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The Five Stages of Hosting

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Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#131

Post by listic »

experiment0 wrote: post #113
seltzered_ wrote: post #109

The hostel You decide to run a site on 'shared' hosting (e.g. dreamhost, 1&1, godaddy (shudder), etc.) because it looks really cheap and they list so many "unlimited" things. The good: It's surprisingly pretty cozy for your startup wordpress blog about fish, although at that point you start wondering why you didn't just get a wordpress.com account instead, but you justify it by saying you were able to put your custom…

The thing is, the price difference between this and a vps is too dramatic. For example, I can get a Lunarpages basic hosting, with "Unlimited" Bandwidth and "Unlimited" Storage for $4.99/mo with support for rails apps and python (not django however). Not to mention a free domain name. However the cheapest linode vps is $19.99/mo. I would LOVE to have a vps to play around on, I would have so much use for it and yet I'…

The price difference between shared hosting and VPS is non-existent. http://www.lowendbox.com/ is a site dedicated to low-end VPS offerings under $7/mo. They have tons of offers listed and guides like "Yes, You Can Run 18 Static Sites on a 64MB Link-1 VPS" (http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/yes-you-can-run-18-static-site...) To be listed there, $7 should be recurring maximum price, not limited time offer. Some are really good.

The real difference is not in price; it's that in shared hosting you don't get the option and associated responsibility of managing your software stack; in VPS you do.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#132

Post by listic »

stevelosh wrote: post #123
experiment0 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, the price difference between this and a vps is too dramatic. For example, I can get a Lunarpages basic hosting, with "Unlimited" Bandwidth and "Unlimited" Storage for $4.99/mo with support for rails apps and python (not django however). Not to mention a free domain name. However the cheapest linode vps is $19.99/mo. I would LOVE to have a vps to play around on, I would have so much use for it and yet I'…

I've heard good things about http://prgmr.com/ and they have 5/6/8/12 -dollar tiers.

If the amount of traffic they offer feels adequate, good for you. Otherwise, practically anyone else will offer more traffic these days.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#133

Post by LogicX »

wildster wrote: post #105
LogicX wrote: post #32

This is an amazing article. I intended to write such a blog article myself. One aspect I intended to cover (and will now do so here) is that of cost. I get very frustrated by cash-strapped startups which from day one are expecting to be 'web-scale' and need to turn up machines at the drop of a hat. Lets get real. I HOPE you have to worry about that... much, much later. I'm quite pleased you started your article menti…

Using Heroku is not free as a programming overhead as you have to bake in Amazon S3 as a dependancy.

That implies your users are uploading files. Certainly not the case for all startups, but yes, this could certainly be an additional overhead. Still, compared to running and configuring a VPS, thats nothing.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#134

Post by imbriaco »

LogicX wrote: post #133
wildster wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Heroku is not free as a programming overhead as you have to bake in Amazon S3 as a dependancy.

That implies your users are uploading files. Certainly not the case for all startups, but yes, this could certainly be an additional overhead. Still, compared to running and configuring a VPS, thats nothing.

Also, if you're handling user uploaded content you shouldn't just be writing it to local disk. You're going to have to figure out how to do off-instance blob storage at some point if you scale beyond a single server or want any redundancy. S3 is just about as good as it gets for blob storage today.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#136

Post by waitwhat »

dspillett wrote: post #129
waitwhat wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also have a look at OVH's Kimsufi brand: http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ i7 + 24GB RAM + 2TB disc + 100Mbps for €50 (they geo-restrict their plans, and I think only the French get unlimited bandwidth; UK people have to survive on "just" 15TB/month, for example)

http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ is showing unlimited for all three plans when I visit (from a UK IP address). I might have to get one of the lower spec (celeron/atom) machines for myself, do you have personal experience of the company?

Careful of the small-print: "The traffic is unlimited. If you exceed 5TB/month for the Kimsufi 2G, 10TB/month for the Kimsufi 16G or 15TB/month for the 24G Kimsufi the connection will be limited to 10 Mbps." My understanding is that if you do get restricted, the restriction isn't automatically lifted the next month. You might want to check with pre-sales to find out exactly what the process is.

