Heroku or AWS, I like to fire up a free PHPFog (I don't work for them, y…

Or, if your Wordpress site gets hacked, your entire site isn't p0wned. I have a friend who had his WP site hacked last week. Fortunately, he hosts his application on a separate server, so there were no (major) security issues.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#55

Post by LogicX »

metajack wrote: post #45
LogicX wrote: post #32

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 menti…

I had some poor experiences with dedicated servers at well known providers. Essentially if the hardware fails, they'd rather fix it than get you into something new so you can be back up and running. My site ended up offline for several hours, several times, so that some tech could run hardware diagnostics, etc. EC2 may be expensive, but if anything goes wrong, I can boot another instance in seconds and abandon the ol…

You can find the full voxel SLA here: http://voxel.net/sla

The nice thing about going with a larger dedicated host like Voxel is that they have extra hardware & servers on hand.

In fact, they even have instant-provisioning of dedicated hardware: http://voxel.net/voxservers

I worked for, and have used dozens of dedicated hosts over the years (I spend far too much time on http://www.webhostingtalk.com ), and can totally agree that these are common issues with dedicated servers.

To each their own; just sharing my $.02 perspective on the situation ;)

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#56

Post by snowmaker »

metajack wrote: post #45
LogicX wrote: post #32

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 menti…

I had some poor experiences with dedicated servers at well known providers. Essentially if the hardware fails, they'd rather fix it than get you into something new so you can be back up and running. My site ended up offline for several hours, several times, so that some tech could run hardware diagnostics, etc. EC2 may be expensive, but if anything goes wrong, I can boot another instance in seconds and abandon the ol…

What dedicated hosts did you use?

We've been using Softlayer for years with ~100 servers and have never had this problem. No host is perfect but overall it's been a good experience and a lot cheaper than EC2.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#57

Post by snowmaker »

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…

One more vote for dedicated hosting. It's a sweet spot for people who need anywhere from a handful to hundreds of servers. You have to get very large or have unusual requirements before colocation makes economic sense.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#58

Post by LogicX »

sopooneo wrote: post #53
LogicX wrote: post #32

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 menti…

I think you are implying that cloud servers are different than Virtual Private Servers. I am new to this, so forgive my ignorance, but how are they different? Is it just that effectively that with standard cloud server options, you can spin up new/multiple instances, whereas with a VPS, you've just got the one? Or is it more about how it is all handled in the background?

So Amazon uses some of the same technology (Xen); but their packaging, support infrastructure, and pricing model make it very different than a VPS offering.

VPS you typically get bandwidth, storage, etc. included - and its 'uncomplicated' - You pay one monthly fee, it covers it all.

AWS can be viewed as both fault tolerant, and additional probability of fault due to the extra complexity they've built in (they've gone down for substantial periods due to hiccups in this additional complexity).

A good VPS provider will make the particular system you're on fault-tolerant on its own: dual power supplies, RAID arrays, etc.

AWS doesn't care about making any particular machine fault-tolerant, because their model is that you should spin up a new instance, and throw away the one that failed.

Thats great for a 'web-scale' enterprise that has invested the resources making their site operational for that mindset. For early-stage startups where dealing with a failed instance means their site is down until they create or restart a new one; the advantage goes to VPS IMHO.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#59

Post by kijin »

yanowitz wrote: post #5
kijin wrote: post #2

You forgot another popular option that a lot of people use as an alternative to the "monastery" stage: shared hosting (shudder).

Virtual Servers (item 2) are essentially a form of this, albeit with slightly more protection. Debugging application performance in a virtualized (and opaque) environment is...a challenge.

I don't think it would be fair to subsume shared hosting under "2. The Dorm Room" just because of performance characteristics. A virtual server gives you a lot more freedom to choose your software stack than most shared hosting plans can ever approximate.

Even when it comes to performance, there's a world of difference between the average GoDaddy hosting plan and a medium-sized Linode.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#60

Post by kornholi »

cagenut wrote: post #15
reedlaw wrote: post #7

Where would you go to find a "condo"? There are no links in the article. What is the pricing/reliability/support like having your own server in someone else's data center?

What this (very good) post calls the "condo" tier is what the hosting industry calls "co-lo" or "co-location". Search that term and you'll get more options than you can probably wade through. The "rackspace" option (biggest name for good quality mid-tier sized setups) is http://www.equinix.com/ Huffington Post, Gawker, BuzzFeed, CafeMom and AdMeld all co-lo with http://www.datagram.com/ , most of them are within a fe…

Equinix is a little on the expensive side... Just a little bit.
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