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The Five Stages of Hosting

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Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#121

Post by ryanbrunner »

4ad wrote: post #111
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.

This has been getting better. The platform-specific knowledge necessary to get a Heroku app running on Cedar is pretty much limited to knowing you need to put "heroku run" in front of your rake tasks or command line utilities, and perhaps 3-4 sets of arguments to back up a database, restore one, and restart your app.

Compared to the amount of knowledge necessary to effectively and reliably run a dedicated server, it's honestly pretty trivial.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#122

Post by hahainternet »

dawgr wrote: post #108
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…

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?

I am a sysadmin, and frankly no book will teach you sufficiently.

Either you use Linux all day every day for some time, or hire someone to consult with you. That's my opinion anyway from years of consulting with people :)

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#123

Post by stevelosh »

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've heard good things about http://prgmr.com/ and they have 5/6/8/12 -dollar tiers.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#124

Post by dspillett »

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've heard quite a few people knocking virpus for unreliability and bad support, though I've never used them myself. http://www.lowendbox.com/ is a good resource for cheap VPS information, though be aware that I wouldn't put anything "production" on just one (I have a couple of cheap VPSs that playthings and some non-sensitive off-site backups go on, but anything of any import does not just go on one of them). Also, be wary of "burstable RAM" - more often than not it is far more trouble than it could possibly be worth (the feature might make sense in an environment where you know the likely use patterns of the whole host and its guest OSs, but it just causes problems in a shared environment IMO).

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#125

Post by dawgr »

hahainternet wrote: post #122
dawgr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I am a sysadmin, and frankly no book will teach you sufficiently. Either you use Linux all day every day for some time, or hire someone to consult with you. That's my opinion anyway from years of consulting with people :)

I'm usually on Fedora, but I barely have to touch anything.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#126

Post by hkarthik »

Great article and this thread is great for checking out some new hosts for dedicated servers. Pricing has gotten pretty good in the last year so I think it's a good time to upgrade from PaaS to Dedicated hosting again.

Has anyone had experience with a hybrid dedicated/cloud model? I'd love to stick our Postgres servers on dedicated hardware but then be able to spin web servers as cloud servers when needed for traffic spikes.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#127

Post by jstsch »

As a small web shop, we went the other way. From 3 (dedicated hosting) to 2 (VPS). It's quite nice to know that when a piece of metal breaks you just get a new machine on the fly.

You do need a good host though. Quick e-mail replies and pro-active management of server load is absolutely vital. Happy to have found it (in NL) :)

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#128

Post by seltzered_ »

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'…

yeah. I'm currently using dreamhost shared and despite my gripes, it's not bad for the lay person. Dare I say I recommend it if you want to run a static-page driven site (e.g. jekyll / hyde / etc.) . I want to see how far they take unlimited and see if they'll handle my several-gig photo collection soon.

Hell, my dad uses godaddy of all things, but at least he has his tiny wordpress site up to help his non-tech business.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#129

Post by dspillett »

waitwhat wrote: post #91
edu wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What company are you using?

Also have a look at OVH's Kimsufi brand: http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ i7 + 24GB RAM + 2TB disc + 100Mbps for €50 (they geo-restrict their plans, and I think only the French get unlimited bandwidth; UK people have to survive on "just" 15TB/month, for example)

http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ is showing unlimited for all three plans when I visit (from a UK IP address). I might have to get one of the lower spec (celeron/atom) machines for myself, do you have personal experience of the company?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#130

Post by MatthewPhillips »

stevelosh wrote: post #123
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've heard good things about http://prgmr.com/ and they have 5/6/8/12 -dollar tiers.

I use prgmr to host a website and couple of private git repos, I would definitely recommend it.
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