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

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

#131

Post by liquidcool »

nl wrote: post #56
dangrossman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not I, but I'm part of their demographic -- http://d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/2013-in-review/52e9b643...

Something's weird about that graphic. Do 17% only of people really recognize the brand Microsoft? Or (more likely) is it that only 17% of people realized they do "marketing technology"?

I'm guessing it's the latter, and as this was put out by Marketing Land, it was a poll of their readers. I don't necessarily associate MS with marketing, but they probably mean Bing as a marketing channel.

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

#132

Post by jmathai »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #104
jmathai wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done both. In my previous startup (circa 2005) we started at The Planet (are they still around?) and within 18 months we were colocating physical servers at a nearby Level 3. I'm sure it's gotten better but when we colocated I had to project what type of traffic and storage (photos) we'd need. That led us to lease a few servers from HP. We were able to reuse hardware we owned already for reporting type tasks. Bu…

But here's the kicker. Since we started on AWS we were able to keep our costs fairly low at the beginning and as we grew we never had to make any long term projections. We simply added capacity (literally) on a weekly basis. The exact same thing can be said for renting dedicated servers. You can add new ones at any time and it's fairly quick. This is exactly how we scaled up as well. Adding new servers day to day as…

It's entirely feasible that things are much better than they were a decade ago. I sure hope they are :).

Perhaps it's slightly more expensive to start with AWS, cheaper as you scale (WRT man hours) and gets (prohibitively) more expensive once you hit a certain scale.

I don't doubt there are plenty of reasons to be off AWS. Lots of evidence exists to support that. And vice versa.

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

#133

Post by programminggeek »

chrissnell wrote: post #88
programminggeek wrote: post #67

What I find most perplexing is that people don't really understand that the point of Amazon is elasticity to make capacity planning easier for high growth situations. That elasticity only makes financial sense when you use it properly. Like, if you keep your entire infrastructure turned on all the time, and cranked up to 11, but you aren't using reserved instances, then you are missing the point and you might as well…

What you're saying may apply to simple SaaS companies who might build a two-tier application that can be easily scaled up and down by adding front-end nodes and r/o database nodes, but it doesn't always apply to data analysis companies like Moz, who may use large ElasticSearch clusters that don't autoscale. I run technical operations for such a company. The vast majority of our infrastructure remains static, simply b…

Right, and that makes total sense. I haven't ran the numbers, but I know that if you have some amount of fixed capacity required, you would absolutely want to do reserved instances on all of those and consolidate as much as you can where it makes sense.

However, if the numbers don't work out on reserved instances and you have a pretty steady demand, going with your own infrastructure makes total sense.

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

#134

Post by reitzensteinm »

rkrzr wrote: post #111
reitzensteinm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure... the above is how to get a ton of bandwidth on the cheap. CloudFlare (and other CDNs) aren't the way to do this, as described below:

http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/02/how-much-traffic-is-too-muc...

>> At 100TB/mo., pure file delivery, you'd need to be an Enterprise customer. Let me know if this works within your budget.

> The Enterprise plan comes at $3000/mo.

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

#135

Post by superuser2 »

bane wrote: post #118
superuser2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

The issue is primarily cost. This stuff costs more per server at small scale. Maybe some colocation hosts are running such a large margin that they cost savings is thrown away, but others aren't.

Colocation is a great solution (in fact, the solution) to the scale issue.

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

#136

Post by ilaksh »

aritraghosh007 wrote: post #74

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 infrastru…

AWS doesn't automatically upgrade your OS image or anything like that. If you want to do that you have to do it yourself. And AWS isn't going to troubleshoot shit unless you pay a huge amount for support which is hard to even find the option for that.

However, on Ubuntu server at least there are literally about two commands to run for upgrading the OS.

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

#137

Post by ilaksh »

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…

I think that at this point EC2 should almost be described as a scam, except for cases where people are going to rely on several of the AWS services like DynamoDB that has little to no competition, and are also relying on having very low latency connections to those other AWS services from their EC2 services. I think scam applies just because the cost differential is so much and only exists because people don't know about other services.

But it is weird that people don't know about Linode or Digital Ocean (which is incredibly cheap compared to AWS and actually works, which the micro EC2 instances often stop working if you put a load on them). Even Rackspace would be much better option.

So even if you are just thinking of very popular companies, there are well known reliable options out there that are vastly better values for most things than EC2. Then there are probably dozens or even hundreds of small companies that would probably provided even better value and service.

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