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Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

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Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#51

Post by RealGeek »

randfish wrote: post #20
ecaron wrote: post #10

I bet one of the leading factors is the number of sites blocking the AWS servers. As a scraping service, the fact that Amazon makes all their public IPs known ( https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1701 ) is really inconvenient for anyone "crawling" the web. Rackspace also makes their list available, albeit incomplete ( http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/cloud-site... ). As more websites setup…

We've actually never crawled out of Amazon (mostly because it was expensive to do so), so the crawl blocking stuff is unrelated, at least for us. As Sarah noted, it's really been costs, service, and support issues.

What type of hosting infrastructure works best for crawling?

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#52

Post by d23 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #42

For what many orgs need to do, a myriad of lesser-known VPS providers would be just fine, and be a fraction of the cost. But most people I've known don't investigate or educate themselves much - it's been a herd mentality towards AWS, irrespective of needs or costs (because often, it's not them paying - it's "the company"). Perhaps as a freelance consultant right now I take a sharper look at the costs involved - if a…

> if a client has, say, $50k to budget on a project, I really don't want $10k of that to go to hosting if it doesn't need to

On a $50k project, how are you even dropping $10k on AWS? I've found a medium instance (~$100/mo) handles with ease 100k+ visitors/mo without breaking a sweat.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#53

Post by jack57 »

askinner wrote: post #49

To be clear, we haven't dumped AWS for short running stateless processing. We dynamically spin up spot instances as needed for all our stateless processing using AWS and other cloud services. At our current size our AWS bill will not be 7 million but closer to 500k-1 million a year. Not exactly pocket change. Some of the cost savings we are realizing is due to working with AWS as well on best practices. For our longe…

Thanks for the additional information. It was difficult to decipher your problems from the original article. I'm guessing the "no variability in load" processes are where AWS was the most unnecessary.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#54

Post by joevandyk »

d23 wrote: post #52
mgkimsal wrote: post #42

For what many orgs need to do, a myriad of lesser-known VPS providers would be just fine, and be a fraction of the cost. But most people I've known don't investigate or educate themselves much - it's been a herd mentality towards AWS, irrespective of needs or costs (because often, it's not them paying - it's "the company"). Perhaps as a freelance consultant right now I take a sharper look at the costs involved - if a…

> if a client has, say, $50k to budget on a project, I really don't want $10k of that to go to hosting if it doesn't need to On a $50k project, how are you even dropping $10k on AWS? I've found a medium instance (~$100/mo) handles with ease 100k+ visitors/mo without breaking a sweat.

depends on the work load, data size, computation needs, etc. measuring by "visitors per month" makes no sense.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#55

Post by askinner »

jack57 wrote: post #53
askinner wrote: post #49

To be clear, we haven't dumped AWS for short running stateless processing. We dynamically spin up spot instances as needed for all our stateless processing using AWS and other cloud services. At our current size our AWS bill will not be 7 million but closer to 500k-1 million a year. Not exactly pocket change. Some of the cost savings we are realizing is due to working with AWS as well on best practices. For our longe…

Thanks for the additional information. It was difficult to decipher your problems from the original article. I'm guessing the "no variability in load" processes are where AWS was the most unnecessary.

Yes! 95% of our services were running at AWS. Paying AWS for running our website is not a good use of money. Many cheaper ways to host a website.

Paying for 70-100 hours of compute and having the server crash in the middle of calculating your predictive analytics not exactly all that bright either. So, we bought our own gear.

AWS works and worked with us pretty damn closely as we pulled apps out of the cloud.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#56

Post by nl »

dangrossman wrote: post #9
abrowne wrote: post #7

Did anyone else think "Moz" was short for Mozilla?

Not I, but I'm part of their demographic -- http://d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/2013-in-review/52e9b643...

Something's weird about that graphic. Do 17% only of people really recognize the brand Microsoft?

Or (more likely) is it that only 17% of people realized they do "marketing technology"?

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#57

Post by dalke »

joevandyk wrote: post #54
d23 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if a client has, say, $50k to budget on a project, I really don't want $10k of that to go to hosting if it doesn't need to On a $50k project, how are you even dropping $10k on AWS? I've found a medium instance (~$100/mo) handles with ease 100k+ visitors/mo without breaking a sweat.

depends on the work load, data size, computation needs, etc. measuring by "visitors per month" makes no sense.

I think it's reasonable to assume that d23 knows that. The question is "how", and the second sentence provides context for d23's knowledge and expectations, which mgkimsal might use in a followup answer.

I too find it difficult to think of a $40K project which is both likely to spend $10K at Amazon, and which can acquire equivalent resources (hardware, power, space, admin, etc.) for significantly under the same cost.

Not impossible, but real-world examples would be nice.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#58

Post by bane »

At some point, I'm going to guess that even moderately large AWS configurations would be better off getting a high capacity business FiOS line (or whatever the next tier is), get a couple racks full of home rolled high-end systems and staff 2 or 3 guys full time to run everything. The systems will be faster, probably about as reliable, everything will be cheaper even with extra people on payroll.

I'd love to see some numbers on this though.

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#59

Post by bigiain »

askinner wrote: post #55
jack57 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the additional information. It was difficult to decipher your problems from the original article. I'm guessing the "no variability in load" processes are where AWS was the most unnecessary.

Yes! 95% of our services were running at AWS. Paying AWS for running our website is not a good use of money. Many cheaper ways to host a website. Paying for 70-100 hours of compute and having the server crash in the middle of calculating your predictive analytics not exactly all that bright either. So, we bought our own gear. AWS works and worked with us pretty damn closely as we pulled apps out of the cloud.

I'm curious to know if you considered other hosting providers as an alternative to building out your own hardware/datacenters? I think it's reasonably well known that AWS is around 3 times more expensive than alternatives where you pay by-the-month instead of by-the-minute. Was a Rackspace/Linode/whoever implementation costed against a buy-your-own-boxes solution, and if so, is there anything you could share about why you chose the way you did?

(Oh, and thanks for the information you've already shared - even if you can't answer my curiosity here…)

Re: Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service

#60

Post by wpietri »

fbags wrote: post #35
wahnfrieden wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to claim otherwise, but I'd be interested to see what instances led to your observation.

As a simple example, if you have a moderate number of hosts in a single security group (e.g. 200+ hosts), you can expect to have intermittent communication problems between the nodes. They used to deny this was a problem. here's a source, since you're attacking and disbelieving everybody who doesn't love AWS: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/2240203992/N...

Asking politely phrased questions is not an "attack". I just looked through the last 30 days of his comments, and I don't see anything attack-like there.
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