

Ask HN: Looking for hosting resources. Best practices.. etc - timmaah

I'm in the process of researching for a move from some older expensive dedicated servers and I only seem to be finding entry level questions on StackOverflow and spam or half answers on Google.<p>A lot of what I found is directed at people just starting a site or just learning. Anyone have suggestions for resources on hosting mid/small site?<p>We are low traffic but burst to 50,000 visits a day multiple times a month. Our main users table is well over a million rows.<p>Heroku is awesome but I still have to host the db somewhere and pay extra for ssl and email. 
Linode or Slicehost VPS looks great as well. Is a VPS enough to handle a database and a site? What happens when you need to scale and load balance?<p>Any advice would be great. I feel like I'm more comfortable with code rather then admin stuff as I get to practice the coding a ton. How do I build my admin knowledge base?
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bobf
Compare the specs on your dedicated servers to the VPSs you are looking at
replacing them with. Keep in mind that you can always switch one portion of
your infrastructure to a VPS to test performance, if needed -- for example,
switch your database server to a VPS and see how it goes.

For general admin information, <http://library.linode.com> is a pretty good
resource. One tip on using a VPS, if you aren't interested in expending extra
effort as a sysadmin, is to get a Xen-based VPS (not OpenVZ). Linode is a
popular choice around HN.

Be aware that using Amazon EC2 brings its own unique set of sysadmin
challenges. It sounds like EngineYard might fit what you're looking for.

Also, take a look at Hetzner - <http://www.hetzner.de/en/> for dedicated
servers at dan order of magnitude less expense than you are currently paying.

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lsc
speaking as someone who sells VPSs... the thing to worry about when moving
from dedicated hosts to a VPS is the disk I/O. If, for example the host in
question is a memcache server, this matters not at all. for a MySQL server, on
the other hand, this matters quite a lot.

~~~
timmaah
Do people use multiple VPSs to host a single site? It would seem slower and a
bigger security risk to have your db on one slice and web server on another?

~~~
lsc
sometimes. Usually it's more of a ease of administration thing. If web and DB
are different virtuals, it's easy to upgrade one or the other on it's own as
needed.

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carbon8
Judging by your comments here, I'd recommend looking more closely into Engine
Yard and Heroku so you can offload some/most of the sysadmin work. Contact
both of them, let them know what your needs are and get price estimates.

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boundlessdreamz
For dedicated I will recommend hetzner. They are cheap and I'm a happy
customer for 3 years.

Cheap and no setup cost:
[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
pr...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
produktmatrix-special/)

Powerful but with setup cost:
[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
pr...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
produktmatrix-eq/)

For VPS you cannot go wrong with linode.

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bwooceli
What does your site run on? I like webfaction a lot. Super flexible and
totally hassle free. They're totally personal and will go the extra mile for
you. For more fun with scaling (from their "Why Webfaction" section):

"Our unique multi-machine load balancing solution allows you to manage your
account on multiple machines from our control panel. You can easily deploy
your apps on multiple machines and our system will automatically provide load-
balancing between these machines. Some customers have scaled up their sites to
tens of machines for a fraction of the price of dedicated servers."

<http://www.webfaction.com/>

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byoung2
If you want the benefits of scaling without the hassle of dealing with server
admin, check out Rackspace Cloud Sites. It's good for a site like yours that
has low traffic but spikes several times per month. Putting it on a VPS might
backfire during those spikes in traffic. If you do go the VPS route, look in
to Cloud Servers...you can resize the slices on the fly, from 256MB up to 16GB
to scale vertically, or add more slices to scale horizontally.
<http://www.rackspacecloud.com/605.html>

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ketanb
We have built a SAAS product which eliminates the headache of building and
maintaining database. Looking at your pain-points, it seems like our product
may be the perfect fit for you. It also provides the analytics out of the box.
As the demand increases, the product automatically scales up. Since it is in
invite only private beta release, I don't want to disclose too much. If you
are interested, we can have a discussion where I can go through the product
and features. My email address is: ketan_bengali AT yahoo.com

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DavidPP
I don't know who is your provider right now, but if you want to stay on
dedicated, you should check <http://iweb.com/>

They have a clearance section where you can get some really good deals

Disclaimer : I know a few ppl who work there but I don't gain anything from
"advertising" them.

