
Updated YC Company Hosting Stats - brett
http://arglebargle.posterous.com/updated-yc-company-hosting-stats
======
edawerd
This might be a little bit off topic, but I've always thought that it could
make some sense to have a YC colocation. With enough companies, it could be
more cost-effective than everyone getting their own slicehost. Of course,
there would be a ton of other headaches involved like backups, outages, etc,
but a lot of YC companies seem to be doing just fine administering their own
boxes in a colo. I know it wouldn't be for everyone, but maybe a standard
stack of software/configuations could be readily available for new YC
companies. We all seem to have had the same frustrations with configuring
webservers, mail servers (ouch!), tweaking database servers, etc. It could be
yet another benefit of joining the YC mafia =)

~~~
rdl
I think an easier way to do this is for a forward-thinking hosting provider,
colo, etc. in the bay area to offer discounted or free hosting to YC companies
(free during the YC period, maybe not after); a few months of free hosting to
have a shot at a successful site as customer would be more than worth it.

(alternatively, convertible debt)

Piggybacking on YC's selection process seems like a good business model in
general.

~~~
lsc
I have considered offering free hosting to YC companies. Most of them seem to
be a bit, ah, brand conscious (thus going for slicehost over linode) so I
haven't bothered to push the idea.

But yea, if any YC company needs free hosting (and really, hosting is so cheap
these days that it's all pretty much free) I'd be happy to give it to them.
I'm younger than linode, but I've been renting Xen VPSs since 2005, which
makes me older than slicehost, I believe.

I'm not asking you to go exclusive or anything (in fact, I think that's a bad
idea. don't host all your stuff with the same provider.)

That said, I'd be a little surprised if any of the YC companies have to pay
for hosting. Many, many ISPs would be happy to give away a little bandwidth in
exchange for some publicity.

------
carbon8
Why only 1 on linode? Is there a reason?

~~~
mdasen
There are several.

Slicehost has been doing Xen hosting longer. Linode is older, but they were
using User Mode Linux (not nearly as good as Xen) for a long time. Slicehost
got the mindshare by getting to Xen hosting first.

Slicehost is local to all their data centers. Whether in St Louis or Dallas/Ft
Worth, their employees actually work there. Linode's employees all work in
South Jersey, 2 hours from their Newark data center and inaccessible to their
other data centers. Kinda indicates that they have other people setting up a
lot of their stuff.

Linode is often out of stock or having limited stock. This might just be that
Slicehost doesn't tell us how the sausage is made and Linode does.

Linode tops out at 2880MB. Slicehost offers instances going up to 15.5GB.
That's a major difference if you want to try scaling up easily and there is a
huge difference between trying to get your site to handle traffic on a 3GB
server and a 15GB server.

Backups are a nice touch.

The Rackspace name lends a "they're the big game in town" to their service.

They aren't that much more expensive. Linode charges a constant $0.0555. . .
per MB of RAM. At the 2GB level, Slicehost is charging $0.634 per MB of RAM.
That means that if you were to get 2GB servers from each, the Slicehost would
cost you $130 and the Linode would cost you $114. It is cheaper, but it isn't
so significantly cheaper.

Slicehost can more easily upgrade your plan. Linode has to switch your box
should you want to move plans. Often Slicehost can move plans while keeping
you on the same box.

\--

Now, none of that may matter to you. It doesn't to me and that's why I'm a
Linode customer. However, for many these are considerations. If you're running
a business, having instances top out at 3GB is a concern. Would you pay a 13%
premium for Slicehost just for the knowledge that you can upgrade beyond 3GB
of RAM should the need arise? If I had a person project where downtime for
migration would be embarrassing, I would.

Likewise, some might care that the Slicehost people actually work in the area
rather than colo-ing boxes with places like The Planet.

I'm very happy with Linode, but I can see why many would choose Slicehost.

~~~
axod
>> "They aren't that much more expensive"

Bandwidth overage on slicehost is .30/GB. On Linode it's .10/GB. That's a
fairly massive difference.

~~~
patio11
For some businesses, the economic value of a marginal gigabyte is, say, (
_does math_ ) $50.

Santa, for Christmas this year:

1) I'd like to use all of my 500 GB quota, every month.

2) I'd like to start paying overage charges. REALLY BIG OVERAGE CHARGES.

------
mc
Thanks for compiling that list. I didn't know about SoftLayer.

I noticed the list mentions Justin.tv hosts itself. Aren't they built on
Amazon EC2 and S3?

~~~
emmett
Your information is out of date. We outgrew EC2 a while ago.

~~~
ankhmoop
Outgrew how?

~~~
emmett
In a couple different ways. EC2 is an amazing service, but it's not a perfect
fit for everyone. We basically wanted to buy cheaper bandwidth and more
bandwidth per CPU, and there's no real path for that on EC2.

------
grandalf
wow nobody using engineyard! I guess the YC stipend would only cover one month
:)

------
pubbins
Not a YC company but I have sites on Slicehost and FDC Servers. Slicehost was
nice for setting up my first Linux server - now that I've done it, I'll be
using FDC as it's hard to beat FDC for the price/bandwidth.

If you can stay under 3 TB/month 1and1 also has some decent servers for the
money.

------
mikeyur
Does Mosso cloud mix into Rackspace? I've been quite happy with my Mosso Xen
VPS.

I pay like $26/mo. for my 512MB VPS. It's $0.03/hr which is $21.90/mo. but you
pay $0.22/GB out, and $0.08/GB in. I don't use a whole lot of bandwidth
though.

------
webwright
It'd be a nice touch to link to the sites in question. I'm ashamed to say that
I didn't recognize all of the YC companies on that list! :-)

~~~
brett
True. They're linked in the FAQ: <http://ycombinator.com/faq.html>

------
ALee
Before this, everyone was on AWS, did YC companies get a deal with Slicehost?

------
dannyr
I wonder why no YC companies are on Google App Engine.

~~~
dangrover
I know of at least one that is!

~~~
vlad
You beat me to it. :)

~~~
dannyr
Which one?

------
tdavis
_sniff_

I miss you, Softlayer :(

~~~
anuraggoel
Why did you switch to Rackspace?

~~~
tdavis
Monetary reasons.

~~~
jbyers
Could you expand on that? :) We've been happily hosted at SoftLayer for a few
years. Our negotiated rates were quite a bit better than Rackspace the last
time I checked, curious if their pricing has come down.

------
jpwagner
Interesting reviews at Web Hosting Geeks: <http://webhostinggeeks.com/>

*edit--damn no one likes sarcasm around here

~~~
quizbiz
Why the url then? Seems a bit tongue and cheek.

