

Ask HN: cloud computing options? - Tichy

Are there any easy ways to move into the cloud yet? Amazon seems very expensive, Google App Engine and Heroku are too limited (though Heroku is really cool for basic Rails). Just hosting vServers somewhere would probably be OK, though I am not much of an admin.
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rarestnews
Are you sure you REQUIRE a cloud? Phrase "Amazon is too expensive" suggests
that it might be not the solution you're looking for.

Maybe you could be a little more clear on what you need, because it's hard to
imagine what are your requirements that fall in-between of "Google App engine
is too limited" and "Amazon is too expensive"?

Also the phrase "I'm not much of an admin" makes it all sound really
confusing... Rarely the cloud is the solution for one person's needs.
Typically something like dedicated server or vps should be the answer. VPSes
can be 6$/m including server's control panel so that you dont have to be "an
admin".

~~~
tzury
Where do you get VPS for $6/m?

Those are usually shared once, aren't they?

~~~
rarestnews
Firstvds.ru (they have US branch at minivds.com). VPSes are never "shared",
but they are on "shared" server. I.e. you have root access to your own VPS as
root, nobody has access to it (1), but there are many VPSes on one physical
server.

(1) ...except for the provider, but even Amazon has access to your files on
EC2... (Tin-foil hat time.)

~~~
olegp
Looking at the Russian version of the site, you can get the same type of VPS
for $4.44 a month instead of $6, although you get 25GB of traffic instead of
30.

Cloudkick should support this provider.

~~~
listic
The more the merier, but I would vote for <http://www.prgmr.com/xen/> The guy
has been doing this thing since 2005, writes here and on his blog about how he
is going about setting up his servers
(<http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/archives.html>) and writes a book about
Xen (<http://nostarch.com/xen.htm>). The FirstVDS/MiniVDS on the other hand,
go very dry official on their site, I'm not sure which virtualization
technology they use and whether or not they are going out of business real
soon (miniVDS forums are a ghost town).

~~~
listic
But mostly I'm just excited about the coming of technologies like cloudkick
which will help push cloud providers (i.e. EC2, VPS'es) into being a
commodity.

~~~
lsc
yes. this is the way of the future... (I mean, APIs that make it easy to move
from one provider to another.) without that, well, the 'cloud' will quickly
become uncompetitive with dedicated servers.

Lock-in is bad for customers; long-term, lock-in can kill industries.

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pierrefar
Broadly speaking, there are two sets of questions you want to answer:

1\. The "really?" set of questions: Is the cloud what you really need? If so,
can you architect your system to exploit the advantages of the cloud?

2\. The "how?" set of questions: do you outsource the cloud to AWS et al or do
you build your own? The details of this are probably worth half a book, but
there are many databases to choose from (CouchDB, MemcacheDB, Tokyo Products
and LightCloud, thrudb, Project Voldemort, redis, and others) and build-or-
manage-your-own cloud computing datacenter (EUCALYPTUS, AppScale, Enomaly,
ELASTRA, 3tera, etc).

The answer to these questions starts with "what are you trying to do?" In many
cases, the cheapest and fastest way to get going is to provision some virtual
servers from Linode or Slicehost and have a go. If you grow too much, 1.
congratulations and 2. look at the cloud options.

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bayareaguy
If all you want is VPS that is cheaper than AWS then Slicehost may be the
thing for you - <http://www.slicehost.com>

EDIT: I forgot about Linode since I haven't used them myself. Here's a
comparison between the two from last November:
<http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode>

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jensv
If you're just looking for storage and have access to extra machines then
Tahoe allows you to store your files reliably for little to no cost.

You can learn more here: <http://allmydata.org/~warner/pycon-tahoe.html> You
can download it here: <http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe>

EDIT: How do I create proper hyperlinks?

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st3fan
Explain what you are doing. The cloud is very much over-hyped and can mean
many different things. Are you looking for storage? For hosting? For dynamic
hosting?

Explain a bit what your app is and we can give your architecture advice.

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delano
Paying for machines by the hour opens new opportunities (ad-hoc staging
environments, for example). We can do things now that we could never do
before.

You may not be ready to move _production_ to the cloud but there is an
opportunity for you to improve your development process.

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tzury
AWS is not expensive, not at all. However, you can combine GAE and AWS where
serving all HTTP from GAE and doing the "rest" on Amazon - that will make it
some cheaper

~~~
st3fan
Depends what AWS service you talk about. Having one slow EC2 instance online
24/7 for a month will cost you roughly 60 dollars. I don't think that is very
expensive but considering the available options I also don't think it is
cheap. At Mosso you get a similar host for 1/6th of the price these days for
example. Charged by the hour.

Anyway, it depends on the specific AWS service.

