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

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121–130 of 137 posts

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

#121
post #113

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?

my profile has my email address now.

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

#122

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…

I'm interested in knowing more since we do development and system integration for client in this kind of budget, and we didn't find a decent hosting provider in years of trying. Could you name some of those managed providers, including the one you work for?

i put my email in my profile. i don't promote my company by name on HN, but send over your requirements and we can take a look.

thanks.

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

#123
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appea…

Well you can't match what AWS provides. Almost nobody strictly can. But it's over-engineered and more than what most businesses could ever possibly need or want. Some questions, does your English only web startup really need redundancy in 30+ countries? Do you really need five 9 reliability or can you get by just fine with four 9s? etc.

For what 95% of the people here on HN need, 2 or 3 decent servers running off of a business FiOS line will be more than adequate for even their wildest ambitions. 99% of the remainder could make do with a rack or two of equipment, a generator, dedicated a/c and some loving electrician work. And even then if they need quick surge capacity expansion, they can still bring in AWS to augment their home-rolled stuff.

If keeping your stuff in-house isn't sexy enough, colo'ing it is still cheaper than AWS in most cases.

There's probably a fraction of 1% of the startups here that actually need what AWS offers. But the prevailing attitude here is that everybody's appointment reminder photo sharing web app is going to require AWS when they'd be perfectly well serviced, and be far more responsible with investor money, with something far less capable. The problem, as I'm seeing in the comments here, is that basic industry know-how (like how to assembly a reliable high-performance server from parts) seems to be largely absent in the industry.

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

#124
post #10

I bet one of the leading factors is the number of sites blocking the AWS servers. As a scraping service, the fact that Amazon makes all their public IPs known ( https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1701 ) is really inconvenient for anyone "crawling" the web. Rackspace also makes their list available, albeit incomplete ( http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/cloud-site... ). As more websites setup…

You can just use BGP to find out all that information easily enough for any network with an AS number (i.e. any who speaks BGP). Just take a look here: http://bgp.he.net or a plethora of looking glasses like http://lg.level3.net or publicly available route servers like telnet://route-views.routeviews.org

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

#125
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've found a medium instance (~$100/mo) handles with ease 100k+ visitors/mo without breaking a sweat. This is not really intended as a direct reply to you, but I think that price point illustrates mgkimsals point well: I have a Django-based project with about the same amount of visitors per month on an old rented vserver that costs about 7€($10)/month. Yes, you have to set up nginx once, but as mgkimsal mentioned s…

> Yes, you have to set up nginx once ... This is the kind of thing that I've just started documenting at http://tweaked.io/

Great Idea! May I suggest a tutorial for setting up uwsgi in a robust way, e.g. including a proper startup script in /etc/init.d/ or something similar?

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

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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…

Reserves instances long-term don't make much p&l sense, it makes more sense to rent dedicated hw where most of the other costs are cheaper.

Agreed, which is why I don't do it or recommend it. I had a client look in to it once, and it was a toss up between renting dedicated servers vs reserved instances, and they went dedicated.

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

#127
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to know if you considered other hosting providers as an alternative to building out your own hardware/datacenters? I think it's reasonably well known that AWS is around 3 times more expensive than alternatives where you pay by-the-month instead of by-the-minute. Was a Rackspace/Linode/whoever implementation costed against a buy-your-own-boxes solution, and if so, is there anything you could share about wh…

We use other cloud services as well. Rackspace and Nimbix are a couple of them. We even looked at Azure figuring no contention for boxes but we don't have any MSFT in our stack (sorry to my whole neighborhood of MSFT employees). We never depend on just one and have a detailed cost breakdown before we decided to buy or move a service. The ROI needs to be there. As an aside, AWS has everyone beat when it comes to regio…

AWS tends to pick locations based on cost rather than their proximity to major Internet hubs, so the number of physical locations they actually have for most of their services is deceptive. They only have 9 available regions, and their latency is going to be much higher than most other providers that are located right by major Internet hubs instead in the middle of nowhere. We're a company (dedicated hosting provider) with only a team of 5 people, and we already have colo in 7 locations, which has them handily beat in North America and matched in Europe. There are also several VPS providers and resellers who simply rent dedicated servers from multiple companies like us with more locations than AWS. I'm looking at the website of one of our clients now who has 20 meaningful locations. Akamai absolutely destroys Cloud Front and everyone else in terms of presence, and a number of other CDNs have them handily beat. Neither AWS nor Cloud Front are anywhere near being leaders in terms of meaningful geographical (i.e. network) presence.

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

#128
post #27

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.

It's not because it's cheap, it's because you can avoid capacity planning and blowing capital (for which you would need an ROI). Once you are big enough that you hire your own accounts, lawyers & ops, then you can make a capital investment into your hosting infrastructure get a return on it. Too early and that was money that could have been better invested into growth opportunities.

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

#129
post #63
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a simple example, if you have a moderate number of hosts in a single security group (e.g. 200+ hosts), you can expect to have intermittent communication problems between the nodes. They used to deny this was a problem. here's a source, since you're attacking and disbelieving everybody who doesn't love AWS: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/2240203992/N...

It may or may not be the same issue, but from what I have been able to gather a modification of a security group is basically a "delete, recreate, repopulate" operation. All of our intermittent network issues could be reasonably tied back to SG modifications.

That's a different issue. This one is instances that are launched into an sg that is then left unmodified. If there are a moderate to large number of instances in that sg, intermittent network connectivity problems will ensue.

The issue you mention (where you have to treat sg's as being immutable if you want them to work reliably) is another problem with the sg's.

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

#130
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to contact you?

my profile has my email address now.

To save everyone a click: it appears he's removed his email from his profile. (Too much interest?)
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