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

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

#111

Post by rkrzr » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 12:41 PM UTC

reitzensteinm wrote: post #76

waps wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or simply use a CDN like e.g. CloudFlare.

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

#112

Post by rschmitty » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 12:47 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #102

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.

$50k/$10k is possibly a bit extreme - say $80k/$8k perhaps. Typically when my clients do a project, they're budgeting out for the year, so that's $8k/year, not per month. AWS would be cheaper with reserved instances, but then (IIRC) you're prepaying in advance for something you may not need. Even if it's cheaper, it's sort of defeating the purpose of "i can scale on demand". (which, yes you can still do, but you're b…

> AWS would be cheaper with reserved instances, but then (IIRC) you're prepaying in advance for something you may not need. Even if it's cheaper, it's sort of defeating the purpose of "i can scale on demand". (which, yes you can still do, but you're back to 'on demand' pricing).

That's why you mix. We know our base needs, these are reserved instances 100% utilization. When something comes up that drives a lot of traffic the on demand instances kick in automatically. If you have somewhat "regular" spikey traffic you can buy reserved instances with less utilization and still save vs raw on-demand pricing.

I'll be the first to say we could do this all cheaper with some other VPS and a bunch more labor, but we are using a _ton_ of AWS services. My personal/moonlighting customers I use DO where a single nginx/sql droplet can handle everything with ease for small load sites

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

#113

Post by svasan » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 12:49 PM UTC

beachstartup wrote: post #44

there are dozens, if not hundreds of smaller TRUE managed hosting providers popping up to service these kinds of accounts. that's what my startup does. we routinely steal large $5k-50k/month accounts from AWS and rackspace and softlayer (IBM) and the like. they just do a shitty job for an exorbitant price, plain and simple. folks... NOBODY gives a fuck about you at those companies, and you better believe it. not the…

Is there a way to contact you?

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

#114

Post by travem » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 1:01 PM UTC

ballard wrote: post #106

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #17

Not surprised to see this, although I am surprised more companies aren't following suit. We abandoned AWS a year and a half ago and cut our server / infrastructure costs by 90% in the process.

Yup. Folks like Netflix and Zynga are showing off how much money they are willing to spend for more potential agility. They could save a ton for predictable capacity by deploying dedicated boxes + openstack. That's where the savings are obvious, because AWS is like living at a hotel.

Zynga are actually "well known" for having a hybrid model and running the steady state games on their private cloud - http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Zynga_Cloud_Case_Study:_The_journe...

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

#115

Post by bane » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 1:20 PM UTC

Xorlev wrote: post #68

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…

I sincerely hope you never deploy a system then. Not trying to attack you, but I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Deploying servers is not as easy as you make it out to be. If you have the dough to hire 2-3 people to run your servers, you can afford to do it right. I would never roll with a FiOS line to run my services, for one I doubt their TOS supports it. I'm not sure anything but the smallest of startups…

FiOS business lines explicitly exist to allow companies to run their own servers and most good companies that self-host build their own hardware. It's not a "franken-rack" (clever term), it's pretty common industry practice (google even builds their own server hardware). That's why you hire 2 or 3 guys who know what they are doing. Hell, I barely know what I'm doing and I've probably helped cobble together half a dozen such setups over the years.

In some industries, designating some office space for your "server room" and building it out to data center specs is pretty common and surprisingly not all that expensive. I'm surprised by both that lack of can-do attitude here on HN as well as the basic know-how about it. I guess the demographic here skews towards young-hip-cloud-framework-I-don't-know-how-to-do-anything-for-myself-everything. But it wasn't all that long ago that buying some empty 1u and 2u cases, and sources parts from the local hardware shop, installing them in racks that you bolted to the floor of your server room, that you fitted out with redundant backbones, industrial a/c and enough amperage to blow out the transformer down the street was what people actually did and it's not that hard. Hell, one of the points of RAID was to enable companies trying to save a buck on such setups to exist in the face of very expensive enterprise class hardware disk options.

(edit) and this is exactly what they did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7155165

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

#116

Post by bane » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 1:28 PM 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.

Having helped put together at least half a dozen such rooms over the year (not an expert, but I can cobble together hardware into a 1u and 2u case as well as anybody and then screw them into a rack) I'm frankly surprised by the lack of both can-do attitude and basic know how here on HN. There's a weird notion here that additional lines can't be run for more bandwidth, and electricians don't exist who can come run more circuits to give you enough amperage for a few racks full of systems. Does anybody do anything for themselves anymore? This stuff isn't rocket science and it's not that hard to do on your own.

And it's surprisingly less hardware than most people think. Stack Overflow runs off of two machines. A few pieces of decent networking equipment and some fans and they're probably not even consuming half a rack.

Turns out running their own hardware is exactly what they ended up doing and even with staff and other costs, runs a fraction of AWS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7155165

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

#117

Post by mooreds » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 1:37 PM UTC

booruguru wrote: post #82

If Moz is a privately held company, why do they publicly release their financial data?

This link would probably help answer that: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2012/05/seomoz-tagfee-and-me...

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

#118

Post by bane » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 1:40 PM UTC

superuser2 wrote: post #86

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…

A real datacenter is almost certainly Better Than You at reliability. Consider: - Redundant fiber connections to multiple independent ISPs - Battery backup and generator failover - Redundant HVAC - Waterless fire suppression - 24x7 staff presence - Security systems and personnel These are all economies of scale. If you're just running a couple of racks you're either throwing away money by paying for all this or makin…

You just described that last 3 server rooms I ever worked in. This stuff isn't all that hard. I'm really surprised at the lack of knowhow here on HN. If people don't have businesses in the right kind of office buildings you can always just colo your own hardware and pay power/bandwidth and still save money over AWS.

> If you're just running a couple of racks you're either throwing away money by paying for all this..

You're paying for all of it anyways. Especially if you colocate, and then you're paying for their costs plus whatever they charge on top of that. Money you pay into somebody else's profits, that you can self-service is literally throwing away money.

It sounds like the OP built their own hardware, but colos it all in a datacenter. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7155165

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

#119

Post by bane » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 1:44 PM UTC

marcusr wrote: post #81

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…

There's always a compelling case for that until your line breaks or your power fails. I've seen data centres fail too, but they do have some redundancy for their systems, more than you could reasonably spec for your own premises.

I've helped do it at least a half dozen times. It's not really that hard and you'll make up the costs pretty quickly if you really need all of that.

To save myself chastising yet another HN'er about this my last comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7156521

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

#120

Post by matwood » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 1:45 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #116

matwood wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having helped put together at least half a dozen such rooms over the year (not an expert, but I can cobble together hardware into a 1u and 2u case as well as anybody and then screw them into a rack) I'm frankly surprised by the lack of both can-do attitude and basic know how here on HN. There's a weird notion here that additional lines can't be run for more bandwidth, and electricians don't exist who can come run mor…

I know it is possible, and have also done it. I just get tired of people saying you can match what AWS provides for less money in house by buying some servers and upgrading your FiOS line. It is disingenuous and simply not true.

In reality the sweet spot is in the planning. If talking about only compute, colo your 24/7 servers and spin up extra capacity when needed in the cloud provider of your choice (what Moz appears to be moving towards).

Something we make heavy use of is Glacier and I don't know of a good alternative on that front.