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My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

jitbit.com

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

#121

Post by spamizbad »

codeulike wrote: post #105
ebbv wrote: post #91

I don't see what the anecdote about the other person has to do with your story. It seems like you're citing it to try to imply that Linux can be expensive, but that's not really a valid point based on that anecdote. Their software costs were $0/mo of that $3000/mo. Linux has nothing to do with whatever reasons they had for such expensive server costs. There is no question that whatever their server costs, they would…

Linux has nothing to do with whatever reasons they had for such expensive server costs. It might do. The point is that Node/Ruby etc aren't particularly efficient compared to C# and the CLR, so you need more Server power for a given application. For example StackOverflow ran from a single windows server in the early days, they didn't add a second one till Oct 2008 http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/10/adde-a-second-s…

Techempower's benchmark's paint a different story than you describe. Node.js seems to be the fastest. ASP.NET MVC shows some strong performance in a handful of database tests but when it comes things like json serialization etc it falls behind the competition.

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r5&f=ug-...

Edit: FWIW it doesn't test Microsoft SQL Server. Still, for most simple-ish web applications I can't imagine MSSQL server being significantly faster than Postgres or MySQL. Its selling point is really its feature set as opposed to its performance anyway.

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

#122

Post by jf22 »

etherael wrote: post #116

2 SP3's from OVH would be both cheaper (89*2) and have way, way more bang for the buck than a single weak amazon instance. (E3 1245v2 8 ht cores @ 3.4ghz , 2 x 120GB SSD in soft raid and 32gb memory) If you wanted to run windows on those, you'd need to buy two licenses pushing an extra 50$ a month onto the price. You also wouldn't need to screw around with spawned instances in failover, and you could actually use the…

>"but for a nice IDE you drop a well behaved git, and everything that goes with it."

?

What about Visual Studio makes git behave badly?

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

#123

Post by midnitewarrior »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #75
jasonkester wrote: post #19

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 yea…

I've worked in IT for 12 years. Microsoft server stuff never just works . I'm in the process of replacing a $1 MM video asset management system that sits on top of Windows Server with OpenStack/Debian precisely because of this. Microsoft server just works . Hah!

Yeah, gotta say if the world can make it work, but you can't, must be Microsoft's problem, right?

I'm guessing Microsoft isn't your problem.

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

#124

Post by TheAnimus »

ebbv wrote: post #91

I don't see what the anecdote about the other person has to do with your story. It seems like you're citing it to try to imply that Linux can be expensive, but that's not really a valid point based on that anecdote. Their software costs were $0/mo of that $3000/mo. Linux has nothing to do with whatever reasons they had for such expensive server costs. There is no question that whatever their server costs, they would…

> Linux has nothing to do with whatever reasons

I think it is not about Linux in isolation, but about the fancy, over hyped tech stacks you see people using.

About 6 months ago I was having a few days off, out in the wilderness so to speak, I decided to try this whole Go thing. When reading about it, I thought nice I like the actor paradigm, I was doing a prime solver from someone's tutorial, and... It was slow. Not slow, slow, but slow.

Compared the same thing to a similar idea in C# in Rx and in TPL, and in F# and in CamelLight, with one in Java.

For my preference the syntax of C# was the best, and funnily enough the old fashioned style implementation I did in Java was the fastest, but not by much at all. Go was about 20% of the speed of the java one, not much faster than the CamlLight implementation.

This wasn't scientific, this wasn't a fair comparison, but I am cynical about the 'buzz' or hype for some of these frameworks.

People often view things like Node.js as free. Which isn't true when you are paying for the hardware it runs on. The 'cost' of C# or MS SQL server isn't just the Microsoft licenses either. You can't look at these things solely in isolation.

However its rather un-interesting to say that a behemoth and status quo are actually good options. 'new' things are much more interesting, so get spoken about a lot more, but I'd love to know something truly high scale, highly available in Node.js, and how much it has really cost them.

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

#125

Post by KaiserPro »

jitbit wrote: post #28
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…

$200 is a m.large instance (7.5.GB) plus the "provisioned i/o" charges (EBS volume). MS SQL is free since we're in BizSpark.

but one instance on Amazon is not high availability.

The rest of your post could be read as apples with oranges, Charm was expensive because they made massive architectural mistakes. End of story.

This is not to say that what you are doing/saying is incorrect. Your stuff works and is able to cope with the load thrown at it on one server.

