Are there any easy ways to move into the cloud yet? Amazon seems very expensive, Google App Engine and Heroku are too limited (though Heroku is really cool for basic Rails). Just hosting vServers somewhere would probably be OK, though I am not much of an admin.
Ask HN: cloud computing options?
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: Ask HN: cloud computing options?
#2Are you sure you REQUIRE a cloud? Phrase "Amazon is too expensive" suggests that it might be not the solution you're looking for.
Maybe you could be a little more clear on what you need, because it's hard to imagine what are your requirements that fall in-between of "Google App engine is too limited" and "Amazon is too expensive"?
Also the phrase "I'm not much of an admin" makes it all sound really confusing... Rarely the cloud is the solution for one person's needs. Typically something like dedicated server or vps should be the answer. VPSes can be 6$/m including server's control panel so that you dont have to be "an admin".
Re: Ask HN: cloud computing options?
#3Broadly speaking, there are two sets of questions you want to answer:
1. The "really?" set of questions: Is the cloud what you really need? If so, can you architect your system to exploit the advantages of the cloud?
2. The "how?" set of questions: do you outsource the cloud to AWS et al or do you build your own? The details of this are probably worth half a book, but there are many databases to choose from (CouchDB, MemcacheDB, Tokyo Products and LightCloud, thrudb, Project Voldemort, redis, and others) and build-or-manage-your-own cloud computing datacenter (EUCALYPTUS, AppScale, Enomaly, ELASTRA, 3tera, etc).
The answer to these questions starts with "what are you trying to do?" In many cases, the cheapest and fastest way to get going is to provision some virtual servers from Linode or Slicehost and have a go. If you grow too much, 1. congratulations and 2. look at the cloud options.
Re: Ask HN: cloud computing options?
#4Are you sure you REQUIRE a cloud? Phrase "Amazon is too expensive" suggests that it might be not the solution you're looking for. Maybe you could be a little more clear on what you need, because it's hard to imagine what are your requirements that fall in-between of "Google App engine is too limited" and "Amazon is too expensive"? Also the phrase "I'm not much of an admin" makes it all sound really confusing... Rarel…
Where do you get VPS for $6/m?
Those are usually shared once, aren't they?
Re: Ask HN: cloud computing options?
#5AWS is not expensive, not at all. However, you can combine GAE and AWS where serving all HTTP from GAE and doing the "rest" on Amazon - that will make it some cheaper
Re: Ask HN: cloud computing options?
#6Are you sure you REQUIRE a cloud? Phrase "Amazon is too expensive" suggests that it might be not the solution you're looking for. Maybe you could be a little more clear on what you need, because it's hard to imagine what are your requirements that fall in-between of "Google App engine is too limited" and "Amazon is too expensive"? Also the phrase "I'm not much of an admin" makes it all sound really confusing... Rarel…
Where do you get VPS for $6/m? Those are usually shared once, aren't they?
Firstvds.ru (they have US branch at minivds.com). VPSes are never "shared", but they are on "shared" server. I.e. you have root access to your own VPS as root, nobody has access to it (1), but there are many VPSes on one physical server.
(1) ...except for the provider, but even Amazon has access to your files on EC2... (Tin-foil hat time.)
Re: Ask HN: cloud computing options?
#7Are you sure you REQUIRE a cloud? Phrase "Amazon is too expensive" suggests that it might be not the solution you're looking for. Maybe you could be a little more clear on what you need, because it's hard to imagine what are your requirements that fall in-between of "Google App engine is too limited" and "Amazon is too expensive"? Also the phrase "I'm not much of an admin" makes it all sound really confusing... Rarel…
Where do you get VPS for $6/m? Those are usually shared once, aren't they?
http://www.prgmr.com/xen/, it's run by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lsc
or, you can pick something on http://www.lowendbox.com/, but be careful - their primary concern is price i.e. they list hosting services that are cheap, but not all of them are reliable.
Re: Ask HN: cloud computing options?
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you get VPS for $6/m? Those are usually shared once, aren't they?
Firstvds.ru (they have US branch at minivds.com). VPSes are never "shared", but they are on "shared" server. I.e. you have root access to your own VPS as root, nobody has access to it (1), but there are many VPSes on one physical server. (1) ...except for the provider, but even Amazon has access to your files on EC2... (Tin-foil hat time.)
Looking at the Russian version of the site, you can get the same type of VPS for $4.44 a month instead of $6, although you get 25GB of traffic instead of 30.
Cloudkick should support this provider.
Re: Ask HN: cloud computing options?
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firstvds.ru (they have US branch at minivds.com). VPSes are never "shared", but they are on "shared" server. I.e. you have root access to your own VPS as root, nobody has access to it (1), but there are many VPSes on one physical server. (1) ...except for the provider, but even Amazon has access to your files on EC2... (Tin-foil hat time.)
Looking at the Russian version of the site, you can get the same type of VPS for $4.44 a month instead of $6, although you get 25GB of traffic instead of 30. Cloudkick should support this provider.
Not really an option for US citizens to use Russian version, I think, since all of panels will be in Russian and also you would have to pay in roubles :) /Also you do have to sign a contract in Russian with them and send it back to far east of Russia/
Re: Ask HN: cloud computing options?
#10Explain what you are doing. The cloud is very much over-hyped and can mean many different things. Are you looking for storage? For hosting? For dynamic hosting?
Explain a bit what your app is and we can give your architecture advice.