The Five Stages of Hosting • Hacker News Board

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#181

Post by A1kmm » Wed, Feb 01, 2012, 8:37 AM UTC

hessenwolf wrote: post #178

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.

It is a place of business if it meets the definition, and there can be more than one.

The definition is somewhat ambiguous, but it is likely that if there is an actual physical place (even if it is just a server) used to offer goods or services for sale to the public, there is a good chance that those sales are attributable to that server, and will be taxed in the country that server is located in.

This might not be a problem for an established corporation with the sales volume to justify the tax accountant expenditure and payment overhead needed to comply with tax law in multiple countries, but for a bootstrapped startup it can be an important consideration.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#182

Post by count » Wed, Feb 01, 2012, 9:28 PM UTC

larrys wrote: post #166

count wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A dedicated line is hundreds of dollars a month in most of the US. Electricity is also not-at-all cheap in many office parks/buildings.

You'll run out of hardware space quite rapidly, simply because the electrical density necessary just isn't there in many office environments (how many boxes can you fit on a 20A circuit today?).

Colo / hosting providers exist and sell for tens of dollars a month, and handle all of that pain and suffering. I can't imagine when self-hosting would ever be actually cheaper over the long run.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#183

Post by ricardobeat » Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 6:52 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #180

ricardobeat wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

300kb in an average HTML page, 47kb/s top transfer speed. It's physics.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#184

Post by devs1010 » Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 7:56 PM UTC

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.

hmmm, yeah I have noticed weird behavior a few times, however I run a Java Spring app on there and most of the time it works, its pretty much me that is using it though, I would think that Ruby does use more memory than Java though.