Ask HN: What provider do you use for Cloud hosting and why? - 10smom
======
blhack
Linode x1000.

I actually have a VPS at both linode and slicehost (originally this was so
that I could have a "dev" and "prod" server for my projects. A stupid decision
[because it's expensive and my projects don't get much traffic], but an
educational one) and the linode one (at least according to ab) outperforms the
slicehost.

If you're thinking about getting a VPS, do it immediately. The $20/mo I
started spending (now $40) a couple of years ago was probably one of the most
important things I've ever done towards furthering my education.

~~~
Timothee
Would a Linode VPS be much different than an Amazon instance to host a couple
of projects without traffic?

I've been thinking about getting something more "proper" than the GoDaddy plan
I've been barely using for a couple of years, and was looking at getting a
micro instance with Amazon. A reserved micro instance is only $54/year. I've
seen Linode mentioned often but I'm wondering if the $240/year are worth it
compared to what I would learn using an Amazon instance.

~~~
loire280
Reserving a micro instance only means that you get discounted usage hourly
usage of that instance. You have to pay usage fees on top of that. By my math,
24 hours * 365 days * $.007 per usage hour (VA datacenter) = $61.32 in usage
fees. Don't forget the cost of elastic block storage, too, especially if
you're going to save snapshots. A full-time micro instance will cost ~$150/yr.

AWS pricing can be complicated, so make sure you read:

<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/>

<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/>

~~~
Timothee
Oh I see. I figured my number might be a bit misinformed. Yeah, AWS pricing is
not simple and I'm not surprised I forgot storage and other things...

Thanks for the reply!

------
gexla
These days I think that's like asking what hosting provider you use and why.
There are so many out there which have some sort of cloud elements these days.
If going the dedicated server route, Softlayer is among the best. If going
VPS, then Rackspace / Slicehost can give you great flexibility with pricing
options (and some of the cheapest VPS options if you have low traffic.) EC2 is
among the best if you need a well developed swiss army knife / kitchen sink
API and wide assortment of services to work with. Heroku is among the best if
you work with Ruby and don't want to be bothered with system administration
(Lot's of others rising up in this space, and GAE for Python / Java.) Joyent
is great if you would rather work in Solaris rather than Linux.

Edit: Forgot to mention Azure for the MS world, though EC2 also offers Windows
servers. I should have known to mention Linode since that service is so
popular with the HN community. Though the Rackspace options provide more cloud
services last I checked.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
I would imagine for most use cases, Linode would be a better and more cost-
effective option in place of Slicehost, and their level of support is just as
good.

~~~
gexla
Sure, I didn't claim that Slicehost has the best performing machines. The EC2
micros are terrible, but I plugged EC2 for it's API's and other AWS services.
Slicehost / Rackspace also has more cloud services the last I checked. But
this may not be true anymore or for much longer (cloud storage, CDN, etc)

------
capstone
Amazon. We have very large data transfer requirements __* plus CloudFront is
the cheapest CDN out there as far as I know.

 __*Spent weeks trying to explain to a large school district's "caching
expert" (100,000+ students all going through a $30,000 dedicated caching
server) that they do not need to flush the cache every day. He was not
convinced. Oy.

------
baggachipz
Slicehost has definitely plunged into irrelevance, as many predicted after the
Rackspace buyout (and Slicehost vehemently denied would happen). I use VPSFarm
as well; for $21 per month I get 1 GB RAM and a lot more transfer included.
It's been pretty reliable so far; a little downtime but nothing out of the
ordinary.

~~~
qaexl
There are some things I'd want to see in Rackspace Cloud (being able to add
subordinate accounts for billing and systems management), but yeah, all my new
stuff has been on Rackspace.

------
steveklabnik
I have accounts with both Rackspace and Heroku, and Heroku's free account
sustained almost 60k hits over the last three days for me like a champ. When I
got on LifeHacker, I turned on a dyno because I thought I'd need it, but then
I shut it off because it didn't even matter.

------
chsonnu
Heroku has been great for bootstrapping. I fear though that it's only a matter
of time before Salesforce pulls a Chargify like stunt.

------
dangrossman
Amazon.

\- Amazon EC2 instances for web servers

\- Amazon Elastic Load Balancers in front of the web servers, also handling
SSL termination

\- Amazon RDS for MySQL databases on the back end, with automatic failover to
a hot spare and zero-downtime full database backups

I reserve EC2 and RDS instances on an annual basis, otherwise the expense
would outweigh the benefits for me.

For offsite backups, I run a TonidoPlug in my house. Under a buck a month in
electricity usage, runs Ubuntu linux, cron runs the backup scripts each night.

------
slyall
For home:

\- Linode. Got the 1024 for $40/month. I'm pretty happy it fits my usage. Host
my home websites, email, vpn, etc.

For work:

Our customers are mostly in New Zealand so it's a real pain. US based
providers are cheap but slow to access while NZ providers are expensive
(especially for international traffic) and there is a lot less choice. We are
finishing rolling out a new GSLB provider ( 3crowd, recommend ) so we can
effectively deal with them separately.

Having said that we use the following mainly to serve international customers
and NZ overflow:

\- Singlehop - Nice, cheap dedicated servers, new servers are deployed in ~3
hours and fairly reliable. Nice user interface and good spec for the price.

\- Serverloft - Not quite as good but still pretty cheap. Deployment was
slower last time but no real problems.

\- Amazon Cloudfront - Playing around with it. Bandwidth is too expensive for
day-to-day usage but great for overflows. NZ customers hit California or
Singapore so a bit slow although there are rumours of an Australian site
coming at some point.

I'm tempted to move the prod/dev environment to a US-based cloud but the
latency/bandwidth constants from NZ->US means that files uploads/downloads for
devs and internal customer's are probably too slow.

------
carl_
Aside from Amazon there aren't any true cloud providers.

Rackspace, VPS.NET, Linode et al are all just VPS++marketing (_not_ cloud).

