The Five Stages of Hosting • Hacker News Board

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#171

Post by mise » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 10:17 AM UTC

cwilson wrote: post #51

I'd like to add that for different parts of your application, or website, it's ok to use different services. For example, a large majority of tech startups have a WordPress blog that is totally separate from their actual web application. In many cases it also drives the marketing front-end of their website. So while my main application may be on Heroku or AWS, I like to fire up a free PHPFog (I don't work for them, y…

My app has a Wordpress install in a subfolder /blog/. Any suggestions on how to break that out of the app? Apache proxy? 301 redirect to a new subdomain?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#172

Post by swah » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 10:30 AM UTC

I'm a brazilian and EC2 just opened in São Paolo (then I realized its kinda expensive).

I'm not sure if 40ms vs 160ms latency is so important for many kinds of web sites.

I'm considering a Linode VPS in Dallas.

What are other brazilians using?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#173

Post by scott_w » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 11:21 AM UTC

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'…

Rackspace Cloud starts at a little over £7/month for their cheapest offering.

They also give you some ability to "scale up" by simply asking for a bigger instance, and they handle moving your server over.

The only real downside is the default password. Unlike AWS, you are given a root password, which is pathetically easy to crack, so the first thing you need to do is change that.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#174

Post by gcp » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 12:18 PM UTC

jstsch wrote: post #127

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) :)

Feel free to mention the name of your hoster.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#175

Post by ck2 » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 1:04 PM UTC

I think the secret is dedicated server costs can only come down so far but VPS prices should get better and better for even better hardware as time goes by.

$50/mo can get you a 4-core raid10 xen VPS which is plenty powerful and almost as flexible as dedicated.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#176

Post by SomeOtherGuy2 » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 2:34 PM UTC

statictype wrote: post #69

charliesome wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No catch, you've just discovered how ridiculously expensive EC2 is.

Then why do so many startups (and even established businesses like reddit and Netflix) use EC2?

Because of the cloud fad. People have always made bad IT decisions based on the flavor of the month. They still do.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#177

Post by SomeOtherGuy2 » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 2:39 PM UTC

azylman wrote: post #159

notatoad wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They didn't. They just tried to store data on EBS volumes, you know, like they are supposed to. But EBS performance is very bad, and incredibly variable. So they would end up getting timeouts trying to write to the volumes, which broke their DB replication, which took the site offline for hours to re-replicate.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#178

Post by hessenwolf » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 4:25 PM UTC

A1kmm wrote: post #168

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…

Have you seen this be an issue in practice? Our place of business is our registered office.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#179

Post by abalashov » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 4:50 PM UTC

swah wrote: post #172

I'm a brazilian and EC2 just opened in São Paolo (then I realized its kinda expensive). I'm not sure if 40ms vs 160ms latency is so important for many kinds of web sites. I'm considering a Linode VPS in Dallas. What are other brazilians using?

O que exatamente você quer fazer?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#180

Post by rhizome » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 8:55 PM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #157

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.

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.

Oh do please supply the numbers you're working with.