

Ask HN: What cloud provider do you use? - edu

After the incidences experienced by reddit (http://blog.reddit.com/2011/03/why-reddit-was-down-for-6-of-last-24.html) related to the reliability of EBD I'm wondering what are alternatives and which one do you have experience with/recommend. Maybe it's just EBD that has to be avoided?<p>(I've used AWS for some batch work but never for hosting a webapp, but now I was planning to use it for hosting a webapp (either directly or via heroku))
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rmoriz
Here in Europe dedicated machines are so cheap (100$/month for QuadCore CPU,
24GB RAM, 2x1.5TB SATA) that most startups and companies just order a bunch of
dedicated servers [1][2].

Hetzner[1] e.g. has pre-provisioned servers running that get delivered within
10 minutes (24/7) (if you're a customer). You can also cancel every server
every month. And they have an API [3]), too (I made a Ruby gem for that[4])

This pretty much kills all needs to use AWS or any other cloud provider for
98% of all startups/projects.

Ah, btw, they've 10 times [5] the connection of e.g. AWS Europe and provide
native IPv6.

[1] <http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq8>

[2] <http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/dedicated_offers.xml>

[3] <http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Robot_Webservice_en>

[4] <http://github.com/rmoriz/hetzner-api>

[5] check on <http://bgp.he.net/>

~~~
edu
thanks! hetzner was already in my list of options, and I think I'll go with
them :)

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parasubvert
The issue with Reddit was that they designed their application for a single,
on-premise data centre, with multiple layers of redundancy at the
infrastructure layer. They didn't design for failure.

If you design your application such that single-availability-zone EBS must be
as reliable as a hardened triple mirror EMC SAN, you're going to be
disappointed. If you treat EBS as what it is - commodity virtualized disk
storage with moderate performance - you'll be fine.

In other words, ensure you have replication of data across availability zones.

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ryanfitz
Linode has great prices for 64bit instances. For all of my own projects I use
mongoDB, which requires a 64bit os and amazon really doesn't compare price
wise, at least for small 64bit instances. My servers have run there without
issue and I've found their customer support to be great.

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selectnull
<http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/>

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slig
Linode, hands down. I've never experienced downtime there in more than 2
years.

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kposehn
Heroku all the way.

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bmelton
There's another thread round here
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2337313>) where shykes is allowing more
people into the dotcloud beta. It's a brilliant product, and if you're lucky,
you can get in.

I believe its backend is EC2, and it's completely normalized deployment for a
variety of different projects - similar to Heroku, but for almost any language
or platform.

The only downfall I've seen in using it for complete deployment is that it
doesn't yet support naked domains, but it DOES support www.domainname.com, so
I have a static page that just redirects from domainname.com to
www.domainname.com where necessary.

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JoshKalkbrenner
RackSpace

