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The Five Stages of Hosting

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Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#71

Post by rhizome »

ricardobeat wrote: post #25
rhizome wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running my own servers out of my closet right here, on my ADSL (though formerly business SDSL) line, for over 10 years. A PC on the floor is fine to start with. It can run MySQL, your framework of choice and give you something you can show people. Evidence: I ran and wrote the backend to a site, starting with two PCs on a DSL line, before ultimately being acquired by EA (stopover at Rackspace). For a couple…

What kind of uplink do you have? An app that starts getting into the thousands of users will quickly saturate a normal ADSL line (1-2mbps up), and an SDSL/T1 connection is many times more expensive than a remote dedicated server.

Well, you move to hosting before you have thousands of users, silly! I'm talking POC/MVP stuff. My uplink is something like 384Kbit, plenty for showoff purposes.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#72

Post by LogicX »

statictype wrote: post #69
charliesome wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Reddit and Netflix have entirely different models at their 'web-scale'

They actually DO need to be able to scale servers up and down based on demand-usage, time of day, growth patterns, etc.

For them, the extra EC2 cost is negated by being able to spin up an extra 400 instances in the evenings, and turn them back down after everyone goes to sleep.

Under the dedicated server model they'd ALWAYS need to have an extra 400 dedicateds to handle that peak load (and in fact would need to have far more to handle additional spikes, projected growth, etc.) Those dedicated servers would sit idle, costing them money most of the time.

This is the difference between 'web-scale' and your typical startup's usage pattern.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#73

Post by aneth »

nl wrote: post #66
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.

It doesn't directly claim that, however calling these "The Five Stages of Hosting" implies that an application will likely progress through these stages as it grows, and that application platforms will be quickly outgrown when any sort of scale is reached. That's a pretty clear implication from the title and I'm calling for counter-evidence, because I don't think it's accurate.

I also host on Heroku applications that I hope will grow, and if that's a bad choice, I'd like to know others opinions.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#74

Post by LogicX »

larrys wrote: post #67
LogicX wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/c…

Yes -- I should've prefaced that this is a combination performance test, staging server, hot failover and evaluation of the company. They appear to have been in business for about 3 years (whois info + archive.org), and have positive reviews on WebHostingTalk: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1120499&h...

Info in that post seems to indicate more employees:

Real office location in Austin, TX

Experienced owners; over 8 years experience in the web industry, over 50 years combined business experience

I haven't even gotten my incero server yet (just ordered it Friday evening); but I am impressed by their offering - such as IPMI/KVM, which is often not offered by fly-by-night hosters (and not offered by EC2 in the form of out of band access).

I also happen to be in a unique situation of not needing 100% uptime for my startup - a few minutes of downtime to switch to a hot failover is a non-issue; so if Incero proves competent to me, I'll still give them serious consideration for production hosting (again, with proper hot-failover backup elsewhere); despite potentially being a one-man-show.

Difficult to say which is the lesser of two evils:

* Being the customer of a small business, having to potentially wait for response

* Being one insignificant customer among millions when there's a datacenter meltdown at AWS, with no phone number to call, and no neck to strangle until you get back up -- at the end of a long list of small customers.

I only casually mentioned Incero here, vs. Voxel in many other replies, as I believe voxel is the more appropriate choice for most startups.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#75

Post by charliesome »

statictype wrote: post #69
charliesome wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You should not make your own technology judgements based solely on what other people are using. There's too many people jumping on the cloud bandwagon who have no clue what they're doing.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#76

Post by devs1010 »

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…

I agree, I love EC2 personally, their mini server plan(or whatever its called) is great for keeping a production version of a project running while its still in an initial phase (very low user base) and then you can scale easily without having to learn anything new as you can run basically things the same as you do locally (I run Ubuntu locally and mainly develop for Tomcat so it makes it really easy to keep things the same on there). I looked at Heroku but as soon as I realized it would be rather expensive just to get regular datbase access (so I could run straight SQL if I needed to, etc) it was out.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#77

Post by mrud »

dangrossman wrote: post #68

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…

Hetzner offers Servers with 16GB of Memory at 49€/month (~$64) or 1and1 starting at $129.99. I don't know the current state of dedicated server hosting in USA but you can nowadays can get a lot of hardware very cheap

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#78

Post by LogicX »

devs1010 wrote: post #76
metajack wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree, I love EC2 personally, their mini server plan(or whatever its called) is great for keeping a production version of a project running while its still in an initial phase (very low user base) and then you can scale easily without having to learn anything new as you can run basically things the same as you do locally (I run Ubuntu locally and mainly develop for Tomcat so it makes it really easy to keep things t…

FWIW - you can run command-line SQL for all heroku instances: https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-sql-console

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#79

Post by michaelleland »

charliesome wrote: post #75
statictype wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You should not make your own technology judgements based solely on what other people are using. There's too many people jumping on the cloud bandwagon who have no clue what they're doing.

Making technology decisions based on what others are doing is the fastest way to make minor decisions. There's immense value in asking "what does company x do?" choosing that option, and moving on. In my experience time deliberating is time wasted--it's better to make a decision and move on. You can (and should) change later.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#80

Post by yaix »

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?

My hoster of many years charges for a similar setup 60 EUR, "unlimited" bandwidth (whatever you can pump though 100Mbit within a month), RAID10, etc, 75 GB external backup, as a managed server. And at another big hosting company you get an even bigger package for 45 EUR, not managed though.

However, I remember that hosting in the US is surprisingly expensive for some reason, and has been for many years. Don't know why.

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