I have had a box with them on and off (more on than off) for the last couple of years. I'm not doing anything critical there, but have also had no issues. Everything seems rock solid (which it should be -- Wikipedia says that "The company has six datacentres housing more than 100,000 machines.") You can reinstall from the web control panel, they rent KVMs, not sure what else to add.

The major things people tend to bring up in forum postings are:

Kimsufi is the "non-professional" brand, and hardware support is slower than the OVH parent. Nothing ridiculous, but you aren't going to get a bad drive replaced within a couple of hours either.

OVH has "low quality bandwidth". Of course, people making this complaint never quantify exactly what they mean by this. I just tested on my "24G" box, and see 30-40MB/s to cachefly, 90MB/s to Leaseweb in Amsterdam, 75MB/s to Linode in London, 3-4MB/s to Linode in Newark and Atlanta, 12MB/s to SoftLayer in Dallas, 10MB/s to SingleHop in Chicago, 11MB/s to Joe's Data Centre. (Of course these are large test files.)

If you're interested, there's no setup fee and no minimum contract length (check this for yourself, obviously), so I'd say go for it.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#137

Post by hga »

larrys wrote: post #65

An option was left out which is to have your own T1 running into your own facility (that is not a data center). We did this for years ('96 to 2004) and had much better up time than with colocation with diverse paths and biometric security. We didn't need a generator either. Just an array of industrial batteries hooked up to a power inverter with a line conditioner could keep the equipment running for 24 hours if util…

Well, that does trade off risks to your T1 getting knocked out by a backhoe, perhaps power failures between you and the other end of it (e.g. if I bought a business DSL connection from AT&T to run a server at my apartment, I could lose it in a general power outage when the DSLAM's battery ran out).

But I can well believe it's better than many co-lo experiences, although all of mine have been positive. Right now I'm helping a friend with one: due to it housing Protected Health Information we pretty much have to run it on our own servers, which I built and he put into a co-lo that he's worked with before for this sort of thing.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#138

Post by adambyrtek »

rhizome wrote: post #71
ricardobeat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of uplink do you have? An app that starts getting into the thousands of users will quickly saturate a normal ADSL line (1-2mbps up), and an SDSL/T1 connection is many times more expensive than a remote dedicated server.

Well, you move to hosting before you have thousands of users, silly! I'm talking POC/MVP stuff. My uplink is something like 384Kbit, plenty for showoff purposes.

384kbit (48kB/s) is plenty? You are kidding, right?

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#139

Post by jiggy2011 »

They forgot my preferred hosting method from my pot smoking college days.

A second hand Pentium II in the corner of the lounge, running Slackware with ports 80 and 21 forwarded to it from a cheap belkin router off your domestic DSL connection.

Good: Basically free (assuming the power bill is in your landlord's name) , host whatever the hell you like.

Bad: Someone might spill the bong water over the power strip and ruin your uptime.

Re: The Five Stages of Hosting

#140

Post by gnosis »

statictype wrote: post #34
there wrote: post #14

as someone that has done colocation, dedicated hosting, and VPS, i'm a huge fan of dedicated hosting. colocation was expensive and the hardware problems were all mine. i was pretty much tied to my local datacenter because i didn't want to ship a server around (which would be at least a day of downtime). pricing can be hard to compare because of power/space/bandwidth. if the equipment i colocated didn't have IPMI supp…

i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month. This seems ridiculously cheap compared to something with comparable RAM/CPU on EC2. Is there a catch?

Paying $140-$190 per month is already ridiculously expensive.

I pay about $3 per month for a very low-end xen VPS. Sure, I'm not running anything at all resource intensive on it.. but if I was maybe I'd spring for a higher-end VPS for $6, or if I really wanted to get crazy I'd find a really solid one for about $20 a month.

At $140-$190 a month, you'd better be getting a bunch of high-end dedicated servers and fantastic support, or you are getting seriously ripped off.

Hell, given the very modest needs of most small startups, having to shell out even $20 a month is a ripoff.

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