Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service • Hacker News Board

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#71

Post by waps » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 5:46 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #61

bane wrote: post #58

At some point, I'm going to guess that even moderately large AWS configurations would be better off getting a high capacity business FiOS line (or whatever the next tier is), get a couple racks full of home rolled high-end systems and staff 2 or 3 guys full time to run everything. The systems will be faster, probably about as reliable, everything will be cheaper even with extra people on payroll. I'd love to see some…

Me too. I suspect there's medium and longterm costs that probably skew my "gut feel" of how much cheaper that'd be. I wonder what the real costs associated with feeding a roomful of local servers replacement disks/ram/powersupplies are, and what a realistic replacement schedule for the hardware is? Sure AWS is expensive for 24/7/365 applications, but I suspect there's some "in between ground" where Amazon's economies…

If you want a worldwide site though, AWS gets you in 10 locations around the world. This would take even an experienced admin a month for just the admin stuff to get going. An inexperienced one ... half a year ?

(but it's still better to have a webserver on AWS, that simply 302s to your "real" services, or only provides a skeleton web page, though 302'ing is better, without it you'll quickly run into difficulties with same origin policy. 302 redirects will also change much faster than dns updates).

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#72

Post by randfish » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 5:52 AM UTC

ecaron wrote: post #47

randfish wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've actually never crawled out of Amazon (mostly because it was expensive to do so), so the crawl blocking stuff is unrelated, at least for us. As Sarah noted, it's really been costs, service, and support issues.

I'd redact my suggestion then if I could. Thanks for answering so directly and promptly! (and great seeing you on HN)

Thanks dude! Totally fair question & assumption BTW :-)

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#73

Post by Negitivefrags » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 5:54 AM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #42

For what many orgs need to do, a myriad of lesser-known VPS providers would be just fine, and be a fraction of the cost. But most people I've known don't investigate or educate themselves much - it's been a herd mentality towards AWS, irrespective of needs or costs (because often, it's not them paying - it's "the company"). Perhaps as a freelance consultant right now I take a sharper look at the costs involved - if a…

What bugs me most is the false dichotomy I get when I talk about this with friends; their choice is presented as either use AWS or "hire a full-time sysadmin, buy multiple server-grade boxes and manage all this in a rented data center". I've been told Amazon is saving people "easily" $100k/year by not having to hire staff and buy expensive hardware.

This absolutely hits the nail on the head.

The dumb part is that the next option down, renting dedicated hardware, seems to be effectively identical with regard to server administration overhead. The only difference is that the time to provision is longer (4 hours with our host), and billing monthly instead of hourly.

In either case, you need to know how you are setting up new machines, monitoring them and deploying your application to them.

The part that really kills me is this though. Using AWS is supposed to be good for start-ups because it allows you to get started quickly and think about building your product rather than focusing on technology that someone else could handle. The problem is, how you are going to scale your technology on AWS is a problem you need to think about very early.

Even the lowest end dedicated hardware is so fast that you can have millions of daily active users before you even need to move beyond a single box. It's amazing how many things you don't need to think about when you only have a single box.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#74

Post by aritraghosh007 » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:07 AM UTC

It makes total sense for a small team (whether a startup or in a large organization) to be on AWS rather than going the DIY route by renting VPS out of some datacenter and managing everything from patching to migration to troubleshooting. What most fail to realize is the fact that a complete AWS package comes at a much cheaper cost than all of the above tasks combined. It just requires one to use some smart infrastructure planning in order to keep the bills low by tuning most of the configurable services which AWS provides.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#75

Post by __david__ » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:12 AM UTC

matwood wrote: post #65

bane wrote: post #58

At some point, I'm going to guess that even moderately large AWS configurations would be better off getting a high capacity business FiOS line (or whatever the next tier is), get a couple racks full of home rolled high-end systems and staff 2 or 3 guys full time to run everything. The systems will be faster, probably about as reliable, everything will be cheaper even with extra people on payroll. I'd love to see some…

Where do you just throw a couple racks of computers? Closet? Sounds great, now let's deal with cooling them and the maintenance around that. Then there is power. You think your standard office had all the necessary circuits to drive a couple racks full of servers? There is so much more to running a server farm than just buying a couple racks of computers and upgrading the FiOS line.

Yes, to all of that. Apparently you weren't around 15 years ago when startups pretty much had to do that if they wanted servers and an internet presence. I lived through a startup during that era and that exactly what we did. We had our fancy ISDN line and could server our web site to the world at a blistering 128K baud.

We bought a $300 air conditioner from Home Depot, cut a whole in the server room door with a sawzall and installed the air conditioner. Ok technically we only used the air conditioner in that configuration on the weekends when there was a human in the room and the main building air was off (we couldn't override it) but I like that story.

