

Ask HN: Best VPS providers for fast scale-out - doppenhe

I am searching for a good , cost effective VPS provider. My main decision point will be how quickly I can spin up new instances (minutes is no good I need seconds). Any recommendations? THANKS!
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Pyramids
Performance: \- PhoenixNap SecuredCloud <http://www.phoenixnap.com/> (US-West,
US-East, Amsterdam) [VMWare based, spinup time is about 45 seconds, offers
every imaginable feature for large production environments, enterprise
firewall, f5 load balancing, 100% uptime SLA]

Value: \- Digital Ocean <https://www.digitalocean.com/> (US-East, Amsterdam)
[KVM/QEMU based, spinup time is under a minute, decent 'basic' API]

As a current customer of both companies, we use Digital Ocean to host our
company VPN and development nodes, and PhoenixNAP to host our production
sites. (Bandwidth at PhoenixNAP is billed @.05- per gb, very competitive
compared to EC2 especially considering they use exclusively premium bandwidth)

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platypii
Friend of doppenhe here.

Amazon, heroku etc aren't fast enough for us due to spin-up time. Basically
when we get a particular command from a user, we need to do a LOT computation
on many parallel machines, but for a short burst of time.

Keeping a whole cluster of machines reserved would be prohibitively expensive
at this stage. We would prefer to keep a small base-load capacity reserved,
and then spin up a large number of instance for a short time. Response time is
key here.

It would be best if they were already up and running, waiting for a command,
but idle most of the time. Fine if it's shared with others. Kind of like a
computation insurance for short bursts of high-demand.

Anyone know any services like that?

~~~
benologist
What about cheap dedicateds?

In the US Hivelocity have great prices - <http://hivelocity.net/>

In Europe there's also Hetzner - <http://www.hetzner.de/en/>

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sheraz
I recommend you take this question over to the WebHostingTalk forums [1]. They
have a lot of smart people who are in that space and can offer a lot of
insights as well as deals on hardware, bandwidth, storage, etc. I am not
affiliated, just a user there from time to time.

[1] - <http://webhostingtalk.com>

~~~
doppenhe
thanks!

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ngcoders
Linode is good with nice API , Even Digital Ocean is good with basic API.

We are using DO ( value for money ) for a new service and A full nginx based
site can be setup in under 60 - 80 seconds after cloning a basic image. New
instances take a little less time.

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benologist
Heroku can spin up new instances in seconds and you can automate it with
HireFireApp. It's not a VPS, but a VPS aka shared hardware is never going to
be "seconds" unless it's already provisioned and basically just needs to boot
(EC2 and your own AMIs?).

