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The Five Stages of Hosting

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Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#151

Post by baudehlo »

LogicX wrote: post #72
statictype wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

I don't think you'll find that reddit actually spins up extra instances though. They simply run 240 instances (right now). So it still seems like an odd choice, given they could probably reduce that to about 50 instances of dedicated hosting.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#152

Post by driverdan »

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'…

Disregarding that you can get VPSes for less than that, is $20/m really that much of a problem? That's 5-7 fewer trips to the cafe, 3-4 fewer beers at the bar, or 1-2 fewer times eating out per month. If you really wanted to you could find $20/m.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#153

Post by amishforkfight »

reedlaw wrote: post #148
devs1010 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The micro instance seems to be routinely throttled, for random reasons. My vm was choked for days despite only pulling in ~200 visitors per day. Upgrading to the Small instance has removed all throttling.

I'm running a standard LAMP stack on it, nothing crazy.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#154

Post by ryanbrunner »

reedlaw wrote: post #149
ryanbrunner wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They've actually moved from a read-only to an ephemeral file system with Cedar. You can write to your hearts content, but can't really rely on the files being there. In most cases where you'd want to write files, you really should be using something like S3 anyway.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#155

Post by bgentry »

reedlaw wrote: post #149
ryanbrunner wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Heroku's Cedar stack does not have a read-only filesystem. However, it is ephemeral, meaning it is not durable and it's not a guarantee that things you put on the filesystem will stick around between requests.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#156

Post by Silhouette »

michaelleland wrote: post #79
charliesome wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should not make your own technology judgements based solely on what other people are using. There's too many people jumping on the cloud bandwagon who have no clue what they're doing.

Making technology decisions based on what others are doing is the fastest way to make minor decisions. There's immense value in asking "what does company x do?" choosing that option, and moving on. In my experience time deliberating is time wasted--it's better to make a decision and move on. You can (and should) change later.

> Making technology decisions based on what others are doing is the fastest way to make minor decisions.

Sure, but a minor decision is who prints your business stationery or what kind of toilet paper to buy.

What hardware/networking platform to build your service on is not a minor decision. It will fundamentally affect the architecture of your entire system, and getting the decision wrong will potentially be expensive-with-a-capital-Failed-Company.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#157

Post by ricardobeat »

rhizome wrote: post #71
ricardobeat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of uplink do you have? An app that starts getting into the thousands of users will quickly saturate a normal ADSL line (1-2mbps up), and an SDSL/T1 connection is many times more expensive than a remote dedicated server.

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.

That speed guarantees you a load time of at least 5 seconds for the average HTML page (with a single visitor), assuming best conditions. Even shared hosting, which is almost free, will fare better than that.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#158

Post by waitwhat »

dspillett wrote: post #150
waitwhat wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scratc…

Local hard drives, and I guess the (re-)install just boots from the network.

You can customise the partition layout, but otherwise get a standard set of packages for whichever distribution. There's a choice of the usual Linux suspects in 32- and 64-bit, FreeBSD, Open Solaris and Windows Server 2008.

The process is fully automatic and a CentOS install takes about 20 minutes.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#159

Post by azylman »

notatoad wrote: post #30
_delirium wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it depends on your use case, but I don't see those as necessarily worse failure modes than other options. For example, Reddit has in the past been down for >20 hours at a time with its cloud solution. With a local solution, you would want offsite backup for the catastrophic "building burned down" failure mode, but most local failures can be solved in that kind of timeframe with the "drive to Frys, buy new s…

reddit goes down because they abuse(d) the shit out of AWS. judging cloud hosting by their failures is pointless. EBS is not meant to be a large scale memcached server. i've done the "drive to fry's, buy a new server, restore from backup" type recovery. it sucks, you don't want to do it, but that's not what i'm talking about. if you're self-hosting at your office your run into all sorts of problems that datacenters s…

Just curious, how has reddit abused AWS?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#160

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?

I should have asked...what requires more than that? Besides "thousands of users," I mean.
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