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The Five Stages of Hosting

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Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#141

Post by larrys »

dangrossman wrote: post #86
LogicX wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I have a quarter rack at the same place for many years now. I make a point of stopping by in person to get the feel of how they are doing business wise from time to time. Just by walking through the office, talking to the employees things like that. They are actually on the expensive side but I like that it keeps out the riff raff that could tax the network or create problems (when I say expensive I mean for bandwidth..)

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#142

Post by commandar »

ricardobeat wrote: post #36
Lazare wrote: post #13

The may be off topic, but... At the moment we're mostly using option two (Linode VPS), and it's working pretty well. I've been repeatedly tempted by option option four (colo), but I'm kind of daunted by the task of getting started. I've been burnt by option three (renting a dedicated server) before - it seems like the worst of both worlds. Can anyone recommend a good guide to getting started with colo? Obvious questi…

Maybe you should test the waters with http://macminicolo.net/ . I haven't used them (yet) but it's relatively cheap, and they will handle lots of things for you (including buying the mini). A dual-core mini can do a lot of work.

Neat idea, but their bandwidth overage charges are brutal. .80c/GB?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#143

Post by rhizome »

adambyrtek wrote: post #138
rhizome wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

384kbit (48kB/s) is plenty? You are kidding, right?

Nope.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#144

Post by larrys »

hga wrote: post #137
larrys wrote: post #65

An option was left out which is to have your own T1 running into your own facility (that is not a data center). We did this for years ('96 to 2004) and had much better up time than with colocation with diverse paths and biometric security. We didn't need a generator either. Just an array of industrial batteries hooked up to a power inverter with a line conditioner could keep the equipment running for 24 hours if util…

Well, that does trade off risks to your T1 getting knocked out by a backhoe, perhaps power failures between you and the other end of it (e.g. if I bought a business DSL connection from AT&T to run a server at my apartment, I could lose it in a general power outage when the DSLAM's battery ran out). But I can well believe it's better than many co-lo experiences, although all of mine have been positive. Right now I'm h…

"trade off risks to your T1 getting knocked out by a backhoe"

Well luckily no backhoe but I did keep, at my own expense, Westell DS1 NIU's around because I had a situation where one went bad and it took the Verizon tech time to go and find one. So I bought a few so he would have the parts around. I also made sure when they strung the fiber from the connection point to our office (several hundred feet through other offices in the ceiling) that it was in orange conduit as opposed to just strung through the building (they were just going to run it like phone wire). I also had them bring an extra fiber through, as well as a fishing wire in case it was ever needed for anything in the future.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#145

Post by rkalla »

TIP: I see a lot of people calculating off-the-cuff AWS prices for comparable hardware somewhere else and declaring how expensive it is.

Don't forget that 3yr reserved pricing is 48% cheaper than the on-demand costs, so once you know what your hardware reqs are on EC2, you can purchase some reserved instance and more or less cut your costs in half. Pricing out any hardware configuration on EC2 using the on-demand pricing is tear-inducing.

For Day 1 release, probably not an option. But at the 6-month mark you probably have a much better idea of what hardware your startup needs and can adjust accordingly.

2 CENTS: For the folks that need something better than a Micro and less expensive than a Large, don't forget about the Medium instances.

They aren't in the primary section but down in the "High CPU" section; they are an excellent fit for work that isn't quite big enough for a Large.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#146

Post by larrys »

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…

In the end I guess I would go (in addition to redundancy) with the organization that was smaller with hopefully more expertise. I feel more confident with the smarter people being able to solve the problem and the smaller people having the motivation to deal with something and not have the personal aggravation of something not working. In a large organization it's easy to hide behind someone else or make excuses.

Ultimately better to have a person or two that will pick up their cell phone when they are in the mall on a Saturday or out for dinner but are quite willing to tackle the problem when they arrive home. Not because they have to but because they care about what they do and have a conscience.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#147

Post by larrys »

I'm thinking of getting another rack at the colo place that I use now. Anyone looking for space on that rack that doesn't have high bandwidth or power needs needs feel free to contact me and I will see if this makes sense for both of us.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#148

Post by reedlaw »

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…

The micro instance seems incredibly slow for me running Rails. It runs out of memory while doing a git index-pack.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#149

Post by reedlaw »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #121
4ad wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I've had to rewrite gems and Rails code to work properly with Heroku. The biggest drawback to Heroku IMHO is the read-only filesystem. It makes simple tasks like creating ZIP files on the server more challenging.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#150

Post by dspillett »

waitwhat wrote: post #136
dspillett wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Careful of the small-print: "The traffic is unlimited. If you exceed 5TB/month for the Kimsufi 2G, 10TB/month for the Kimsufi 16G or 15TB/month for the 24G Kimsufi the connection will be limited to 10 Mbps." My understanding is that if you do get restricted, the restriction isn't automatically lifted the next month. You might want to check with pre-sales to find out exactly what the process is. I have had a box with…

I might be interested at that.

5Tb as a limit really shouldn't be a problem for what I would use it for.

Then again for what I currently do 10Mbit would not be much of an issue either to be honest, though I'll ask about the procedure to reset this if I do set a sudden bandwidth spike one month.

There is VAT on top of that listed price, but even with that it is still a good deal if the kit and company are up to scratch. Last time I looked there was an extra cost for paying monthly, but that seems to have been removed.

> You can reinstall from the web control panel

That sounds interesting for a dedicated box. Are they using some for of SAN rather than each machine having its own local drives (so they can "reimage" your machine just by dropping its volume on the SAN array and creating a fresh one from template)? Or is this less instant (more like: make the request via the control panel and in X hours a passing support tech will plug a USB stick in and reboot to reinstall)?

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