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The Five Stages of Hosting

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Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#161

Post by dkrich »

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…

Ha, well said. I could never understand why GoDaddy didn't bother to improve its Rails support. I tried more than once to get a Rails app up on GoDaddy only to find that they were still supporting a version from 5 years ago. Seems like it would be an easy way to get several thousand paying customers who just have simple Rails applications.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#162

Post by josephcooney »

huskyr wrote: post #120
josephcooney wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Yes. I'm not disputing the usefulness of shared hosting, in fact I called out the fact that it had originally been omitted from the list.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#163

Post by vellum »

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.

This happened to me as well. If I had to do it all over again, I would have started pushing to Heroku from the start.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#164

Post by count »

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…

A T1? Can you even get hosting that slow these days? At hundreds of dollars/mo for a T1 (or more, depending on where you are at), you can get a dedicated gigabit connection and hardware colo'd somewhere. A T1 in an office is laughable these days.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#165

Post by lamnk »

gnosis wrote: post #140
statictype wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month. This seems ridiculously cheap compared to something with comparable RAM/CPU on EC2. Is there a catch?

Paying $140-$190 per month is already ridiculously expensive. I pay about $3 per month for a very low-end xen VPS. Sure, I'm not running anything at all resource intensive on it.. but if I was maybe I'd spring for a higher-end VPS for $6, or if I really wanted to get crazy I'd find a really solid one for about $20 a month. At $140-$190 a month, you'd better be getting a bunch of high-end dedicated servers and fantast…

$140 for a second gen i5 and 8GB of ram is pretty reasonable.

A $20 VPS is only for pet projects. For a startup it's worth it to invest in a/some dedicated server(s). Having some redundant firepower of dedicated servers so that you don't have to worry about the upgrades for a while presents a sweet spot between saving cost and scalability.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#166

Post by larrys »

count wrote: post #164
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…

A T1? Can you even get hosting that slow these days? At hundreds of dollars/mo for a T1 (or more, depending on where you are at), you can get a dedicated gigabit connection and hardware colo'd somewhere. A T1 in an office is laughable these days.

Depends on what stage you are at and what type of site you are hosting. You get the advantage of being able to have unlimited hardware space and not worrying about paying a premium for electric to the colo which, in many cases if you aren't serving up video could be a trade off worth making. You also get the hardware physically where you are which can be a benefit. It may not be the desired option the majority of the time but it belongs on the list as an option.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#167

Post by Nick_C »

seltzered_ wrote: post #128
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'…

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 busin…

Dreamhost handle my photo collection fine.

Also, Dreamhost at least gives you shell access, which is a big plus. And, contrary to a comment above, you can build your own environment. I have an up to date python 2.7 virtualenv from easy_install, and same for ruby.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#168

Post by A1kmm »

One thing no one has mentioned is the tax implications of the different choices for startups - something which can be as important as the technical side of things.

The OECD model tax convention, which has been adopted by many pairs of countries for their double taxation avoidance agreements (DTAAs) uses the term "permanent establishment" - "a fixed place of business through which the business of the an enterprise is wholly or partly carried on". If a business derives income attributable to a fixed place of business in another country, they will likely need to deal with the tax department of that country. At best, this will mean considerable expenditure (by a bootstrapped startups' standards) on legal compliance, and at worst, could mean considerably more tax is paid.

For hosting stages 1-2 in the article, no fixed place can be attributed to the business purchasing the hosting (CPU resources are shared and no CPU fixed CPU is assigned to the business). Disk space may temporarily be associated with a business, but this is under the control of the service provider - it is disk space and not physical disk sectors which are being rented, and the provider is free to move data.

However, stages 3-5 mean that a business has a very definite physical location (i.e. place of business) in another country.

These types of non-technical issues can often outweigh the technical ones in terms of business priority.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#169

Post by lsc »

kmfrk wrote: post #18

An important addition to the article is that, as you descend the list, you run out of people to blame.

"people to blame" only helps if you work for someone else. When you are the boss? more "people to blame" means more people that can cause serious problems if they can't do their job.

Having other people that can do something for you so you don't have to is a good thing. Having someone else to blame, if you work for yourself, is the downside to outsourcing, not the upside.

Outsourcing is great; but make sure you can always move to another provider if you have trouble with your current provider. Your boss might let you off the hook if a provider screws it up, but your customers won't.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#170

Post by lsc »

Lazare wrote: post #20
josephcooney wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd suggest slum. It's a place to sleep, but you have no security and no property rights. It's generally unpleasant, and the whole thing could burn down at any moment. And you have (practically) no recourse if you don't like what you're getting. Even the best hosts have laughable SLAs (if they have one at all), and no meaningful performance guarantees.

Show me any reasonably priced service that has a SLA worth reading.

Nearly all retail providers have some sort of "if we have downtime, if you complain, we will refund you for the time you were down" SLA. The pennies you get don't compensate you for the time it took to complain, much less the lost business from being down. Look at all the companies advertising a 100% SLA; I mean, even 99.9% is unrealistic in most cases without some very expensive hardware or application-layer redundancy.

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