
Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions, 2010 edition - jf
http://jpf.github.com/domain-profiler/ycombinator.html?2010
======
birken
Very surprising so many people use Godaddy for their DNS, given it is very
slow as far as DNS servers go. I've been running a Pingdom speed/reliability
test for a few popular DNS servers for the past few months, and here is the
data:

    
    
      Guide:
      <dns provider> <uptime %> <downtime> <outages> <avg speed>
      
      October:
      Godaddy DNS	100.00%	0h 00m 00s	0	68 ms
      Dynect SMB	100.00%	0h 00m 00s	0	31 ms
      DNSMadeEasy	100.00%	0h 00m 00s	0	39 ms
      
      November:
      Godaddy DNS	100.00%	0h 00m 00s	0	67 ms
      Dynect SMB	100.00%	0h 00m 00s	0	26 ms
      DNSMadeEasy	99.98%	0h 10m 00s	1	43 ms
      
      December:
      Godaddy DNS	99.99%	0h 05m 00s	1	58 ms
      Dynect SMB	100.00%	0h 00m 00s	0	28 ms
      DNSMadeEasy	99.00%	7h 25m 00s	22	40 ms
    

So basically Godaddy DNS is reliable but slow, DNSMadeEasy is relatively fast
but had some uptime troubles in December, and Dynect (Dyn Inc) is fast + super
reliable.

As for pricing:

\- Godaddy DNS is free (I think?)

\- DNSMadeEasy runs about $2-5/month (max of 10 million queries/month)

\- Dynect SMB runs between $30-95/month depending on what you need (max of 1.8
million queries/month)

~~~
biot
Were the DNSMadeEasy outages related to their DDoS after they terminated DNS
services for Wikileaks?

~~~
birken
Well to be completely fair to DNSMadeEasy, this failure wasn't necessarily
their entire service, it was just the one nameserver pingdom was testing,
ns10.dnsmadeeasy.com. However, both GoDaddy and Dynect were tested using just
one nameserver, so the comparison is fair.

I'm not sure what the cause of it was though.

~~~
mscarborough
Not 'fair' if you're posting statistics from one nameserver of each in order
to represent uptime for the service as a whole.

------
lacker
Our company (Gamador) is listed as hosting from "Global Net Access LLC" which
I had never heard of - we just use Linode. So there might be some Linode
undercounting going on.

~~~
ig1
I believe Global Net Access LLC owns the subnet of IP addresses that Linode
use.

~~~
jf
I updated my script to take that into account. The page has has been updated
to reflect that change.

~~~
jamesheroku
Heroku IPs are 75.101.163.44, 75.101.145.87, and 174.129.212.2, if you want to
update the script to make the distinction from raw Amazon EC2.

~~~
lukeschlather
Yeah, I was confused by the lack of people using Heroku.

------
redstripe
So despite the vociferous defense app engine received here about a month ago
after some criticism it looks like no YC companies actually use it?

~~~
noahc
I think a large part of this has to do with programming language choice. I
suspect there is a large group of ruby hackers out there who can only use
Amazon, and not GAE.

~~~
simonw
A survey of language choice by YC companies would be interesting - I think
Python is actually very well represented.

I'd guess that the reason people aren't using AppEngine is more that it's
strategically a pretty bad idea. You can't move off it, and its constraints
have a major effect on how you design and architect your application. When
you're still figuring out what your product is, using a platform that requires
you to design your data storage to fit the queries you are going to run isn't
necessarily that smart.

~~~
robryan
Wasn't data access very slow up until recently? From the outside I question
how important GAE is to Google, has it got a decent sized team behind it and
will it always be around. With Amazon cloud hosting seems much more of a key
business. Of course this is from the outside if I were considering options, I
don't use either of them.

------
d_r
I'm surprised not to see more alternatives to GoDaddy for registrars (say,
NameCheap.) GoDaddy interface and upselling are simply infuriating and I've
always thought of it as a "Wal-Mart for domains/etc," not something a tech-
savvy startup would use.

------
ghshephard
I find this chart fascinating - though I'm wondering how much of Rackspace is
Rackspace "Cloud" and how much of Rackspace is "VPS". Also, I'm embarrassed to
admit that I'd never heard of SoftLayer as a server hosting company - I wonder
what the attraction there is.

For Web Hosts it comes (roughly) to:

    
    
      o Amazon EC2
      o Rackspace Cloud
      o Self Hosted (Surprisingly large number)
      o Slicehost
      o Hurricane Electric (which is likely self hosted? EDIT (per jedsmith) Linode?)
      