To be honest I'm quite mystified why startups boast about using n instances to serve a few thousand hits. Node, some python frameworks and ruby are ridiculously wasteful[1]. All it tells me is that you've not though about the best way to do things, you've just used the latest tools and smooshed them together. If you had to have more than one server to handle 2[2] tickets a minute and 1 hit a second on your website I'd be questioning your programming skill

The one thing I do take issue with is your implied claim of high availability. Hourly backups, and no hot spare or active active replication is not high availability. Yes you can rebuild an instance in 5 minutes, but only in best case, and you've still lost up to an hour's worth of user data (around 60 tickets). That is a commendable recovery rate, but its still downtime.

[1] depending on usage, of course. [2] using stats from the article

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

#126

Post by etherael »

jf22 wrote: post #122
etherael wrote: post #116

2 SP3's from OVH would be both cheaper (89*2) and have way, way more bang for the buck than a single weak amazon instance. (E3 1245v2 8 ht cores @ 3.4ghz , 2 x 120GB SSD in soft raid and 32gb memory) If you wanted to run windows on those, you'd need to buy two licenses pushing an extra 50$ a month onto the price. You also wouldn't need to screw around with spawned instances in failover, and you could actually use the…

>"but for a nice IDE you drop a well behaved git, and everything that goes with it." ? What about Visual Studio makes git behave badly?

Nothing particularly about Visual Studio, and I know msysgit does work, but it worked absolutely terribly back when I tried it. That wasn't intended to be a mark against Visual Studio in any way, I agree completely it's a very nice IDE and the statement about it maybe being the best in the world is probably quite defensible. I just don't think that alone is a good reason to ignore all the other things about the MS stack that don't compare well to the competition, and the first example that sprung to mind was real git vs msysgit.

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

#127

Post by sixothree »

pmelendez wrote: post #84
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…

>"this specific article has absolutely no real reasons why you _should_ use Microsoft" He does give some reasons, which might not apply to everyone is another thing: (from the article) Because I love C#. Because "MS is expensive" is a myth. Because of Visual Studio Of all the three I am very agreed with the third one. I wish it would be different but I haven't used a better alternative to VS so far (XCode, Eclipse, N…

And the list seems to be missing the most important point.

    The .Net Framework is extremely powerful and extensive.
The number of problems the framework has prevented me from needing to solve is staggering. We get work done here, fast.

Eg. Recently I had to convert times from any random time zone into another random timezone accounting for daylight savings etc. I cannot imagine having to solve that problem in just about any other language suggested in this comment section.

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

#128

Post by jf22 »

etherael wrote: post #116

2 SP3's from OVH would be both cheaper (89*2) and have way, way more bang for the buck than a single weak amazon instance. (E3 1245v2 8 ht cores @ 3.4ghz , 2 x 120GB SSD in soft raid and 32gb memory) If you wanted to run windows on those, you'd need to buy two licenses pushing an extra 50$ a month onto the price. You also wouldn't need to screw around with spawned instances in failover, and you could actually use the…

>"On the other hand, if you build your apps around a horizontally scalable storage solution"

I'm assuming you're talking specifically about Sql Server because there is no technical reason you can't use MS tech with Node, Mongo or MySql.

What about Sql Server doesn't scale horizontally?

Sql Server was scaling horizontally in the enterprise space since 2005.

And also, all the fancy middleware ( memcache, lucene, whatever ) that we put in front of MySql to scale it these days work just fine with Sql Server.

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

#129

Post by statictype »

bayesianhorse wrote: post #98
statictype wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're building a web-based saas on a Microsoft stack. We use coffeescript, sass, compass in our development environment and it works really well. There are open source libraries for doing REST, unit testing, performance testing and they work pretty well. Node.js and npm run on Windows. Mercurial always has and git now works as well. What are the components that you miss?

It does sound a bit as if you were using a node.js stack on top of a Windows operating system, which I wouldn't exactly call a Microsoft stack. In which case there is really just the question of what you know better, linux ecosystem or Microsoft...

No, we're are using a Microsoft stack - ASP.NET MVC and Sql Server.

We're not actually using Node.js in that sense. I was just pointing out that it works well (we use Node and npm to run the coffeescript compiler - that's it)

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

#130

Post by KaiserPro »

bstar77 wrote: post #56
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…

I'm not sure why anyone, with the technology options available today, would choose a single monolithic server approach and scale that vertically. I think this is just poor design and probably not an MS stack issue. But could this be an MS community thing, where they generally prefer proven technical solutions from 2001?

Because the original poster shouldn't need more than one server to deal with 1 ticket a minute. (1500 tickets a day) you should be able to grow that by 1000% and still not break a sweat. In fact it should be able to cope with 1 a second.

In reality most people are never going to deal with that level of scale.

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