
A Short Rant About Hosting  - jakewalker
http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/08/a_short_rant_about_hosting/
======
conesus
After reading Maciej's last post about his "cathedral" of a server, I moved
NewsBlur off of half a dozen Linode VPSs (512MB and 2GB machines, for app/task
and db respectively) and onto a hosting provider that offered both dedicated
bare metal and a variety of VPS configs.

I'm now paying $405 / month for 6 servers, and they range from 2 dedicated db
machines with 12GB and 16GB of memory to 1GB virtualized app and task servers
that cost $10 to $20 per month.

What I've learned is that where it really matters, in terms of I/O
performance, the dedicated servers make great machines, naturally. But the
insanely cheap VPSs, which I use for distributed feed fetchers (task servers)
and web servers, are wonderful because they are so inexpensive. I have
redundant load-balanced machines, so when I need to take down an app server or
it fails for some reason, nginx immediately routes around it. And it's costing
me only $10 / month per machine.

And task servers have served me especially well as VPS. It depends on the
intensity of the task, but for such a small expense, you get 4 cores and
enough memory to go nuts. And if you're pulling off a task queue, you can
programmatically spin up more to deal with a higher queue load. When you move
entirely to dedicated machines, your spin up time is on the order of hours to
get it prepped and connected.

I'm just thrilled that many decent hosting providers (with <table>s for
salespeople) offer both. I wouldn't last without being able to have a mixed
setup.

~~~
plinio_silva
What provider is that?

~~~
conesus
I use reliablehostingservices.net. Been solid for about 6 months now. Billing
sucks (credit card for every server because I bought a few of them at
different times -- so different billing cycles), but that's part of the
benefit.

~~~
mgkimsal
Glad to see another reliablehostingservices.net customer - been using them for
> 1 year. Decent value for money, I do wish they had a good selection all the
time - it's a little hit/miss at times - but overall happy with them!

------
ethank
"Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted
HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting
my time."

My god that is good. I spent two weeks about three years ago going around the
country looking at data centers to move our systems to (30+ servers that were
currently in a co-lo and we were looking to go to managed/leased).

We'd get pricing estimates that changed by the time of day and who emailed it
to us. The shopping process made the migration seem easy.

~~~
pmcginn
Why do people think a spreadsheet is less likely to rip them off than a
person?

I mean, sure, if you want to, feel free to walk into a car dealership and pay
sticker price. Go to the mall and buy that hardcover book at MSRP.

~~~
ethank
A spreadsheet doesn't waste time in the negotiation dance. I'll gladly pay for
convenience and directness, which I do frequently.

Think of it this way, given the choice between paying X for a service, or
having to "Call for pricing..." which will you do?

Personally I'd take the X option even if it cost more.

~~~
wisty
And that doesn't mean you can't still call for a better deal.

The sticker price should at least help you scope out whether your project is
feasible on their system.

------
utunga
As someone who runs both AWS and my own dedicated servers I'm starting to see
a pattern.. MBA types talk about 'new trends', 'data centric startups' and new
opportunities opened up by AWS and such. OTOH practical advice from real
people with successful startups - marco arment, jakewalker, others, seems to
focus more on the unseen problems of virtual and advantages of just getting
your own server. Am I right?

~~~
jacques_chester
"When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning.
When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine."

\- Pablo Picasso.

~~~
chopsueyar
Good one.

------
jakewalker
I particularly like this nugget:

> Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted
> HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and
> wasting my time.

~~~
gks
What if the person doesn't know exactly what it is that they need? I know a
lot of people who know software but aren't as solid on knowing how to scale
the hardware side. For those people a table isn't really helpful.

That said however, it should be an option to have that access. I personally
prefer Joyent as a web host. They've shown really solid I/O numbers via their
benchmarking. I've been a happy customer since it was TextDrive.

~~~
chopsueyar
_What if the person doesn't know exactly what it is that they need? I know a
lot of people who know software but aren't as solid on knowing how to scale
the hardware side. For those people a table isn't really helpful._

I don't think a salesman is the first person you want to talk to to help you
in this regard.

~~~
jvdh
This is actually a sad state of affairs. It used to be that the salesperson
was exactly the kind of guy who could solve this. Now they're just too busy
padding deals with stuff almost everyone knows you don't need.

