
Shared Virtual vs Dedicated vs Colocated server hosting - which do you use for your startup? - nanott

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mattjaynes
Unless you have money to burn, I would definitely recommend against hosting at
a colo.

At the last startup I worked at we had no end of fiascoes regarding our colos.
The startup bought over a _million_ dollars of servers and then was paying
high-priced employees and consultants to set them up at a colo. But then once
the servers were all set up, the colo discovered that they didn't have enough
power for our servers. Then we had trouble getting out of the big colo
contract that we had signed and had to move all the servers and get them set
up at yet another colo. Turns out the next colo also didn't have enough power
for our setup even after many reassurances at the beginning that they did. So
all in all, this waste of resources put us months behind schedule. Then,
ironically we got acquired and no longer even needed our setup because we
could then just use the bigger company's server setup.

This is another case of 'premature optimization is the root of all evil'.
Seriously, we could have done the whole startup with a couple of Dreamhost
accounts and launched earlier with a better product and with WAY (millions)
more money in the bank. They were optimizing our server setup for HUGE traffic
when they should have just been focused on the product.

I'm glad I was able to see those mistakes close up. It gave me confidence to
do my own startup self-funded since I knew how low I could keep my burn-rate.

So now, I'm using EC2 for my servers and it's an amazing experience. I set up
a custom server image and then can run multiple instances of it for only 10
cents per server per hour. I can kill instances that I'm not using and bring
up a new server within 2 minutes. My server bill is less than $50 a month
during development and will be about $100 a month once I launch. I'll also
have the ability to scale up VERY quickly and cheaply if I need to.

Anyway, that's my take on it from my limited experience. I'm sure there are
some guys that are obsessed with doing their own custom server setup at a
colo. Good for them. But you have to realize that you'll have _much_ higher
capital costs up front and will be exposing yourself to _much_ greater risk.
Focus on your product and find a server solution that is cheap, low-risk, and
flexible. Remember you can always scale later - but you have to have a reason
to scale first! Have the faith to focus on product and don't fall into the
trap of an 'intriguing' 'interesting' academic experiment in server setups!

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jey
If you want a dedicated server, aplus.net has "value servers" that are
basically unmanaged dedicated servers using last-gen hardware. I pay $50/mo
for a 2.5 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM.

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gyro_robo
The problem with VPSes at least is if anyone on the physical box manages to
crash the machine, it goes out for everyone. Xen has historically been buggy
-- just starting SBCL would crash it(!). Count on Murphy's law -- I had just
finished some work and was waiting for a client to take a look at it, and of
course my webhost decided to reboot the VPS right before the client checked.
Since I hadn't put a restart in rc.local yet, it was just down.

Even with all your other ducks in a row, you don't want a third party
rebooting your machine while someone is in the middle of using your site,
especially if there's anything important going on, like customers purchasing
with a CC or investors taking a look.

Jey's suggestion of cheap dedicated servers for $50 sounds better than EC2 if
you're CPU-bound (2.5 GHz vs. 1.7) and is cheaper ($72 per node for 24-7 EC2
usage) and won't wipe everything on restart like EC2 does.

Note that mileage varies widely with webhosts. The majority of them do not
understand even the basics of computer security, e.g. the importance of
publishing their SSH key fingerprints (via https).

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rbc
I'm running at home off a DSL circuit. I host using a mixture of virtual
FreeBSD servers under Parallels on an Intel Mac Mini and two real servers. It
works pretty well for low traffic web sites, but the VM's need to have a real
hardware NTP server to keep their clocks syncronized. I also run NFS on real
hardware. It works surprisingly well. Watch how you allocate VM disk I/O
across your physical disk spindles. I have three physical drives plugged into
the mini.

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brlewis
I started out with shared virtual hosting, but after getting a couple of
paying customers I moved to dedicated hosting with LayeredTech.

If you try out the demo you'll see it's really responsive:

<http://ourdoings.com/>

As compared to shared virtual hosting, where even a trivial sample app is
sometimes sluggish:

<http://brlewis.com/map.brl>

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mattculbreth
Classic "that depends" question there. I'd suggesting going to
<http://www.webhostingtalk.com/> and doing some searching. You'll see some
wide ranging opinions on Dedicated vs. Colo vs. VPS.

Go there for an hour or so, ask around. It's mostly a hangout for
infrastructure dudes but you'll still learn quite a bit.

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michele
At my company, we decided to get a few dedicated servers from LT. Prices are
great and so far -- knocking on wood -- it's been a great ride.

VPS are not the best for mission critical services, because you never now what
you neighbours are doing. Colo is just to expensive and not practical.

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davidw
I'm ok with running my own machine, so I have a dedicated box from Layered
Tech that's not too expensive, and has a gig of memory and hardware raid. One
thing you can do with a box like this is, while you're ramping up and don't
use the full capacity, share it with a friend.

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timg
Related: What's a provider that can give me lots of CPU time when I can no
longer host CPU intensive processes from my home computers? What about for
cost less than a dedicated server?

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mattjaynes
Amazon's EC2!

<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2>

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nickb
After a lot of testing, we went the colocated route. VPS was the second best
option but the memory issues (too little) that we've experienced with two
hosts were unacceptable.

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dawie
I am going with Media Temple (GS) I can't give you feedback about them yet,
but they cost $20 a month and their grid server can grow with your needs...

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blader
I recommend doing a Technorati search on that. Lots of people have received
less than reliable service on the Grid. They do great marketing, but their
tech is overrated from I've been reading.

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Sam_Odio
I agree, my friends actually just switched off MT because of their difficulty
hosting RoR apps.

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eduardoflores
Textdrive

