Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Short Rant About Hosting

blog.pinboard.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 66 posts

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#51

Post by simonw »

pmcginn wrote: post #22
ethank wrote: post #3

"Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time." My god that is good. I spent two weeks about three years ago going around the country looking at data centers to move our systems to (30+ servers that were currently in a co-lo and we were looking to go to managed/leased). We'd get pricing estimates that c…

Why do people think a spreadsheet is less likely to rip them off than a person? I mean, sure, if you want to, feel free to walk into a car dealership and pay sticker price. Go to the mall and buy that hardcover book at MSRP.

A spreadsheet doesn't earn a bonus.

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#52

Post by Luyt »

utunga wrote: post #10

As someone who runs both AWS and my own dedicated servers I'm starting to see a pattern.. MBA types talk about 'new trends', 'data centric startups' and new opportunities opened up by AWS and such. OTOH practical advice from real people with successful startups - marco arment, jakewalker, others, seems to focus more on the unseen problems of virtual and advantages of just getting your own server. Am I right?

"...the unseen problems of virtual [servers] and advantages of just getting your own server. Am I right?"

In my experience, you're right. For the same monthly amount of datacenter cost I can either install a pretty beefy machine, or rent a underpowered VPS.

A disadvantage of a VPS is that they're always artifically limited in memory, disk space and CPU power, whereas in the case of a real physical server machine I can put as much RAM/drives/CPUs I want.

An advantage of VPS would be no hardware cost, no redundancy concerns, easy to add/delete instances, etc.

However, for me the advatages of real machines weigh heavier than those of VPS solutions, at least at present.

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#53

Post by wisty »

ethank wrote: post #31
pmcginn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people think a spreadsheet is less likely to rip them off than a person? I mean, sure, if you want to, feel free to walk into a car dealership and pay sticker price. Go to the mall and buy that hardcover book at MSRP.

A spreadsheet doesn't waste time in the negotiation dance. I'll gladly pay for convenience and directness, which I do frequently. Think of it this way, given the choice between paying X for a service, or having to "Call for pricing..." which will you do? Personally I'd take the X option even if it cost more.

And that doesn't mean you can't still call for a better deal.

The sticker price should at least help you scope out whether your project is feasible on their system.

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#55

Post by dspillett »

conesus wrote: post #17

After reading Maciej's last post about his "cathedral" of a server, I moved NewsBlur off of half a dozen Linode VPSs (512MB and 2GB machines, for app/task and db respectively) and onto a hosting provider that offered both dedicated bare metal and a variety of VPS configs. I'm now paying $405 / month for 6 servers, and they range from 2 dedicated db machines with 12GB and 16GB of memory to 1GB virtualized app and task…

Yep.

If your usual working set (code+data), or better still your entire working set, fits into RAM easily and doesn't see a lot of write activity (where in RAM or not it needs to be copied to disk at some point), cheap VMs are often a no-brainer. The I/O hit will only seriously affect you if you need to reset he VM so the working set needs priming in RAM again.

As soon as you need I/O bandwidth (much writing, or a data-set that doesn't fit easily in RAM) you need a physical machine as the I/O contention between you and other VMs will completely kill performance.

So as you say: real machines for significant database work and cheap VMs for your web servers and other worker tasks is often the most cost effective arrangement. Don't go too cheap on the VMs though for production work. I generally avoid "burstable RAM" options as I find them less reliable (I'd rather have a fixed amount that can all reliably be allocated as needed, than unpredictable reliability forcing me to put procedures in place to deal with unexpected OOM situations). And make sure you properly test the bandwidth carrying capacity: I've seen cheap hosts get good reviews where the reviewer tested incoming bandwidth but filed to test outgoing - this is not all that useful as a hosts outgoing bandwidth usually sees much more contention than the incoming.

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#56

Post by praptak »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #25
pmcginn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people think a spreadsheet is less likely to rip them off than a person? I mean, sure, if you want to, feel free to walk into a car dealership and pay sticker price. Go to the mall and buy that hardcover book at MSRP.

Because a spreadsheet won't waste 10 minutes of my life talking about football, etc. before showing me a price. I'll buy a car from one of those no-haggle car dealerships. Yes, they're probably padding it out, but it's worth it not to have to chit-chat.

"I'll buy a car from one of those no-haggle car dealerships. Yes, they're probably padding it out, but it's worth it not to have to chit-chat."

This, or take a page from an economy handbook and set up the game so that it works to your advantage (hint: if you're physically at a dealer before the negotiation starts, then you've already lost.) Decide the exact model you need an email a dozen dealers for a quote.

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#57

Post by dkersten »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #50
joshu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seriously. i like to buy parts for things online and i am infuriated when there is a "call us" for what is ultimately a $37 part or whatever.

My rule of thumb is that if they don't put the price out there, either they're too expensive, or they aren't worth buying from

agreed. When I am looking for something, I want to make up a quick list of providers with a rough idea of what they offer and for how much. After I've got my list, I'll happily call them for more details and pricing options, but unless I can have a rough idea beforehand, I'm never going to call them.

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#58

Post by nirvana »

I'm curious to know why he chose the company he did among all the companies he looked at. I agree with the concerns about the difficulty of sourcing these services, and this may be a large part of why AWS is successful-- they provide the service as a utility.

One of the cheaper companies on his spreadsheet is hetzner.de They have dedicated servers that go down in size to about $20 a month: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x2

Note that their price includes VAT. If you're not a EU company, you don't pay the VAT and so the actual price is cheaper.

For our needs, we're going to start off buying a cluster. Probably 4-5 machines. As load grows, we'll add nodes and larger nodes over time. (A nice feature of Riak is that you can do this, just give the ring time to rebalance and you can migrate from one set of hosts to a larger one relatively quickly.)

VPS offerings lose a lot of their appeal in the face of a $20/month 1GB dedicated server! And with no setup cost, it is pretty elastic, though as you get to larger dedicated servers hetzner has a setup cost.

I'm not shilling for hetzner, I am just sharing them because I'm considering being a customer and and curious as to what others think about them. Also, curious if anyone else is facing the "we need to start with a cluster of machines, but we're a tiny startup at this point" issue...

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#59

Post by mgkimsal »

conesus wrote: post #46
plinio_silva wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What provider is that?

I use reliablehostingservices.net. Been solid for about 6 months now. Billing sucks (credit card for every server because I bought a few of them at different times -- so different billing cycles), but that's part of the benefit.

Glad to see another reliablehostingservices.net customer - been using them for > 1 year. Decent value for money, I do wish they had a good selection all the time - it's a little hit/miss at times - but overall happy with them!

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#60

Post by sandGorgon »

nirvana wrote: post #58

I'm curious to know why he chose the company he did among all the companies he looked at. I agree with the concerns about the difficulty of sourcing these services, and this may be a large part of why AWS is successful-- they provide the service as a utility. One of the cheaper companies on his spreadsheet is hetzner.de They have dedicated servers that go down in size to about $20 a month: http://www.hetzner.de/en/ho…

desktop grade hardware - if that's your thing go for it.

I believe that if you're going dedicated, might as well pay for enterprise grade hardware (with ECC RAM, RAID disks) because you dont get all the nifty backups/clones/spin-ups that you get from the cloud.

Post reply on HN