~~~
generalk
What's the difference? (Not a sarcastic or leading question, if VPS isn't
"cloud" hosting, then what is?)

~~~
AngryParsley
EC2 is the only provider where you can make API calls to launch 50 servers,
have them all booted in a few minutes, then shut them down an hour later.
Slicehost's management console will barely load if you have 100 instances, and
your servers are all in a single data center. Ditto for Rackspace Cloud. (Both
have multiple data centers, but each account is bound to one DC.) I haven't
tested Linode beyond booting a single instance on it, but since they bill by
the month I assume they're another cloud-ish VPS provider.

Of course, most individuals and small companies would do best to pick a cloud-
ish VPS provider. They have much better support than EC2 and small companies
usually don't need hundreds of servers.

~~~
commx
While Linode's billing is monthly by default, it's also prorated. This means
that when you remove a Linode from your account, the account is issued a
prorated service credit for the unused time in the billing period. Service
credit is always used for further services before charging the card on file.

In other words, you can spin up multiple Linodes, remove them the next day,
and all you're really paying for is the day you had them deployed. There's a
document on Linode billing located here: <http://library.linode.com/linode-
platform/billing/>

------
jread
There are some distinguishing factors between IaaS clouds and VPS: paygo
pricing (VM & bandwidth), API, self-service automated provisioning, no term
commitments, scale-up/down (CPU, memory), VM imaging/cloning/templating, off
instance storage. Some VPS providers like Linode, Slicehost, RimuHosting, etc.
do offer a few cloud like features, but I wouldn't put them on the same
playing field as EC2. If you don't need the additional flexibility and
features of cloud, Linode is an excellent VPS provider.

There is also a big difference between PaaS cloud services like AppEngine,
Azure and Heroku which require your application to fit within a particular
mold (programming language, packaging, deployment), and IaaS cloud providers
which offer you the full flexibility of root access to a dedicated server.

------
rubyrescue
newservers.com - "dedicated cloud" - the servers are physical servers but they
have a provisioning api. they have the cheapest 48GB boxes we can find, and
we're running an app where we need a few very high memory boxes

pros - boxes are cheap relative to EC2, boxes are fast as they're all yours
cons - they're slow to provision; up to an hour when you make a request, but
the smaller boxes are faster - 10 mins or so. also, only one datacenter, and
it's in miami...

~~~
gexla
Stormondemand is a similar service, and which I'm actually using right now. I
believe it's basically a VPS where you get the whole server to yourself.

~~~
jpgagne
newservers.com delivers servers with bare metal os installations with no vps.

------
mbesto
Linode 512

1\. Awesome support.

2\. I got a free voucher, so I essentially have a free server for 5 months.
I'm actually considering just paying them anyway.

3\. Linode Library is amazing for a Linux noob such as myself -
<http://library.linode.com/> \- Had an OpenVPN server setup and going within
an hour. It's a great way to learn Linux, etc

4\. Freedom of use - no restrictions on what you use the server for as long as
it isn't illegal.