Two things I found very, very surprising.

    
    
      #1 - Small use of Linode 
      #2 - How much Rackspace is used more than Slicehost.
    

Anybody care to comment on why SoftLayer is so predominant?

~~~
nwilkens
I operate a server management company.

We we have worked with many providers, including all of those listed.

We continue to recommend Softlayer for leased dedicated hardware needs because
of the features they provide, and the solid network infrastructure (although
they do have hiccups on occasion).

Softlayer has a great support team, fast server deployment (1-2 hours) and
full management capabilities - power strip reboot, IPMI KVM, OS reloads, etc..

~~~
jjoe
I wouldn't trust Softlayer with my clients' data. Look at what happened to
SimpleCDN and others. In a matter of a couple of days Softlayer pulled the
plug on all their servers. SimpleCDN was erased from the CDN map. They used to
have over 100 servers with them.

Regards

~~~
jbyers
We've hosted our site at SoftLayer since 2006 and trust them with our
customers' data. We have a significant investment in time and money in them
(dozens of servers in 3 datacenters) and don't regret it.

The SimpleCDN issue involved three parties: SimpleCDN, 100TB (aka UK2), and
SoftLayer. We've only heard from SimpleCDN and they threatened to sue the
other two, so the silence is not surprising. In any case, my opinion of
SoftLayer didn't change as a result.

~~~
jjoe
FileVo is another victim. They were shutdown by none other than Softlayer
without providing a reason for termination.

I do admire your courage.

Regards

~~~
jbyers
I didn't know about FileVo. I just read up on their situation and curiously,
it's another issue involving UK2 (in this case their MidPhase brand) and
SoftLayer.

Both the SimpleCDN and FileVo shutdowns do look bad. But I'm not relying on
courage, I'm relying on experience. Over four years I personally have had
hundreds of phone, email, and forum interactions with SoftLayer at every level
from their CEO to first level support. And countless DMCA requests. If I
believed based on those experiences I was at risk hosting my company and my
livelihood there, you better believe I would beat a path to the door.

~~~
duskwuff
From what I understand of FileVo, they were running a file upload service, not
retaining any identifying information on uploaders, and not taking any steps
to prevent copyrighted files from being uploaded. Softlayer's decision to
terminate their hosting was no different from what any other hosting company
would do (and, in fact, what they would be legally required to do!).

------
philfreo
Doesn't YC have a special discount with one or more of the hosting providers,
which might be influencing decisions?

~~~
Tichy
Too lazy to Google, but I think they have deal with Rackspace.

------
daniel_levine
I'm not affiliated with the company in anyway, but I'm a big fan of
<http://iwantmyname.com/> for domain registration. Super quick and easy
especially if you're using Heroku or GAE.

It's depressing how little GoDaddy has innovated and how dominant it still is.

~~~
olalonde
For me, a domain name is a commodity, so I go for the cheapest: GoDaddy.

~~~
staunch
1and1 is almost always cheaper than GoDaddy. Currently it's $4.99 for the
first year and $8.99 afterwards. GoDaddy is $11.99 per year.

~~~
dangrossman
You never have to pay full retail at GoDaddy. Not for .com at least. There's
at least one coupon available 365 days a year; check retailmenot.com.

~~~
staunch
Even with the 30% coupon it's still not cheaper for the first year or
following years.

~~~
moe
Does it matter if your domain costs $3 more or less _per year_?

I'll gladly pay plenty more only to avoid being exposed to the ridiculous mess
that GoDaddy calls a web interface.

------
haribilalic
I'd like to move my email away from Google Apps, for various reasons, but they
have the best spam filter by far. It's worth sticking with them just for that.

~~~
andreaja
Would you care to elaborate? I'm just getting to grips with Google Apps and
would be interested in what experiences others have had with it.

