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My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

jitbit.com

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Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#71

Post by bad_user »

Meh, I have an instance hosted on Linode for $26 per month (price includes backup + 1 additional IP used for an extra SSL certificate).

My Linode hosts about 3 static websites (2 blogs generated with Middleman [1], plus one Maven repository in which I publish stuff). It also hosts a Wiki and a CRM (both powered by Ruby / MySQL). So that's Ngix + Passenger + 5 MB of Memcached + MySQL + file storage.

I also host several apps I've made on free Heroku dynos, which can get you quite far if you use Scala/the JVM in combination with all the freebies ;-)

[1] http://middlemanapp.com/

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#72

Post by jtolj »

_pmf_ wrote: post #55
jtolj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> All our stuff runs on one (1) server > This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak > (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. It's hard to believe a company would "admit" to running all of these services on a single server. There's no way I would pay for a CRM or Ticketing App (relatively mi…

> It's hard to believe a company would "admit" to running all of these services on a single server. There's no way I would pay for a CRM or Ticketing App (relatively mission critical for many companies) that wasn't highly-available. One also has to take into account how many systems that are distributed over n servers have actually n points of failure. My estimate would be "quite a lot".

Very true. It's expensive and complex to have real HA/redundancy, but they can't even bounce a DB server without taking down every one of their apps. I have no idea about administering Windows servers, but based on my experience with Windows Update on the desktop, I would imagine that you need to do that relatively often.

Hopefully they have a staging environment running somewhere internally at least.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#73

Post by timdorr »

Toshio wrote: post #43
jitbit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$200 is a m.large instance (7.5.GB) plus the "provisioned i/o" charges (EBS volume). MS SQL is free since we're in BizSpark.

> "[insert technology here] is free since we're in BizSpark." For how much longer? And then what?

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ There are tabs for SQL Server Web and Standard Editions.

Depending on what version of SQL Server he needs, it's either a $0.136/hr additional cost to add Web Edition or $0.610/hr additional cost to add Standard Edition. That works out to an approximate $97.92 or $439.20 additional cost per month. So, not a huge jump in cost.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#74

Post by Toshio »

earlz wrote: post #33

I'm amazed that more people don't use Mono. Best of world to me is using Visual Studio for local development, and then deploying to a Linux server running Mono and Apache/Nginx. It's actually a lot less painful than people think, after you get ramped up a very small learning curve as to what is not supported in Mono.. And if you want to go completely free, MonoDevelop also isn't too bad, though you will find an occas…

The vast majority of startups in the Valley use MacBooks for development.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#75

Post by toomuchtodo »

jasonkester wrote: post #19

I'll pluralize this anecdote. Every bit of my little software empire runs on a single Windows box. That includes my 3 main money-making products, a couple dozen smaller sites being hosted for consulting clients and my partner's businesses, and the Expat blog. Lots of steady-state traffic to lots of sites, several Techcrunch, Reddit and HN poundings, nothing to write home about as far as downtime or drama in the 6 yea…

I've worked in IT for 12 years. Microsoft server stuff never just works. I'm in the process of replacing a $1 MM video asset management system that sits on top of Windows Server with OpenStack/Debian precisely because of this.

Microsoft server just works. Hah!

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#76

Post by hudo »

I have several dozen asp.net sites and one startup (asp.net + background services). And people ask me why I use MS products, they are expensive. But reality is: prices of win shared hosting are almost exact like linux shared hosting. Windows licence on Hetzner (or many other win VPS providers) is 15€/m. I don't mind paying 15€/m, I spend more on coffee and cola, and dont make any money from that. And for database, if sql express is not enough, I go with mysql/postgre, simple as that. I also played with ruby and php little bit, but don't find any special advantage or stuff that are hard/complicated/long to do in .net, even they're nice products (RoR at least). All those tools looks very similar to me, and hosting price on VPS/cloud is really low also today. Maybe one thing that's missing in .net compared to some other ecosystem is community, but last few years that changed a lot (to better of course).

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#77

Post by venomsnake »

earlz wrote: post #33

I'm amazed that more people don't use Mono. Best of world to me is using Visual Studio for local development, and then deploying to a Linux server running Mono and Apache/Nginx. It's actually a lot less painful than people think, after you get ramped up a very small learning curve as to what is not supported in Mono.. And if you want to go completely free, MonoDevelop also isn't too bad, though you will find an occas…

Unless mono has improved dramatically in the last 5 years it has that poor man's C# feeling about it - when I had to develop for it was nightmare - it had problem managing a lot of io buffers and silent improvements like making dictionary thread safe had some very very bad side effects in non blocking io applications.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#78

Post by sljd »

hkarthik wrote: post #52
dkhenry wrote: post #10

While Microsoft might be a good solution for many people (Use what get the job done), this specific article has absolutely no real reasons why you _should_ use Microsoft. The truth is if One 8-gig windows server is what he needed for his start up he could get by with one 8-gig Linux server and save a couple of bucks a month. While that might not be a big deal now, if he ever wants to get big, those little costs start…

I agree, he could easily be using a JVM-based stack to get the same or better efficiency out of his 1-server configuration. Also there's some clearly naivety when bragging about his "low cost" $200/month setup. His SQL Server licenses alone will probably triple or quadruple his costs when his Bizspark status runs out.

Well, AFAIK he can easily switch to MySQL for instance, under the same ORM.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#79

Post by aetimmes »

jitbit wrote: post #28
mbesto wrote: post #11

All our stuff runs on one (1) server This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. That costs us about $200 a month. By the way, that's Amazon What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? Database servers for all o…

$200 is a m.large instance (7.5.GB) plus the "provisioned i/o" charges (EBS volume). MS SQL is free since we're in BizSpark.

What about the concerns with running your apps on a single server? Or do you Hyper-V within a single instance?

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#80

Post by soundgecko »

zdw wrote: post #15
mbesto wrote: post #11

All our stuff runs on one (1) server This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. That costs us about $200 a month. By the way, that's Amazon What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? Database servers for all o…

Exactly. If he was paying list price for any of this, there would be a sudden, dramatic increase in price. Which will happen, when BizSpark runs out.

IIRC, you get to keep the existing licenses and only need to pay for new ones.
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