

Ask HN: What criteria do you evaluate cloud platforms options  on? - sidmitra

I want to deploy an app(dealing with personal records) on a scalable platform. So security is an important aspect. I started with appengine but i needed SSL support so from what i gathered it doesn't have that.<p>Anyhow, there are various other options such as Joyent, Salesforce to some infrastructure platforms like Amazon EC2. At a high level there's certain amount of feature overlap among them too. So, i was wondering how do you decide or what are the points that i should look at while considering each platform? Also, currently i don't have any restrictions/apprehensions on using any technology/languages etc.<p>In other words are there any "Gotcha's" for the ones that i mentioned? Or other ones that i should look at as well?
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lsc
Speaking as both a provider and someone who has managed many servers for other
people, I would argue that you are best off if you base your system on
something that is commodity... that is, don't buy something from someone else
unless you can get the same product from two vendors. Locking yourself in to
one vendor is nearly always a bad idea.

That said, Personally, I would suggest you go for what you call an
'infrastructure platform' - if you are just renting [virtual] linux boxes, you
can rent those from many providers. Once you start needing a larger box,
buying your own hardware will save you a whole lot of money over something
like ec2. (though, ec2 is pretty nice for scaling quickly)

When just starting out, well, personally I'd suggest a small VPS, though I
have something of a vested interest in the matter. I've heard nothing but good
things about Linode, and their prices appear reasonable. If you are willing to
accept something that has a much more 'raw' interface, you can check out my
offerings, see the link in my profile. My prices are

But either way... the important part is to avoid that lock-in. Companies
change. Sometimes a company that was previously reliable makes some bad
decisions and becomes unreliable. Other times, like in the case of EC2, some
companies start with really good prices, but fail to lower them as the price
of infrastructure falls.

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nreece
If you are considering cloud computing, then I guess you have worked out the
reach of your application. If you haven't (i.e. you don't know what's the user
growth rate), then you don't need cloud computing (yet). Just get a VPS with
Slicehost or Linode to start with.