------
nobody_nowhere
Moved from Amazon to Softlayer because we could get a mix of virtual and
dedicated infrastructure at a good price. Amazon wasn't cutting it for the
low-latency part of our system. SL hasn't been perfect, but pretty good --
maybe slightly better than Amazon for reliability.

~~~
capstone
Any benchmarking numbers off top of your head?

------
vyrotek
Windows Azure

Since we run on .Net and SQL Server it felt like the right choice. Microsoft
has some really nice C# libraries that make accessing things like Blobs, Table
Storage and Queues dead simple.

~~~
mikerg87
The auto scale up and down based on request thresholds is worth the price of
admission alone. I am sure that other provides have something like this but I
was able to get it going in about 15 mintues after watching the Azure demo
video.

------
kawera
\- 14 webapps on AppEngine, all small and all profitable

\- 1 Linode for internal webapps

\- 1 Linode for some fancy data mining

\- S3 for backups

I highly recommend all those services if you undestand their strengths.

------
rkalla
Have hosted with RimuHosting (years), Slicehost (1 year) and VPS.NET (2
weeks).

Slicehost VPS's by far had the worst real-world performance for me. After a
year and multiple Slashdot or Digg front page stories taking down the site. I
found that I had to scale to approximately 2x of what I thought I would need
in order for the site to stay up.

 __More specifically, I had to scale to twice what other services were able to
keep my site up on. So if I could get by on a 4GB instance on Rimu, AWS or
Linode, that meant on Slicehost I needed somewhere between a 6GB and 8GB
instance. Multiple times I found for my site to be responsive (Apache + PHP
FCGID) I was always buying bigger instances on Slicehost than anywhere else.
The disk I/O was one of the biggest problems.

To keep the site stable on Slicehost and support the traffic I ended up
spending twice what I budgeted for, for a few months before giving up.

VPS.NET is really cool conceptually (I think it's like Heroku with the 'cells'
of power you apply to your server) but I kept getting VPS failures. 3 times in
1 week and support would take increasingly longer and longer to bring the
server back up. When you make your living from writing and publishing, have
your site just be _dead_ for an entire day is painful.

RimuHosting has been my favorite by far. I eventually went to a dedicated with
them, but they are a quiet group of smart new zealanders with an ugly-ass
website but excellent hardware and service. I don't have down-time with them
and their overages for bandwidth is cheaper than AWS from Colo4Dallas --
$0.10/GB or less. They really should advertise that, BW is a killer for some
folks (like me).

All that being said, if you like a nicer website and the real-time scaling
functionality that Slicehost or Linode provide, I've heard lots of good things
about Linode (and many comments here seem to verify that) so they seem like a
safe bet.

Some quick-reference numbers looking at AWS versus RimuHosting are below... I
had these handy when I update my comparisons every few months just to see what
is out there. Thought someone might find them interesting.

AWS Bandwidth per Year - $0.15/GB

\----------------

1,000 * 0.15 * 12 = $1800

AWS RESERVED INSTANCES per Year

\----------------

Small

227.50 + (0.03 * 24 * 365) = 490.30 + 1800 = $2290.30

Large (Most Comparable to Dedicated Below)

910 + (0.12 * 24 * 365) = 1961.20 + 1800 = $3761.20

XLarge

1820 + (0.24 * 24 * 365) = 3922.40 + 1800 = $5722.40

RimuHosting Dedicated per Year

\----------------

4-core HT-enabled/12GB Dedicated/1TB Bandwidth

306 * 12 = $3672

REFERENCES

1\. <http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/>

2\. <http://rimuhosting.com/order/startorder1.jsp?hom=t-ded>

~~~
bradleyland
For a startup that might be short on resources, Rimuhosting will perform
sysadmin work for you at $40/hr. That may not seem like a big deal, but their
sysadmins are knowledgeable, and always provide a detailed account of the work
they've performed. I've yet to find another company with as dedicated a
support staff as Rimu.

~~~
rkalla
I absolutely agree there. They have this policy of doing admin work for free
as long as it takes less than 30 mins -- and I've never asked for a fix that
took longer than 30 mins, these guys are quick.

Everything from debugging connection issues (possibly hardware problem) to
fixing a breaking build of apache for me from source in a few mins.

Great group of folks.

------
mikelbring
I use VPS.net. My project isn't in production yet, but I have a few clients on
it. Love the flexibly and features.

------
matthall28
Just so you all know, sites like Linode and Slicehost are NOT cloud hosting
but actually VPS hosting

------
Concours
I'm using AppEgine and love what it does for me, it's also free to start.

------
dedward
Anyone know of any non-US based cloud services with reasonable capacity?

~~~
10smom
iweb.com is in canada. I was considering them as well. anyone know anything
about them? how do they compare. I like the name. :)

