The Five Stages of Hosting • Hacker News Board

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#61

Post by daydream » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 4:56 AM UTC

CamperBob wrote: post #43

moe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also make sure to hire someone who has done it before if you want to go that route. "Racking" is an art-form in itself and the cabling alone can turn into a real problem[1] down the road if you take it too lightly for too long. You also want to plan for redundancy, power density etc. from the start. Sorting out messy cabling or adding redundancy to a badly managed rack on live hardware is not fun. [1] http://www.vibr…

Not a huge fan of zipties, honestly... there's a point where it's less trouble to just pull the cable and see what it's attached to, especially since we all get lazy when it comes to labeling our source/dest endpoints. Most of the shots of "cable messes" don't really look that unacceptable to me. I don't complain about messy cables until they start to look more like http://static.cray-cyber.org/General/LARGE/Cyber_86…

Don't use zipties as much as possible. A roll of velcro cable ties cut to length is much easier to handle and reconfigure.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#62

Post by caw » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 4:57 AM UTC

moe wrote: post #48

CamperBob wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a huge fan of zipties, honestly... there's a point where it's less trouble to just pull the cable and see what it's attached to, especially since we all get lazy when it comes to labeling our source/dest endpoints. Most of the shots of "cable messes" don't really look that unacceptable to me. I don't complain about messy cables until they start to look more like http://static.cray-cyber.org/General/LARGE/Cyber_86…

Matter of pain threshold I guess. Personally I prefer spending the odd hour on tidy zipping and labeling (yes, both ends of the cable) over cable-pulling during an emergency at 4am...

As a matter of opinion I use zipties for permanent cables (tray runs, other mostly fixed cabling), and velcro ties for in-rack where they're more likely to be updated. But then again zip ties are cheap and it's sometimes just easier to cut them off then mess with the velcro.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#63

Post by moe » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 5:01 AM UTC

caw wrote: post #62

moe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matter of pain threshold I guess. Personally I prefer spending the odd hour on tidy zipping and labeling (yes, both ends of the cable) over cable-pulling during an emergency at 4am...

As a matter of opinion I use zipties for permanent cables (tray runs, other mostly fixed cabling), and velcro ties for in-rack where they're more likely to be updated. But then again zip ties are cheap and it's sometimes just easier to cut them off then mess with the velcro.

Indeed, when I wrote "zipping" I actually meant velcro.

We're doing it pretty much the same way (in some racks we even have a velco-strip on the side as "parking zone").

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#64

Post by aneth » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 5:03 AM UTC

Why is it that a well written site can't scale quite large on heroku? (or similar - I use heroku so I'm biased) Perhaps I'm naive, but I feel one can go from heroku to stage 5 if you truly have a blowout.

According to their website (http://success.heroku.com/) some pretty large websites run there, including Urban Dictionary and Rapportive.

Sure, it may cost more, but not more than a full time sysadmin and you are buying efficiency and flexibility. You can buy a lot at heroku for $10,000/month (the minimal cost of a full time deployment / sysadmin / dbadmin,) including I'd imagine some rather hands-on support.

This article seems to downplay the great advances that have been made in "cloud" deployment. IMO, a cloud service like heroku beats the pants off of self-operated virtual servers and debatably some of the higher "stages."

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#65

Post by larrys » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 5:15 AM UTC

An option was left out which is to have your own T1 running into your own facility (that is not a data center). We did this for years ('96 to 2004) and had much better up time than with colocation with diverse paths and biometric security. We didn't need a generator either. Just an array of industrial batteries hooked up to a power inverter with a line conditioner could keep the equipment running for 24 hours if utility power went down. (This is much cheaper than anything you would buy commercially from APC or Triplite).

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#66

Post by nl » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 5:16 AM UTC

aneth wrote: post #64

Why is it that a well written site can't scale quite large on heroku? (or similar - I use heroku so I'm biased) Perhaps I'm naive, but I feel one can go from heroku to stage 5 if you truly have a blowout. According to their website ( http://success.heroku.com/ ) some pretty large websites run there, including Urban Dictionary and Rapportive. Sure, it may cost more, but not more than a full time sysadmin and you are b…

Why is it that a well written site can't scale quite large on heroku?

Is anyone claiming that? The linked blog post doesn't make that claim.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#67

Post by larrys » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 5:26 AM UTC

LogicX wrote: post #28

jbarham wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I have that exact setup with Voxel.net for $180/mo. Just bought a 8core 16GB, 120GB SSD & 1TB HDD /w 1gbit/sec connection for $141/mo from Incero.com

Curious about incero.com. Seems like a 1 man company essentially renting rackspace from Netriplex. How comfortable are you with that as a point of failure?

I'm also uneasy with people that put up a page like this which basically makes it seem (unless you read the first sentence carefully) that you are in the secure hands of a much larger organization.

http://www.incero.com/datacenter-network

http://www.linkedin.com/company/incero-llc

Thoughts? (Note all blog posts are by "Gordon") I have less issues of course if the idea is redundancy.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#68

Post by dangrossman » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 5:39 AM UTC

I've been stuck between #3 and #4 for years. I could really, really use more than the 8GB of RAM my largest (rented) servers have. Not being able to build high-RAM servers limits the sites I can build and the features I can offer on the ones I already operate.

For example, I built something like Mixpanel 2 years ago, but I never launched it because in load testing it really didn't take a very large client's worth of data to exceed the 4GB of RAM I could afford for a server, and hitting disk would make reporting far too slow. Buying a new server for each client (who may decide to cancel the next day) was not something I wanted to commit to. http://i.imgur.com/DAOEA.png

I've ended up at Softlayer after trying a number of hosting companies over the past 10 years. They want $25/mo/GB for RAM. It's almost like they want you to pay the one-time cost of the hardware every month... and then some!

Yet, supporting all this on my own, I can't really colocate -- I don't have the expertise or the money to get it off the ground, nor can I be there to drive to a data center and fix things if something breaks 24 hours a day. I have no employees. I have 60k users to support myself.

It seems like I'll be stuck here for a long time.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#69

Post by statictype » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 5:55 AM UTC

charliesome wrote: post #38

statictype wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then why do so many startups (and even established businesses like reddit and Netflix) use EC2?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#70

Post by dangrossman » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 5:55 AM UTC

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; you can get a VPS with those specs in that price range too. It's EC2 that's extremely expensive. I moved $1000/mo in fully utilized EC2 instances to dedicated servers for half the cost.