

Ask HN: Would you use a service like MongoHQ, if so why? - startupcto

I've been playing around with MongoDB and really liked using it and we're considering moving all our datastore over to Mongo. The question I have is startups like MongoHQ. Why would anyone use them?<p>First question that came to mind is the latency issue. Unless you are using EC2 and deploying your application servers "close" to theirs, there is no way to reduce the latency between your app servers and their db servers.<p>2. Why would you give control of the single most important piece of your livelihood over to someone else who in fact is just another startup.<p>My questions are really more geared towards using MongoHQ for production. I feel 100% comfortable in using MongoHQ for staging and development but just not production.
======
jasonmccay
Hey there...I am one of the founders of MongoHQ. We get this question often. I
think that the issue is less about getting up and going with a technology
(generally, that is the easy part), but the reality that it is something that
you still have to manage as you get increasingly busy. So:

1) How are you going to handle monitoring?

2) Do you feel comfortable making the right moves when you are faced with
growth?

3) Do you feel comfortable optimizing your database as things change?

4) Do you have time to stay up on all the updates to MongoDB and how they can
affect you, what improvements are right for you, etc.? The space is very busy.

As part of both of our shared and dedicated offerings, we offer this to our
customers and can assist them as they grow and their needs change. Hosting the
data is the easy part...mastering the domain is what takes effort. We do our
best to help our users in this way.

One final note...we do offer consulting, installation and monitoring of in-
house MongoDB setups. That way, if you did want to run MongoDB on your own
platform, we could assist you. I'd love to talk to you more about it if you
would like. My email is jason@mongohq.com.

------
benologist
We're using MongoHQ and have been for around a year.

1) We're outside of the AWS infrastructure, the latency is bearable esp. with
caching. If you can cache it then the latency straight away only matters a
small % of the time.

2) Local mirroring is coming I believe, at which point you can have a constant
failsafe although their uptime & reliability has been great in our time with
them.

~~~
startupcto
Why are you even using MongoHQ and have to live with bearable latency? I mean
if you don't even use AWS, why not just deploy your own db server?

~~~
benologist
Good question. Originally I did do it all myself, I installed it and I had
replication and all that set up, but it fell over and until you have a bunch
of experience that means you're a noob who has to dick around in Google and
IRC looking for answers for every simple problem, while part or all of your
platform is broken.

Our servers are already in multiple datacenters which means we can either
maintain our own multi-dc MongoDB cluster (not really an option w/ me at the
wheel) or we have to eat some latency anyway.

In my opinion it's cheaper + easier to let MongoHQ handle it all, and latency
.. as long as it's measured in milliseconds it's acceptable compared to doing
it all myself.

------
MPiccinato
I am using MongoHQ to get up and running.

The recommended setup for deploying MongoDB on EC2 is a little too much
overhead right now and I am not a sysadmin. If everything is going well and I
start to notice performance issues on MongoHQ, I will move off to managing
MongoDB myself.

~~~
benologist
Not having to learn it all is the best part of using MongoHQ - you can focus
on _using_ the platform instead of learning how to administrate it which on
top of the million other things we all have to do is a PITA, especially if
your startup goes down with every mistake you make.

------
rawsyntax
I'm using it for my sideprojects. Heroku has an addon for mongohq. If it goes
down, no biggie, it's just a side project.

------
latch
No, I wouldn't. Mongo is easy to setup, configure and monitor.