You're not going to get 5 nines this way, but you would be surprised at how much you can do, even when there exactly zero dedicated sysadmins.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#76

Post by reitzensteinm » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:18 AM UTC

waps wrote: post #66

d23 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if a client has, say, $50k to budget on a project, I really don't want $10k of that to go to hosting if it doesn't need to On a $50k project, how are you even dropping $10k on AWS? I've found a medium instance (~$100/mo) handles with ease 100k+ visitors/mo without breaking a sweat.

Then there's the AWS massive disadvantage in data traffic cost. Small VPS providers (or large ones for that matter) typically include 4-5 Tb of data, and their compute is no more expensive (or cheaper) than amazon. And half the customers want large pngs (because jpg at 2% "reduces quality"). I'd say only to people with 45" monitors at 5cm to their screen or less. It also produces 50% data savings. That's the biggest…

If anyone is in that situation and remotely budget conscious, you can do this trivially:

1) Order a server with lots of bandwidth from a provider such as Hetzner, 100tb or Leaseweb (or possibly OVH, though I haven't used them personally).

Low performance hardware is fine, though you'll either want enough ram to fit your frequently used images, or an SSD.

2) Install nginx as a reverse caching proxy. There's an example configuration in the nginx docs. Requests to /blah/something.png on your nginx server are sourced from www.yoursite.com/blah/something.png, but cached for the period you specify.

3) In your DNS, set static1.yoursite.com, static2 etc to point to the newly created server. This is for browser parallel downloads.

4) In your html, point your static assets randomly amongst the newly created domains (best if this is done automatically).

In this way, your newly created box soaks up the load of the static assets traffic, but it has no additional cognitive overhead. You don't change your development model at all.

If you have a switch in your code to source the images from the original domain, you can go back to hitting AWS instantly should the box have problems, so the risk is very low.

You can get a 10 gigabit unmetered server from the Leaseweb volume network for 600 euros/mo. The bandwidth is lower quality than AWS, but if you have high utilization you can pump more than a petabyte from the server a month, which would cost approximately $60k from EC2.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#77

Post by vacri » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:25 AM UTC

fbags wrote: post #27

wahnfrieden wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't you spending even the $50 support tier if not enough for one of the higher tiers if you're dropping that much in usage costs? I don't understand why anyone expects free support when every little thing in AWS is charged for as a utility.

The paid support tier is also atrocious and close to useless. AWS routinely denies the existence of major flaws for months or years, until they eventually admit it, often by just documenting it instead of fixing it. They're horrifically expensive, and low quality. It's really, really sad that so many startups have been convinced that it's "cheap" when it's almost comically expensive and lousy.

I've found the opposite - the support techs I've talked to have been technically proficient, and willing to spin up VMs and test things out for me.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#78

Post by shrooms » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:30 AM UTC

In one of Moz's technical blog posts they mentioned that running the couple of instances needed to process the raw search data equated to $700k. That's fucking insane. They could run a couple of dedicated servers for a fraction of the cost and get a hell of a lot more performance.

It was around this time they mentioned that they were building their own private cloud so at least they saw the writing on the wall - AWS wasn't suited to their use case.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#79

Post by shrooms » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:33 AM UTC

Negitivefrags wrote: post #73

mgkimsal wrote: post #42

For what many orgs need to do, a myriad of lesser-known VPS providers would be just fine, and be a fraction of the cost. But most people I've known don't investigate or educate themselves much - it's been a herd mentality towards AWS, irrespective of needs or costs (because often, it's not them paying - it's "the company"). Perhaps as a freelance consultant right now I take a sharper look at the costs involved - if a…

What bugs me most is the false dichotomy I get when I talk about this with friends; their choice is presented as either use AWS or "hire a full-time sysadmin, buy multiple server-grade boxes and manage all this in a rented data center". I've been told Amazon is saving people "easily" $100k/year by not having to hire staff and buy expensive hardware. This absolutely hits the nail on the head. The dumb part is that the…

>The problem is, how you are going to scale your technology on AWS is a problem you need to think about very early.

Yep, and in my experience getting developers to wrap their head around decoupling systems and make sure the system is always decoupled is difficult.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#80

Post by Veratyr » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:58 AM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #42

For what many orgs need to do, a myriad of lesser-known VPS providers would be just fine, and be a fraction of the cost. But most people I've known don't investigate or educate themselves much - it's been a herd mentality towards AWS, irrespective of needs or costs (because often, it's not them paying - it's "the company"). Perhaps as a freelance consultant right now I take a sharper look at the costs involved - if a…

One that not many people seem to know about but which interests me significantly is http://www.instacompute.com/.

It's run by Tata, which is pretty massive plus according to http://cloudharmony.com/ it's got pretty good performance, especially considering the price.

I guess problem for most of you (it seems pretty US centered around here) may be that they don't have a presence in the United States (they're good in Europe, Asia and India though).

Anyone have any experiences with them?