

Ask HN: Hosts you use for your projects? - fjabre

I've used webfaction and slicehost quite a bit and have been very happy with them but wanted to check out a few others before I release my latest project.<p>Wondering who everyone else recommends or likes for their projects.
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jtg
I use Amazon EC2 for several reasons. They basically boil down to having
everything I want with little hassle.

\- I can hold my own as far as basic sysadmin functions go, and I like having
control over the entire software stack. A lot of Amazon EC2 machine images can
be stripped bare to give me only what I need.

\- I don't have a lot of money to blow on a dedicated machine each month, so
it's nice to at least have a running environment even if it's virtualized (and
therefore slower). At least I can know if my code works out in the wild.

\- I pay only for what I use. There's also the option to leave it on and pay
in advance (Reserved Instances). So whether my projects end up being just
small diversions or whether they gain traction, there's a pricing plan I can
go with. It was meant for companies to scale up and down, but I've actually
found it useful for scaling my personal projects up and down.

\- The management tools are pretty good. ElasticFox is clunky at times but it
has everything I need without a whole lot of hassle.

\- Elastic IPs. I can claim a static IP if I wish, or just choose not to use
it.

Amazon has exposed a lot of stuff over their APIs, but don't be fooled into
thinking that this means they added layers and layers of cruft akin to all the
useless software that comes on new PCs. The APIs just work on a meta level --
useful if you want to package up machines and that kind of stuff -- but if all
you need is a Linux box with good bandwidth for your personal projects, give
Amazon a shot.

There's also the added bonus that they're, well, Amazon. And they're not going
away anytime soon.

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nreece
Linode: <http://www.linode.com>

Rackspace Cloud/Sites: <http://www.rackspacecloud.com>

~~~
aditya
linode here too, but I've heard decent things about hetzner.de which works out
much better from a price perspective if you want more resources.

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jusob
So you're hosted in Germany? Is your target audience in the US? Prices are
great in Europe in general, but the latency between US West coast and Hertzner
was too high for us. They also had network issues at some points with a lot of
TCP retransmission, that did not help.

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marram
We use Google App Engine because we lack serious sys-admin skills, and GAE
abstracts all that away from us. Also, the datastore was much easier for us to
understand and hack than relational databases.

For project hosting, we use hosted-projects.com because it gives us
SVN+track+bugzilla and wires them together, and they have good tech support. I
also like Beanstalk, but it doesn't come with a bug tracker.

~~~
samueldrop
We use GAE and also for projects that need PHP. Also see how to run PHP on
your app engine [http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/run-php-on-the-google-
app...](http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/run-php-on-the-google-app-engine/)

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andrewtj
I use Linode (<http://www.linode.com/>) at the moment but will probably move
to prgmr (<http://prgmr.com/xen/>) so I can cut costs — anyone got experience
with them?

~~~
thismat
Linode is fantastic. Their support and control panels are great. Anything not
in their really cool guides, you can always jump into their IRC channel, which
I've had really great results with.

I love my little VPS!

~~~
andrewtj
I was remiss in not posting my experiences with Linode:

* I got an unintuitive error using the Control Panel to do a simple operation (resizing a disk) so I emailed support and got a quick response.

* Linode rolled out a security update for their control panel whereby one had to whitelist the IP's you could login from. This is a good thing except that I don't have a static IP at the best of times and when they rolled this out without notice I was cruising around the North Coast of NSW (Australia) with my sole connectivity being spotty GSM/3G.

* I emailed support to try and gain access to the Control Panel again. They said I could either call them as they needed to verify my identity or they could reset my account and email me new credentials. I did the later for above mentioned connectivity reasons. Apparently my response got lost in the support-rep's inbox (reps words, not mine) as it took a while to get a response. I can't remember how long but I think it was about 24 hours. I'd have been well frustrated if it was urgent.

* Guides/IRC are from my perspective not relevant to picking a host. What is, is the service itself — the VPS has been rock-solid and I like knowing that I can provision another VPS in ~15 minutes. I know prgmr can't do the later but hopefully they can do the former.

* Price is the real reason I'm going to move away from Linode (at least in the short term). I'm topping out with my Linode 360 at the moment. I'd like to move up to a 720 so I have some head-room. I'd also like to have a redundant setup in place when I start charging users. That's ~$860 a year with Linode versus (with 1024 mb instances) $384 with prgmr.

tl;dr: Linode are good but not exemplarily. You might be better off elsewhere
depending on your needs.

~~~
thismat
For what it's worth I've never had any of the problems you've mentioned.
Otherwise I wouldn't be posting such a glowing review. I think documentation +
instant communication with the community is a strong point for any company as
well, honestly.

But yes, as always, everyone has different needs and there is no one size fits
all.

~~~
andrewtj
To be clear:

* _Guides/IRC are from my perspective not relevant to picking a host_

I'm not referring to documentation on the service itself here, but to the
software install/setup guides which seem to be in vogue at the minute.

Regarding community, with a service like a VPS it's a bit of an airy concept
to me; somewhat akin to having a community around a petrol station.