~~~
sunchild
It's a top-down problem. If the company's executives are pushing salespeople
to work in the 1990's-era enterprise sales model, you get websites with zero
useful information and a phone number for upselling.

------
joshu
I wish there was something with the flexibility of AWS (scriptable machines,
disk, etc) but for whole machines and networks - no multi-tenancy.

~~~
jeremyw
If you can stomach month-long commits, many shops will give you bootp/dhcp
visibility in your private vlan, so you can burn/update machines however you
like. I managed 140 systems at Softlayer with ~500 lines of provisioning
script.

~~~
timf
Softlayer also has hourly rates for their "Bare Metal Cloud" offering:
<http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer/computing/>

------
mherdeg
It was "Edsger Dijkstra", not Edgar. (Probably no one else cares about this.)

------
moe
Yes, a thousand times.

And I can also vouch for LeaseWeb. Their signal-to-bullshit ratio is indeed as
excellent as their bang-for-buck.

------
zer0point
I can relate to this guy. About month back I noticed that one of my servers
(VPS at HostV) had dropped and hadn't come back for a week. It's used for dev
stuff and acts mainly as storage for repo archives. Long story short, HostV
had suffered some sort of file system problem, all my files were gone and they
didn't even bother to send me an email. I can live without the files and shit
happens but not emailing the customer, that's just idiotic.

------
B-Scan
One thing I additionally take into account is reviews of customers on
<http://www.webhostingtalk.com/>

------
benologist
I like when you do email sales and they don't get back to you ... someone lost
a large order from us this month for that.

------
citricsquid
Softlayer are great at this. Their sites lists prices over $1200 but talk to
sales and you can get it close to cut in half and if you order enough servers
you'll get it at 75% discount. I guess the value of sales staff knowing about
the customer is quite high.

~~~
tshtf
So anyone who wants servers needs to talk with sales and negotiate a discount?
I think the point of this post was:

 _Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted
HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting
my time._

When comparing between hosting providers, most lack the time and resources to
negotiate with each provider to find out what the "real" rate is. Hosting
should be a commodity, providers should treat it as such. I think there are
probably good opportunities for hosting providers that provide an honest rate.

~~~
andrewf
SoftLayer has the nicely formatted table. The prices on it seem quite
reasonable - except they charge up the wazoo for RAM.

------
kookster
comparing contegix managed hosting to others like AWS is apples and oranges.
There is no level of AWS where you get a team of sysadmins answering your
emails within seconds, 24/7.

contegix is worth every penny.

------
dendory
I've had several sites with Dreamhost for a long time and am very satisfied so
far. They give you a lot for a low price. I don't use their Dedicated packages
however, just shared and VPS.

------
nirvana
I'm curious to know why he chose the company he did among all the companies he
looked at. I agree with the concerns about the difficulty of sourcing these
services, and this may be a large part of why AWS is successful-- they provide
the service as a utility.

One of the cheaper companies on his spreadsheet is hetzner.de They have
dedicated servers that go down in size to about $20 a month:
<http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x2>

Note that their price includes VAT. If you're not a EU company, you don't pay
the VAT and so the actual price is cheaper.

For our needs, we're going to start off buying a cluster. Probably 4-5
machines. As load grows, we'll add nodes and larger nodes over time. (A nice
feature of Riak is that you can do this, just give the ring time to rebalance
and you can migrate from one set of hosts to a larger one relatively quickly.)

VPS offerings lose a lot of their appeal in the face of a $20/month 1GB
dedicated server! And with no setup cost, it is pretty elastic, though as you
get to larger dedicated servers hetzner has a setup cost.

I'm not shilling for hetzner, I am just sharing them because I'm considering
being a customer and and curious as to what others think about them. Also,
curious if anyone else is facing the "we need to start with a cluster of
machines, but we're a tiny startup at this point" issue...

~~~
sandGorgon
desktop grade hardware - if that's your thing go for it.

I believe that if you're going dedicated, might as well pay for enterprise
grade hardware (with ECC RAM, RAID disks) because you dont get all the nifty
backups/clones/spin-ups that you get from the cloud.

------
troels
_If your server enclosures are made of elemental silver and polished daily
with static-free cloths by computer science PhDs who are related by blood to
Edgar Dijkstra, then I definitely want to know about that. Put a paragraph
about it right under your price chart._

Now, that certainly would be something to pay for. Who provides that?