~~~
chunkbot
There is very little spam; what's to elaborate?

~~~
hallmark
How about, "I'd like to move my email away from Google Apps, for various
reasons."

I am always interested to know what pitfalls other smart people have run into.

------
Sukotto
I'm interested in seeing aggregates of technology choices like: primary
database, main programming language(s), frameworks, etc

~~~
bradleyland
I'd love to see that too, but it's not something you can easily identify just
by querying their web server. This list was compiled using the domain-profiler
tool:

<https://github.com/jpf/domain-profiler>

------
onteria
Oh, a bit of a side note on hosting for startups. I know many people want to
save costs by centralizing hosting, but as a word of advice keep your
database, mail, and web servers separated. By not doing so you've created a
single point of failure. Not only that, but it makes securing things
appropriately more difficult (ie. you are unable to create only web server
specific firewall rules for the server).

~~~
bobfunk
A good trick we've been using while building <http://www.webpop.com> has been
to use the cheap small instances on the Rackspace cloud to build a mini
version of a nice distributed setup with load balancers, web servers, database
servers, monitoring, etc...

The small instances are very cheap, and we've been automating everything with
chef, so it's east for us to gradually scale up by adding large instances to
our cluster instead of small ones.

This means we've been able to build a scalable and secure infrastructure, that
didn't cost us much more than a hundred bucks a month during development.

~~~
jamroom
We've been doing the same thing on Linode, and initially did our development
on Rackspace cloud. One important thing to note about Rackspace cloud is that
your private network bandwidth is limited to 10mbps when you're on their small
Xen instances - this may not be a big deal during development, but after you
go live if you have any traction, then with simultaneous backups, sql
replication, and any other chatter that might be happening between servers, it
can really "slow down", and you might end up having to move to larger
instances simply for the port speed, even though your existing server is
sufficient in regards to CPU, RAM and disk.

Our testing ended up leading us back to Linode, since with a simple support
ticket you can up your private interface to the full 100mbps. So our "combo"
ended up being Linode + Amazon S3 (since for many of our items the reduced
redundancy storage is sufficient, and is half the price of could files).

It's sure fun though setting up your own small "cloud" system ;)

------
klochner
Anyone that's self-hosting email care to explain why they're doing it? Seems
like something that makes no sense to do internally until you start getting
more "enterprisey".

~~~
lisper
I'm not affiliated with a YC company, but I do self-host my email. My reasons:

1\. I'm a control freak and a privacy freak. I don't trust any third party
with my email. I want to know how things work under the hood. And if I want to
make a change, I don't want to have to depend on any third party to do it.

2\. It's not hard to do. apt-get install postfix and dovecot, invest a couple
of hours munging config files, and you're done.

3\. Much easier to transition your data if you do get "enterprisey." All your
data is on your server, so you can just tar it up and ship it anywhere.

4\. You can configure the server so that insecure connections are not
possible, making it that much less likely that someone will leak a password
accidentally.

5\. Stealth. It's much less likely that someone will try to break into my
server than into Google's servers.

~~~
maukdaddy

      2. It's not hard to do. apt-get install postfix and dovecot, invest a couple of hours munging config files, and you're done
    

Bullshit. There's troubleshooting when things go wrong, patching, maintenance,
etc.

edit: don't forget adding additional storage, managing spam and malware
filtering, user admin, backups, and other tasks.

    
    
      5. Stealth. It's much less likely that someone will try to break into my server than into Google's servers.
    

You wish. Your single server is much easier to target and break into than
Google's.

~~~
seiji
With Google email hosting you just have to worry about a few hundred people
who can read all your email, their data retention policies, and who can
subpoena your private communications.

(conspiracy theory: Google gives the public one text box on a webpage to
search the Internet. Do you think they don't have a text box on an internal
webpage to search all of Gmail? Do you think facebook doesn't have one
internal webpage capable of searching all private communications? Facebook
used to advertise "spy on your friends!" as an employment perk.)

~~~
maukdaddy

      and who can subpoena your private communications.
    

Hate to break it to you, but that same subpoena can just as easily allow your
house, office, or datacenter to be raided. Your data is just as susceptible to
lawful intercept at Google as it is your private premises.

~~~
mike-cardwell
When self hosting, you can make sure that deleted email has actually been
deleted. You have control over how long logs are kept. You have control over
whether or not to use encrypted filesystems.

------
olalonde
I'm surprised Slicehost is not present. Perhaps is it included in Rackspace?

~~~
rottencupcakes
I was wondering if anybody who uses Slicehost would elaborate on the
advantages of Slicehost over Linode?

At the surface, it would seem that Linode offers more bang for your buck
(almost twice as much) and outdoes Slice in the performance benchmarks.

Thoughts?

~~~
ig1
Slicehost is more friendly to inexperienced sys admins in terms of docs, etc.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
But you can use all the Slicehost docs while you setup your Linode box, which
is what I do :)

Linode also has StackScripts, which are pre-configured user-contributed setups
for your VPS, so setting up a LAMP server is really easy.