That said - I can see how both of these things would be nice to have for some
people.

~~~
thismat
Understood, it's probably just the knowledge divide that makes certain things
more valuable than others. I'm not a sysadmin, I know enough to get around and
get things done and learn to do them properly, but the guides certainly help
at times when I get stuck.

IRC I'm not really a regular on, but I've been on Linodes a few times and the
people are extremely nice and helpful, I feel if someone can relate directly
to my situation (same host, same features) it's a lot easier to solve certain
issues.

You sound like you don't really have these needs for the most part, which
probably makes the value of these services a lot less for you than for me.
Although, this is the first time I've heard of prgrm(?), I'm going to need to
look into it now, peaked my curiosity.

~~~
andrewtj
I've got a VPS with prgmr now and whilst it's too early in the piece for me to
share any meaningful opinion, I will say that I think it's quite likely they
represent genuine value for money. Feel free to email me (see profile) in a
month or so if you'd like a more in depth review.

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prateekdayal
Checkout <http://www.softlayer.com> for dedicated and <http://www.vpsfarm.com>
for VPS hosting. I have used both and highly recommend them.

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tsally
Heroku is pretty kickass for deploying Rails (or any Rack framework) on.
Couldn't ask for anything simpler. Integrates right into your Git workflow.

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fjabre
Also check this from the webfaction site:

 _Scale as much as you need Our unique multi-machine load balancing solution
allows you to manage your account on multiple machines from our control panel.
You can easily deploy your apps on multiple machines and our system will
automatically provide load-balancing between these machines. Some customers
have scaled up their sites to tens of machines for a fraction of the price of
dedicated servers._

I think that's the reason I signed up.. That and the prices.. It's nice to
know you can scale out your solution that way.. but anyway, I still want to
have a plan B if it doesn't work out with them.

~~~
moe
Also I'd like to see some more details about their "multi machine
loadbalancing". The blurb that I found on their site was so devoid of facts
that I'm tempted to believe this is just a red herring (hosted HTTP
loadbalancer or such?).

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warp
I'm using gandi hosting for my hobby projects.

I think their virtual servers are XEN based, having access to the actual
console via ssh is nice if you like to do your own OS install on your slice.
(They also have easier web interfaces for those users who don't want to do
spend as much time sysadminning, but I have no experience with that).

<http://www.gandi.net>. (it's a french company btw, so especially useful if
you and your target audience is in europe :)

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colbyolson
I believe this question is related but, are there any special hosts for
ruby/rails or python/django?

Sort of like MediaTemple's containers?

~~~
ashleyw
Wouldn't it just be worthwhile to get a VPS and setup what you need? You
should be able to host multiple small sites on even a 256MB VPS. And of course
you can just upgrade from there, if they grow too big.

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hikari17
We're using Solo on EngineYard (i.e., their AWS-based offering.) Quite happy
with it so far. Thinking about moving to Flex eventually.

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Zak
I've had a VPS with tektonic.net for about three years. It's not oversold,
I've never had unscheduled downtime. Scheduled downtime is very rare. Tech
support answers their email.

Aside from that, it's a basic VPS running Debian. They're all pretty similar.

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dpcan
Slicehost.com

~~~
hellweaver666
Same here... their support is awesome, and upgrades are easy. I would skip the
256 slice if you are doing anything but hosting simple static websites
though...

I found that even a single Wordpress install was able to bring my 256 slice to
it's knees each night when it was indexed by search engines (until I installed
a bunch of caching plug-ins that is).

I was quite fearful of using Slicehost as I have practically no knowledge of
system administration, but their support and tutorials made the whole process
easy. I've done it a couple of times since and I'm getting faster each time!

~~~
dpcan
You may want to setup a system just for cloning if you create a lot of slices
for yourself or customers. You can then just restore it to a new slice, run
updates, make firewall changes, etc, but at least you get some of the core
work out of the way each time - and it's as easy as a few clicks.

~~~
hellweaver666
That's actually a really good idea - I'll keep that in mind for the future!

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tezza
<http://www.fdcservers.net/Services/VirtualDedicatedServers>

Storage is larger than other virtual hosts.

~~~
harper
i am a bit late to the game here. but i have used FDC for a year or two and
have been very happy. Have one dedicated unmetered 100mbit box. it owns.

They also have GREAT support.

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redact207
A bit off topic, but in terms of source control and bug tracking, I use
www.unfuddle.com which supports Subversion/Git, integrated bug tracking,
simple, and has a free version

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thomanil
<http://railsplayground.com> specializes in RoR hosting - they offer both
shared hosting, vps and dedicated servers. Extremely rapid and competent
service.

I've used them for both my startup and some smaller personal projects over the
last 10 months, very satisfied so far.

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walesmd
Depends on the project. If it's just for a simple content site, I'll use my
hosting account through ASmallOrange. If I need Ruby/Python/more resources
than a shared account I'll set the client up on GAE or Slicehost.

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bdmac97
Heroku!

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ballen
Checkout <http://www.arpnetworks.com> for OpenBSD and FreeBSD VPS hosting. I'm
a client and they've been quite good for me.

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dfrankow
I'm trying Google, as in Google App Engine.

~~~
fjabre
I've thought about using them in the past but was scared off by the TOS. I
think they place some restrictions on apps hosted there no?

<http://code.google.com/appengine/terms.html>

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swixmix
i like prgmr.com for VPS.

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wlievens
hosteurope.de

dirt cheap VPS

~~~
WalkingDead
They need to have an English section on their web site.

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alexkay
Google App Engine and SliceHost

