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The Five Stages of Hosting

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Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#111

Post by 4ad »

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 agree that you should be writing code and not managing servers, but in my limited experience PaaS only replaces managing servers with learning the platform's APIs, learning idioms specific to that platform and working your way out of the lack of libraries you are accustomed to.

A lot of programmer overhead.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#112

Post by neilmiddleton »

The article isn't completely accurate in that it states that you need to build your application in a certain way in order to host it on Heroku, which isn't true. I just don't see Heroku in same category as something like GAE.

Heroku places no requirements on your code that you wouldn't find through general best practise when building scalable applications. A lot of people will cite the read-only filesystem as a special requirement (which requires S3 or similar), but this is a common requirement with clustered systems. Yes you might have a local SAN that you can use as a local filesystem but the point is the same.

With the multiple applications I've deployed to Heroku I don't think any would not run on a 'regular' VPS as is. There's no Heroku specific code in there period. In fact, if I have changed my approach to better suit hosting on Heroku, it's generally been changing it to a better approach that would suit all types of hosting.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#113

Post by experiment0 »

seltzered_ wrote: post #109

The 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…

The thing is, the price difference between this and a vps is too dramatic. For example, I can get a Lunarpages basic hosting, with "Unlimited" Bandwidth and "Unlimited" Storage for $4.99/mo with support for rails apps and python (not django however). Not to mention a free domain name.

However the cheapest linode vps is $19.99/mo.

I would LOVE to have a vps to play around on, I would have so much use for it and yet I'm a student living in London and all my money goes towards the cost of living. It makes much more sense for me to go with the cheaper shared hosting as I just can't afford anything more.

As an aside, I found http://virpus.com/ the other day and they are selling vps's starting at $3/mo. Does anyone have any experience at all with them?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#114

Post by Terretta »

experiment0 wrote: post #113
seltzered_ wrote: post #109

The 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…

The thing is, the price difference between this and a vps is too dramatic. For example, I can get a Lunarpages basic hosting, with "Unlimited" Bandwidth and "Unlimited" Storage for $4.99/mo with support for rails apps and python (not django however). Not to mention a free domain name. However the cheapest linode vps is $19.99/mo. I would LOVE to have a vps to play around on, I would have so much use for it and yet I'…

Gotta love those "CPU slices" that ensure you'll never dream of touching those "unlimited" limits.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#115

Post by pestaa »

experiment0 wrote: post #113
seltzered_ wrote: post #109

The 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…

The thing is, the price difference between this and a vps is too dramatic. For example, I can get a Lunarpages basic hosting, with "Unlimited" Bandwidth and "Unlimited" Storage for $4.99/mo with support for rails apps and python (not django however). Not to mention a free domain name. However the cheapest linode vps is $19.99/mo. I would LOVE to have a vps to play around on, I would have so much use for it and yet I'…

CloudSigma is in Europe, and has a little lower barrier to entry compared to Linode. I'm on the lookout for an even cheaper solution. Virpus seems to be almost too cheap, so where is the catch?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#116

Post by rudd »

experiment0 wrote: post #113
seltzered_ wrote: post #109

The 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…

The thing is, the price difference between this and a vps is too dramatic. For example, I can get a Lunarpages basic hosting, with "Unlimited" Bandwidth and "Unlimited" Storage for $4.99/mo with support for rails apps and python (not django however). Not to mention a free domain name. However the cheapest linode vps is $19.99/mo. I would LOVE to have a vps to play around on, I would have so much use for it and yet I'…

I'm on the EC2 free usage tier and having no problems for my minimal use of a VPS. For just playing around and testing stuff, it's great.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#118

Post by experiment0 »

pestaa wrote: post #115
experiment0 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, the price difference between this and a vps is too dramatic. For example, I can get a Lunarpages basic hosting, with "Unlimited" Bandwidth and "Unlimited" Storage for $4.99/mo with support for rails apps and python (not django however). Not to mention a free domain name. However the cheapest linode vps is $19.99/mo. I would LOVE to have a vps to play around on, I would have so much use for it and yet I'…

CloudSigma is in Europe, and has a little lower barrier to entry compared to Linode. I'm on the lookout for an even cheaper solution. Virpus seems to be almost too cheap, so where is the catch?

Thats what I'm trying to find out. TBH I'm not looking to use it for a startup, more for actually playing around with all the new stuff I see on HN. But yeah it does look a bit dodgy being SO cheap.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#119

Post by experiment0 »

rudd wrote: post #116
experiment0 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, the price difference between this and a vps is too dramatic. For example, I can get a Lunarpages basic hosting, with "Unlimited" Bandwidth and "Unlimited" Storage for $4.99/mo with support for rails apps and python (not django however). Not to mention a free domain name. However the cheapest linode vps is $19.99/mo. I would LOVE to have a vps to play around on, I would have so much use for it and yet I'…

I'm on the EC2 free usage tier and having no problems for my minimal use of a VPS. For just playing around and testing stuff, it's great.

Ah, I hadn't see this before! Going to register now.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#120

Post by huskyr »

josephcooney wrote: post #12
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).

Agree. I was surprised they overlooked this one. Perhaps they couldn't think of an appropriate metaphor. Prison? Orphanage?

When you're doing something even remotely technically interesting shared hosting isn't an option. However, if you need something for, you know, the restaurant down the street, your nephew's school blog, a small shop that justs wants a Google Map and a contact form i don't think shared hosting is such a bad option.

It's really cheap ($20 for a VPS might be low for you, but it isn't for your nephew), doesn't matter that much when it's down, usually easy to set up, etc.

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