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petervandijck
Are you price sensitive? Budget? Is this RoR? Does the site have performance
problems right now?

~~~
timmaah
Not overly price sensitive, as anything will probably be a savings over what
we are paying now. (Budget ~$1000 a month)

The site is RoR and while doesn't have performance "problems", it is slower
then I would like.

~~~
lsc
how long do you expect to keep paying that? You can get 2 amps and 50-100Mbps
most co-lo places for $200/month, depending on where you are. A 32GiB ram/4
sata disk/ 8 core amd server sets me back about $2500 in parts (I can't
imagine it'd be more than $3000 or $4000 built.) that's a lot of capacity...
you could save quite a lot of money by buying rather than renting if you plan
on sticking around for 6 months.

Do the math on owning vs. buying; even if you have to hire a $100/hr hardware
guy (that's above market for a hardware guy) to jack with stuff every now and
again, you are saving some serious coin.

~~~
timmaah
We won't be closing anytime soon.

I'm the only tech guy and am basically already on call 24/7 for the software
side of things. Being the only one responsible for hardware as well is not
appealing.

~~~
lsc
ah, that makes sense. It's something to consider as you scale, though.

Personally, I think the optimal situation is running mostly on co-located
hardware then have cold spares on ec2 or the like that you spin up once a week
to test, that you can bring on in case of hardware failure of your primary
system, or in case of load spikes.

Of course, depending on your time value, often times at $1000/month you aren't
saving enough to justify the two provider setup... and ec2 _will_ be able to
get you another unit faster than anyone else will, if your primary fails.

The thing to remember about "the cloud" as implemented by ec2 or the vps
providers is that recovery from hardware failure is a problem you still need
to solve; In many cases you'll see problems with your ec2 instance, and you'll
have to kill it and bring up your stuff on another ec2 instance.

Instant provisioning is a powerful tool, but it doesn't completely remove you
from worrying about hardware.

This is the value proposition of something like Heroku or engine yard. they
handle more of the sysadmin stuff that you would otherwise have to worry about
if you were running on ec2. It can be a big win in some cases; but keep in
mind... they are charging you a premium for that service.

~~~
timmaah
oh of course I'm already on call for the hardware stuff.. but I'm not the one
who has to go down to the colo and find another motherboard to swap.

Heroku is really tempting me, but as you say they are charging me for it. $100
a month for SSL, another $100 for email delivery and then add on background
tasks.. etc..

~~~
lsc
>oh of course I'm already on call for the hardware stuff.. but I'm not the one
who has to go down to the colo and find another motherboard to swap.

eh, my experience is that actually touching the hardware is a very small part
of the hardware janitor job. the hard part, in my experience, is figuring out
when it's a software problem vs. when you need to go swap that motherboard.

This is why I build all my servers rather than going dell and buying a service
contract... at least on the affordable service contracts, sure, they will swap
out the motherboard if you can prove that's the problem, but if it's an
intermittent problem, you are going to have to work damn hard to get them to
do the swap. (to be clear, dell is fine when the problem is obvious.) To me,
the actual hands-on-the-hardware part is trivial when compared to the effort
required to track down an intermittent problem.

I mean, on ec2 they won't troubleshoot intermittent hardware problems for you,
but at least you can shoot the node and bring it up on fresh hardware without
arguing with anyone. (I have some... anger issues left over from dealing with
dell support. )

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xsc
Very happy with Servint (<http://www.servint.net>). Their managed
VPS/Dedicated machines are very well supported and every issue I've had is
resolved very quickly.

