41–50 of 87 posts
I agree with the other comments about Azure's VM's being too expensive though.
Amazon S3 and Cloudfront b/c Azure CDN doesn't quite have all the features I need.
I have provided my own cloud, in the form of a 1U server, since 1998. I run my (very tiny) website there as well as my own mailserver, and I read email over SSH using (al)pine. Backups offsite go to the obvious place :) This setup might not be that interesting, but I think it's worth noting that a cloud computing paradigm/model has functioned well for 16 years now with no significant changes. I have not had data on m…
How easy is it for you to manage keeping your server and data secure? I would really like to do this, but my fears of getting hacked have kept me from doing it.
Digital Ocean - I only want to build off base Linux VM, I do not want to be locked into S3 + SQS + ... - Price is right for young startups - Speed is nice
DO is really nice. I use a little droplet myself and for the given price of 5-10 USD/month it is a great value. Once you want something more I wonder if there are better options. Take there 320 USD/month plan. You get 32GB memory, 12 CoreProcessor, 320GB SSD disk and 7TB transfer. If I take a fixed price server at Hetzner I get 128 GB memory, 12 CoreProcessors, 2x240 GB SSD disk and 50TB transfer. Even the smaller ma…
100£ for such a monster: http://www.soyoustart.com/en/offers/sys-ip-6-s.xml is really reasonable, imho.
Historically, Linode. Good performance, and decent value. More recently, Heroku. Expensive, but I love being able to leave the sysadmin to someone else.
Now I'm using Heroku and wonder why I wasted so much time before worrying about disk space, permissions, rotating logs, etc. I definitely get it now.
Microsoft Azure - The admin portal is great - Deploying to websites is just a simple push - I can programmatically spin up new SQL DB instances - I really like C# - There are a LOT of additional services available - Microsoft is very aggressive about keeping prices low
I think Azure gets a bad reputation in this community from the old "Microsoft = bad" bias that a lot of us have. However, if you are in a Windows stack and/or a corporate developer (and that is a large but quiet percentage of developers) it really seems like the best solution. Also the variety of services they provide under one umbrella is neck and neck with Amazon for best in the industry.
I also had trouble using one of their API's. Got even thrown out very quickly for abusing it. No idea why, just trying to access. Maybe MS does not like my coding style :-) Never had something like that before. Reference to possible explanation page did not work. Faq did not cover it. Still I got an automated email a few days later to congratulate me with using Azure, while actually I was locked out...
But I have no commitment to Windows, so its easy to switch. I normally use DO and AWS and stick with them for now.
Digital Ocean - I only want to build off base Linux VM, I do not want to be locked into S3 + SQS + ... - Price is right for young startups - Speed is nice
I just wish there was a single VM that wasn't SSD backed. I write web crawlers sometimes and I usually only have to parse the HTML / JS once into JSON or SQL, but I like to keep the data backed up just in case I need to re-parse it later, or to see the changes between crawls. It's completely impossible for me to even fit it on their $640 / month box. But I love Digital Ocean for everything else.
I use RunAbove[1] usually. Mostly because it's nearby (low latency), based on OpenStack (opensource and all the tools works ootb), and inexpensive. [1] https://www.runabove.com/
Looks too cheap. For how long have you used them and is all your experience positive. Their $/GB RAM is more than twice cheaper than DigitalOcean which are already quite cheap (compared to AWS and the like). Apparent downside of RunAbove is that the ration of cores to memory is lower.
I have been using RunAbove specifically since October. It's fine. Even the sandbox instances.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just wish there was a single VM that wasn't SSD backed. I write web crawlers sometimes and I usually only have to parse the HTML / JS once into JSON or SQL, but I like to keep the data backed up just in case I need to re-parse it later, or to see the changes between crawls. It's completely impossible for me to even fit it on their $640 / month box. But I love Digital Ocean for everything else.
Couldn't you potentially push that aspect elsewhere, into a data storage solution like S3 or something (not sure of the cost efficiency, not a huge cloud guy myself). Then you'd just be utilizing the DO server for processing. It would have the added benefit of allowing you to scale your crawling horizontally if you wanted, as all your servers could have access to the same set of data.
Microsoft Azure - The admin portal is great - Deploying to websites is just a simple push - I can programmatically spin up new SQL DB instances - I really like C# - There are a LOT of additional services available - Microsoft is very aggressive about keeping prices low
We have used SoftLayer, Peak10, Google and Azure at different times while testing things out. SoftLayer we actually ran some processes in for about a year.
I recently had posted on HN about services like DigitalOcean because there are ways for us to save money using those types of services, or even Heroku. In the end the ecosystem, ease of use, reliability (when architected right) and flexibility of AWS is still just too powerful for us. The costs are not the cheapest way we could do something, but when you factor in the minimal amount of man hours we spend on infrastructure compared to what we could be, I think it is a good deal. We try not to get too ingrained to AWS only features, and where we do we will hide their implementation so we can switch them out if ever needed. I also classify them differently too, for example, DynamoDB or MySQL (via RDS) wouldn't be something I'd try to wrap, it is your database and could be used from anywhere so you aren't really locked into AWS as much as your database there. But something like SQS, we used but wrapped, and eventually moved to RabbitMQ with very little extra effort.
I have had to use AWS support a few times, and they have been AMAZINGLY helpful. And for non-critical things they usually answer forum posts pretty quick too. AWS isn't a panacea with no issues, but for my money its the best thing going right now. And they are constantly releasing new things and tweaking things, not everything is for the better, but for the most part it is.