~~~
jedsmith
Linode has <http://library.linode.com/> too.

------
c2
Loopt is self hosted? Is that actually cost effective? I can understand a
company like justin.tv being self hosted, but loopt makes less sense to me.

~~~
kogir
We're not 100% Microsoft. Probably 80% though.

We do it for security and privacy reasons. It matters less now, but for
getting early carrier deals it was key, and now those agreements still bind
us.

I use Amazon EC2 personally and would love to use it for more at Loopt, but
can't.

~~~
c2
Ah interesting, that makes sense. I'm sure carriers threw a bunch of inane
capital intensive requirements at you. Frame relay anyone?

------
jedberg
Is this only pre-acquisition companies?

Where's reddit? ;)

FWIW:

Web Host: EC2 (Amazon)

Email Host: Self hosted

DNS Host: Akamai

Registrar: Corporation Service Company

SSL Issuer: None

Certificate Type: None

~~~
jf
> Is this only pre-acquisition companies?

Yes, it's a "List of active Y Combinator startups that haven't exited yet."

[https://github.com/jpf/domain-
profiler/blob/master/ycombinat...](https://github.com/jpf/domain-
profiler/blob/master/ycombinator-list)

------
dguido
I love that despite all the Firesheep business, about half of the companies on
that list don't even own an SSL certificate. :-(

------
xsc
Seems like a few companies have chosen WebFaction for email hosting. Any
specific reason?

~~~
bco
I was wondering the same thing. Maybe they started out on WebFaction before
moving to a VPS or cloud server and decided to keep their email there?

------
dtran
This is pretty cool Joel! Small nitpick - Zerigo is spelled incorrectly as
"Zeroigo".

~~~
oldgregg
I recently switched to Zerigo after years with DNSMadeEasy. I got tired of
their clunky interface from 1993 and their login captcha (?!). Zerigo has a
fantastic UI, quite refreshing...

------
dsmithn
Google Apps uses Go Daddy for domain registration. Would that be why there are
similar number of Google Email users and Go Daddy Registrars?

------
Encosia
Surprised to see no one using Linode.

~~~
lacker
We (Gamador) are using Linode, but it lists us as being from some no-name
hosting. So something is awry with the Linode stats.

~~~
jf
I'll fix that after I'm done with the meeting I'm in now.

Edit: Fixed.

------
blahpro
I’m surprised that no–one is using Linode.

~~~
lacker
We (Gamador) are using Linode but it does not list us as using Linode, so I
suspect this is a problem with the script.

~~~
jf
Host is determined by the name of the owner of the netblock that the IP
address of the A record for that domain is in...

------
vaksel
I think it's very telling that something like 60% of YC companies have a SSL
certificate...means they are most likely processing some financial
transactions, so they charge their users directly

it's also interesting that so many are using the hurricane electric
host...never even heard of them before

~~~
jonknee
Or they like to handle logins properly.

~~~
jf
Or that they paid attention when Firesheep came out.

------
callmeed
So, no YC companies on Rails use Heroku? (or is that lumped into Amazon?)

~~~
ashleyw
Look at the 'certificate type' column for *.heroku.com. That shows at least 8
using Heroku.

------
Aegean
what is the catch with google as email hosting? we use rackspace, it seems
nobody is using rackspace for email. What is the criteria in choosing email
hosting?

~~~
damoncali
Google Apps email is free and easy. The paranoid will not use it, because
Google can read your email, possibly with good reason.

------
jim_h
I don't see any prgmr.com hosting. I've seen it mentioned quite a few times in
when people were looking for hosting.

~~~
AdamGibbins
prgmr will appear has Hurricane Electric ash thats who I believe provide all
their IP space.

------
ivankirigin
Missing are data stores. Web store isn't the same thing. I'd like to see the
percentage that use S3.

------
xhtmlweaver
i am very surprised that linode is not in the chart for webhosting section!
something must be wrong

------
corin_
Surprised to see none of them using Route 53. Suspect that won't be the case
in a year's time.

------
nopassrecover
Surprised how few of these I knew, considering I read HN pretty regularly

------
tsycho
I am surprised to see no heroku.

~~~
tedunangst
Look at the SSL column for *.heroku.com. They are all listed as using AWS for
web hosting.

------
bauchidgw
best charts ever

------
eurohacker
would have been even better if the "language decisions" would also be included
- what programming language each startup has

------
aneth
Great to see godaddy successfully disrupting the ripoff ssl certificate
market.

