Ask YC: Hosting costs...

[rjett]

I have a small project that I have been working on that has the potential to become a big project over the next couple months. So far, I have been using shared hosting, but have started to realize some of the pitfalls of it. Consequently, I have scanned over some earlier posts here at news.yc concerning hosting advice and it seems like Amazon EC2, Slicehost, and a small handful of others come widely recommended. In terms of money spent on actual hosting and time spent learning how to use my hosting environment, what is my best bet?

[qhoxie]

Slicehost and Linode are both great VPS options. In terms of learning curve for setting up the environment, I think you could play your cards right so that it is nothing too intensive. An Ubuntu or CentOS slice would provide an extremely well-documented base to get set up on. Depending on your needs, there is a good chance that whatever you need to do with the VPS has been done before and is documented.

In addition, both services have very helpful support, and they are notoriously affordable.

[MicahWedemeyer → qhoxie]

I'm also a loyal slicehost customer. It's perfect...if you know what you're doing.

Before jumping to VPS hosting, you need to be sure that you can handle administering your own machine. If you have some Linux experience, you'll probably be fine. If you've never seen a command-line, it's going to be a rough ride.

[rjett → MicahWedemeyer]

Unfortunately, I don't have much experience with the command line or Linux; however, I'm willing to learn. I'm just wondering what kind of time I'm going to spend learning. What are other viable options?

[qhoxie → rjett]

There are plenty of managed hosting solutions out there, but it will cost you a bundle. The time it will take to learn the Linux admin thing you need to varies, but if you are a pretty quick learner, I would not expect it to take too long.

Just don't get stuck trying to find the right guides/information. It is out there, so as around.

[iamdave]

I'm a big proponent of NearlyFreeSpeech (http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/). Everything is pay-as-you go, literally. 1GB data transfer = $1. Everything is super affordable, but let me state this, and this is the theme of what I'm going to tell you: it can become expensive if you're running a very trafficked site with lots of user activity.

That said, you should look at hosting with price as the very last thought. Find out what you need, compare that against availability. Find out how much you need, compare that against reliability. Find out how you can support it, compare that against your host's support community, staff and users alike. Using things like this you pick out your host, and if the price is okay, great. If not, move to the next and deduce in the same fashion.

EC2 I think is a good way to go to keep prices low to start off, and if you want to something else later on you'll have the finances saved to do so. Just know the more you use, the higher costs will be, but at least you're not paying $40/mo for clustered/redundant/balanced hosts and databases when all you're doing is writing a blog early on in the game.

[ulfstein]

How about MediaTemple - I've found them to be quite reasonable.