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My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

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Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#11

Post by mbesto »

All our stuff runs on one (1) server

This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted.

That costs us about $200 a month. By the way, that's Amazon

What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something?

Database servers for all of the above

MS SQL licensing costs are crazy stupid. You either (a) have to fork over about $2-3k fee or (b) the cloud based cost is an extra ~$150/month on top of the standards windows vm cost.

I'm genuinely curious about all of the above, because I am working with a MS-based startup and would be good to know.

But most importantly, because the customer doesn't give a darn.

100% agree.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#12

Post by stugrey »

BizSpark is fantastic, not for the free MS software but for the $150 a month of free Azure use for 3 years. For my bootstrapped project which has a significant server-side component it has removed my only monthly expenditure. There is also no compulsion to use MS products or to develop for Microsoft platforms either as i'm using Azure to power the Linux based backend of my iOS app.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#14

Post by tbrock »

Wouldn't you be doing something horribly wrong if you couldn't serve 70k requests a day? It's actually less than 1 a second: 70000 / (60 * 60 * 24) = .81

I think this article is more about distributed systems being costly (yes) and perhaps overly complicated for the types of applications most people build. I agree. However, you could easily do the same with Linux.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#15

Post by zdw »

mbesto wrote: post #11

All our stuff runs on one (1) server This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. That costs us about $200 a month. By the way, that's Amazon What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? Database servers for all o…

Exactly. If he was paying list price for any of this, there would be a sudden, dramatic increase in price.

Which will happen, when BizSpark runs out.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#16

Post by omni »

mbesto wrote: post #11

All our stuff runs on one (1) server This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. That costs us about $200 a month. By the way, that's Amazon What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? Database servers for all o…

> What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something?

You can easily get near 8GB for way under $200/mo using reserved pricing. A one year reservation, heavy utilization m1.large gives you 7.5GB of RAM for $40/mo and $676 up front, or about $100/mo total.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#17

Post by statictype »

mbesto wrote: post #11

All our stuff runs on one (1) server This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. That costs us about $200 a month. By the way, that's Amazon What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? Database servers for all o…

Yeah, 8gigs of RAM on ec2 works out to about a m1.large? I assume they're running SQL Server Standard Edition (do Saas apps like this one qualify for web edition?)

Shouldn't that be more than $200 a month?

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#18

Post by eduardordm »

80% of my costs come from securing client data and having a HA environment. We were using Oracle DB for many years, switched to PostgreSQL last month due to usability problems, not cost.

I hope you make clear to your users that there will be data lost (to the point of your last backup) in an event of failure (which is certain thing in AWS).

If you think Multi-AZ will save the day: we lost a whole region of data in 2011 and again in 2012. If we didn't have a slave node on another region, we would have to restore a 13 hours old backup, that would pretty much make us go bankrupt.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#19

Post by jasonkester »

I'll pluralize this anecdote.

Every bit of my little software empire runs on a single Windows box. That includes my 3 main money-making products, a couple dozen smaller sites being hosted for consulting clients and my partner's businesses, and the Expat blog. Lots of steady-state traffic to lots of sites, several Techcrunch, Reddit and HN poundings, nothing to write home about as far as downtime or drama in the 6 years it's been running.

Say what you like about Microsoft, but their server stuff just plain works.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#20

Post by [deleted] »

dkhenry wrote: post #10

While Microsoft might be a good solution for many people (Use what get the job done), this specific article has absolutely no real reasons why you _should_ use Microsoft. The truth is if One 8-gig windows server is what he needed for his start up he could get by with one 8-gig Linux server and save a couple of bucks a month. While that might not be a big deal now, if he ever wants to get big, those little costs start…

[deleted]
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