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The Five Stages of Hosting

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Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#81

Post by nchuhoai »

aneth wrote: post #73
nl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think you pointed it out, it's the cost. I love Heroku too, however, I can definitely see how Heroku can be much more expensive in the long run. 37signals just recently showed how their recent RAM addition was just a tiny fraction of what they would have payed at Amazon.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#82

Post by nchuhoai »

Love the article, just one note: I think #1 is not necessarily constrained as it may sound. Especially with Heroku, I think it is very easy to upgrade later on for most set ups, not too much special code or conventions. The major one would be probably the read only file system, but I'm sure using Amazon S3 is not that bad

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#83

Post by buro9 »

No-one has mentioned mixed hosting, whereby you pick from each category.

Something like Varnish you want a lot of RAM for, dedicated suits that well.

Web servers tend to be numerous and are just computational power (stitch all this gubbins together and return a string), their number vary according to demand and they suit virtual servers really well.

Now databases, these really need good disks, lots of RAM, decent CPUs. They are best dedicated or colocated. When things go wrong with a database server you really want to be able to rule out the invisible magic of other hosts, and the voodoo of being a virtual machine.

The best thing I can hope for whilst I scale is to find a provider that will sell me dedicated and public cloud instances that can live on the same VLan and still be reasonably priced.

I'm currently still totally with Linode, but with 9 instances, and an over-heated database server I know I'm getting close to the limits of what I can do there without re-focusing on splitting up the app when I could be adding new features.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#84

Post by Cherian »

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…

The problem I have with Ec2 is their configuration. They have small instances and then large instances. Nothing in the medium range with 4 cores, 2 GB ram, 64 bit etc. So if I were a small company and I need 2 medium instances (which IMO is what most people want) I’ll end up paying .34 * 24 * 30 = $244.8 in Amazon where as in Linode I pay $60 per month.

I run my staging boxes on Ec2 and production on Linode. The small micro instances are good for staging/dev with just $15/month. No other provider I know gives you a VM at such low costs.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#85

Post by dangrossman »

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 very much regretted using Amazon EC2 EBS disks for their site according to their blog. It killed their site for almost entire days, many times, for a long time. It's taken them months to undo that decision.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#86

Post by dangrossman »

LogicX wrote: post #74
larrys wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I once rented servers from a company that came highly recommended on WHT, back in 2004 or so. One day, all their servers went offline. There were hundreds of posts in the thread at WHT. They never came back. It turned out they were operating at a loss and had stopped paying their bill to the data center for so long that the building finally pulled the plug on their racks.

I'm reminded of this every time I log in to my now 12-year-old PayPal account. I see "1 open case" in my "Dispute Resolution Center" -- it's the case disputing my prepayment for the servers to this host, which PayPal said they would leave open forever, and if the principals of that company ever opened a new PayPal account they would have to resolve those disputes with all their former customers first.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#87

Post by edu »

yaix wrote: post #80
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?

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 wh…

What company are you using?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#88

Post by yaix »

edu wrote: post #87
yaix wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

What company are you using?

I am using netclusive, but I think they only have a German language site. Others and with English site are Server4you or Hetzner.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#89

Post by johnsea »

edu wrote: post #87
yaix wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

What company are you using?

It may be Hetzner (Germany). They have a 45 € root server with i7 quadcore, 16 Gb RAM, 2 x 3 Tb Disk (link: http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produ...). I'm very content with what they provide, even good/friendly support.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#90

Post by nl »

aneth wrote: post #73
nl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think companies outgrow PAAS platforms because they need more flexibility, not because the platform won't scale .
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