

Ask HN: How/Where do you host your webapp? - schtog

What is the best way to host a webapplication?<p>What are pros cons of hosting in the cloud vs hosting on your own servers.<p>Is it a lot of work to host on your own?<p>What services do you recommend for hosting your application elsewhere?
Google Appengine is the most famous option I guess, what do you think about that?<p>I also looked at slicehost:
https://manage.slicehost.com/customers/new?referrer=40156bada03f0adc4fae89abdce4693c<p>256 slice  	$20.00  	10GB  	100GB
Exactly how much is that? Seems cheap but how far does 100GB go?<p>Other tips? It seems an obvious choice for me with no real knowledge of hosting my own server to choose to host in the cloud.
======
jws
"Exactly how much is that?" Good question, no answer. I recommend you get some
sort of a network byte counter, then go to a few sites that feel similar in
size/scope to what you plan. Use their "bytes per visit" as a ballpark figure.

For instance, I'm using Safari and turned on the "Show Network Timeline" then
reloaded hacker news. 34kB. Then I went to slashdot.org: 643KB for a first
visit, probably more like 74KB for subsequent front-page load (scripts are the
bulk but they cache).

If you use a VPS solution, you will be managing your machine which is nice,
but if you aren't already skilled at that it will be a distraction from your
webapplication that you might be better without.

The big question with VPS solutions is "how fast is my machine today?" I have
a tiny slice at VPSlink that used to be nicely snappy, but now is painfully
slow. Something outside my visibility has changed on my server and there is
nothing I can do. My slightly cheaper server at RapidXen is much faster.

Slicehost guarantees CPU share based on your slice size, but I don't see the
denominator, I assume since a nearly 16GB slice is available that is the
denominator which would give you 1/64th of the machine, worst case. Disk IO is
another thing entirely, 1/16th of a modern CPU is ok, 1/64th of a disk drive
spindle is painful. I suspect that is why my VPSlink machine has become slow.

Money can mitigate some of this, just buy a bigger slice. Mine are tiny
because I am interested in how much I can do in a ~$7/mo server.

------
noodle
slicehost is a wonderful place to stage your app and grow it until you need to
break out, imo.

i host around 10 apps and sites on a 256 slice. its plenty if you're not
getting too much traffic and optimize correctly so that you don't see
thrashing.

if you don't like that, though, you can boot up a server on EC2.

