

Where do YC applicants host their projects? - white

Hi everyone,<p>Quick question: what do YC applicants prefer - dedicated servers, co-location, VPS, regular hosting plans or somethings else?  Where are they being hosted at?  Are there any major hub of startup hosting?<p>Thanks!
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cperciva
Taking the list of YC-funded companies from wikipedia, excluding those marked
as defunct or sold, resolving www.${domain} to an IP address, and then looking
that up via whois, I see:

Amazon.com (presumably EC2?) -- 2

Layered Technologies, Inc. -- 2

NoZone, Inc. -- 2

Rackspace.com, Ltd. -- 2

Software Technologies Inc. -- 2

BitPusher, LLC -- 1

Carnegie Mellon University -- 1

Columbus Network Access Point, Inc. -- 1

Global Netoptex, Inc -- 1

ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc. -- 1

So it looks like YC-funded companies usually have dedicated servers, but
there's no single place where they tend to congregate.

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iamyoohoo
Next time try whoishostingthis.com instead of whois - quicker for knowing
who's hosting them.

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cperciva
I could query whois for a list of IP addresses by piping the list through
"xargs -n 1 whois". It would have been rather more complicated if I wanted to
query a website.

EDIT: Here's the code in case anyone's curious -- note that most of it is just
a list of domain names:

echo anywhere.fm adpinion.com fuzzwich.com slapvid.com versionate.com
auctomatic.com buxfer.com heysan.com octopart.com socialmoth.com
virtualmin.com weebly.com whitenoisenetworks.com writewith.com xobni.com
iilwy.com jamglue.com scribd.com thinkature.com justin.tv audiobeta.com
flagr.com inklingmarkets.com snipshot.com sproutsys.com wufoo.com
clickfacts.com loopt.com | xargs -n 1 | lam -s 'www.' - | xargs -n 1 host -t a
| grep 'has address' | cut -f 4 -d ' ' | xargs -n 1 whois | grep OrgName |
sort | uniq -c | sort -srn

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SwellJoe
We've got two boxes at The Planet, and we're planning a box at RackSpace, and
probably an Accelerator from Joyent. A lot of the guys I know from YC use the
following hosts and said at least a few good things about them:

Joyent/TextDrive

Rails Machine

Amazone EC2 (though I also hear a lot of reliability complaints)

Rimu

Slice

There is no major concensus on the best. I've been using The Planet and
RackSpace, or the cheaper ServerBeach offering from the RackSpace folks, for
many years and have never had any complaints. Service is good and reliable,
prices are fair (RackSpace is a wee bit pricier, but they provide good service
and reliability).

~~~
cstejerean
The company where I currently work just moved away from Rackspace. Their
prices are high and as far as I know (I didn't deal directly with rackspace)
we had interesting performance issues due to their networking setup. I
wouldn't recommend them but you might have better luck.

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prakash
I will answer the hosting part of your question.

1\. get a list of all YC companies 2\. get the AS (Autonomous System) number
plugin for firefox 3\. visit these YC companies to figure out where they are
hosted

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kobs
This method presumes that all hosting companies have an ASN. Often, this will
just tell you who the connection provider(s) is (are).

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palish
Does anyone have any thoughts on ServerBeach (<http://www.serverbeach.com>)?
I've heard YouTube started with them.

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blored
Yeah, I know for a fact that a bunch of YC companies use them. I was told so
by a YC founder. So we signed up with them and so far no complaints. They are
quick, and somehow they caught wind of when we launched and sent us an e-mail
asking of there was anything they could do for us. It was a nice touch.

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palish
A little-known, fantastic host is Reflected Networks
(<http://www.reflected.net>). I talked them down to an insanely cheap monthly
rate for a dedicated server with 3mbps. It's so inexpensive that I'm worried
Mr. CEO will fire whomever did it.. :) The service there is fantastic: Zero
downtime, free support, and a quick setup. So you should shoot them an email
to see what special rates you can get (much less than what they advertise on
their site).

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rms
Just how cheap are we talking... less than $50 a month?

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blored
Somebody please correct the title.

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jamiequint
We have two servers (for various project sites) both VPS One from RimuHosting
and one from Slicehost. Both are excellent, although you pay significantly
more for Rimu but they have the best service I've ever encountered with a VPS
hosting solution. We also have an EC2 invite but haven't got around to trying
it out.

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pius
I couldn't tell you where YC applicants host anything, but we've had a nearly
flawless experience with Slicehost.

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abstractbill
Slicehost have fantastic customer service but unfortunately had problems
hosting SBCL when I tried them (SBCL is known to interact badly with bugs in
some versions of Xen).

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stoic
I advise anyone who is considering hosting with Layered to take backups --
frequently. Drives fail like third-world goverments over there.

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thomasswift
I am on a slicehost VPS. I think it is probably the best deal for money, in
terms of memory allocation.

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iamyoohoo
For anyone considering a host - be sure to check out webhostingtalk.com - you
will find out whether your chosen host has had issues with others. You can
also find some great deals from top hosts there ...

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yrashk
Although I am not an YC applicant (I wish I was but my co-founders will not
relocate), I am pretty happy with dedicated boxes at The Planet

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palish
Apply anyway.

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yrashk
What is the reason to apply if I am the only co-founder ready to move? I am
afraid it is not following YC model

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cperciva
According to pg, exceptions can be made to any rule if the rest of the
application is good enough.

I applied as a sole founder who was unable to move to the bay area -- breaking
the requirements far more than you -- until it turned out that I wouldn't be
able to fly out for the November 3rd/4th weekend.

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mchristoff
Site5. Excellent support. They answered a question of mine 2AM on Christmas
Day.

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carter
We use colocation for now.

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foodawg
Been using Voxel.net since July. No complaints.

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breck
I don't care what anybody says, we use GoDaddy and they're great.

(Not for heavy duty stuff, but great for low traffic stuff)

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henryw
i had a hard drive die on me after 6 months in. they are cheap and decent, but
if you do use them make sure you cron some auto backups. right now i have it
on raid 1.

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yrashk
I had filesystem corrupted after 3 months or so.

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mattmaroon
Ours is RackForce.

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fdb
MediaTemple anyone?

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robmnl
Can't recommend them.

Been with them for a month, major outage earlier this month for two days.

They seem good for blogs, or staging, but if you require reliability, go
somewhere else.

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chaostheory
I have to agree.

Their admin UI is great and their staff is really helpful; but it's been days
and they still haven't resolved their issues...

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nextmoveone
vps here. we're applicants though.

