The power of strong metaphors strikes again.
The Five Stages of Hosting
101–110 of 184 posts
Re: The Five Stages of Hosting
#102Aww, this is a gem. Beautifully written and none of the bias and factual errors that you commonly see in articles on this subject.
Plus the metaphor pretty much holds up. That is rare in this kind of post.
Re: The Five Stages of Hosting
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 4…
> They actually DO need to be able to scale servers up and down based on demand-usage, time of day, growth patterns, etc.
Cost wise, your best scenario is usually going to be dedicated or colo + EC2 or similar for overflow / peak.
If you do just dedicated hosting you need to leave enough spare capacity that you feel comfortable handling the spikes for whatever the worst case provisioning time your host has.
It's still cheaper than EC2.
But if you do dedicated + ability to spin up EC2 to take peaks, you can go much closer to the wire with your dedicated hardware, and increase the cost gap to EC2 massively. You don't need as much spare capacity to handle peaks any more. You don't need as much spare capacity to handle failover.
It's rare for it to pay off to spin up EC2 instances to handle inter-day "normal" load changes, though - most sites don't have differences that are pronounced enough over short enough intervals for it to be worth it. If you do the dedicated + EC2 model, your EC2 instances needs to be up no more than 6-8 hours or so on average per day before it becomes cheaper to buy more dedicated capacity.
Re: The Five Stages of Hosting
#104Regarding the DataCenter, yes, correct, you will need some divine help ...
Re: The Five Stages of Hosting
#105This 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…
Using Heroku is not free as a programming overhead as you have to bake in Amazon S3 as a dependancy.
Re: The Five Stages of Hosting
#106This 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…
Dedicated servers are cheaper for the same performance, so you can afford 2.
Re: The Five Stages of Hosting
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 4…
Thanks for the explanation. This comment (and indeed this whole thread) has been very useful to me.
Re: The Five Stages of Hosting
#108as 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…
The problem is the "o/s installation" part, while I can install Ubuntu which is fairly easy these days, I'm not a sysadmin and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to configure it properly. Do you recommend any book that'd teach me how to set up a dedicated server from start to finish, including all those little details of OS configuration?
Re: The Five Stages of Hosting
#109The hostel
You decide to run a site on 'shared' hosting (e.g. dreamhost, 1&1, godaddy (shudder), etc.) because it looks really cheap and they list so many "unlimited" things.
The good:
It's surprisingly pretty cozy for your startup wordpress blog about fish, although at that point you start wondering why you didn't just get a wordpress.com account instead, but you justify it by saying you were able to put your custom design theme with lasercats this way. You're not sure why your friends are saying the site feels slow.
The bad:
Oh, you like to program huh? Sorry our python version is 2 years behind. What's this ruby stuff you speak of? You're hosting user-submitted content on your bunk bed? Get out! Or upgrade to our overpriced "VPS" solution! You give up on the site and throw money away.
Re: The Five Stages of Hosting
#110The hostel
You decide to run a site on 'shared' hosting (e.g. dreamhost, 1&1, godaddy (shudder), etc.) because it looks really cheap and they list so many "unlimited" things.
The good: It's surprisingly pretty cozy for your startup wordpress blog about fish, although at that point you start wondering why you didn't just get a wordpress.com account instead.
The bad: Oh, you like to program huh? Sorry our python version is 2 years behind. What's this ruby stuff you speak of? You're hosting user-submitted content on your bunk bed? Get out! Or upgrade to our overpriced "VPS" solution!