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I am actually a startup and time is very precious for me. Within a day I managed to set 4 server infrastructure on Vultr - I have database server, 2 workers and

by funkyy 11y ago

I am actually a startup and time is very precious for me. Within a day I managed to set 4 server infrastructure on Vultr - I have database server, 2 workers and 1 web facing server. While this is nothing compared to what companies use AWS for, I will be scaling very quickly. And best thing? I wont be scaling to AWS. Lets look at Vultr, that is more complete option compared to DO in my opinion. You get click away following: -backups -ddos protection -internal IP -storage servers -dedicated resources servers With this I can scale up to rather large size. While this is not enough for some startups, for MVP and Bootstraping startups that's more than enough. And frankly once I will grow big enough to hire tech guys, I will just move everything either to dedicated servers or simply to Rackspace or Softlayer for premium cloud solution. The whole point of my comment was - AWS, Google and Azure - all are loosing to the ones like DO and Vultr in smb market. And while it looks irrelevant now, what stops DO etc. to scale up and offer more services? I bet if not due to their enormous growth rate, they would be already doing this but for a year or two they must focus more on scaling rather than increasing number of products. Once they are ready AWS/Google will be forced to either buy DO for crazy money or rethink their documentation, offering, approach, business model etc.

Johnny555 11y ago
I don't think AWS is chasing the Small Business market (but they probaby want the Medium Business market), they are looking for the enterprise market. I doubt AWS turns much, if any profit on a 4 server implementation when support costs are factored in. Instead of 100 4 server customers, they'd rather have a 400 server customer. If I had a small static site that could be served by a few dedicated servers, I probably wouldn't use AWS myself. But, for me, the power of AWS is the elasticity - I can scale from 100 servers to over a 1000 servers and back down to 100 servers in one day - and those servers are distributed across 3 regions. And I have nearly a petabyte of data in S3. If I ran my app on dedicated servers, I'd need to pay for 1000 servers to handle my peak load, and I'd need a large petabyte-scale storage array (well several of them for redundancy). I'm probably biased in thinking that my use case is more what AWS is seeking since they provide a good API and powerful tools to enable exactly this use case.
- funkyy 11y ago
  But that is what I am saying. If there is a startup, it builds infrastructure that is easy to scale. In a year they end up having 500 servers. Are they interesting to AWS? Sure. Are they interested to move their infrastructure from quite good setup that works to completely new provider? Not likely. Medium sized high growing startups cannot really afford moving to new infrastructure until they got proper funding. I can scale Vultr from 100 servers to 1,000 in 1 day as well (most time this takes is to click things through, not sure if AWS have buy XXX servers at once but if they do, thats good then). And once again, I am not saying about small websites/static sites. I am talking about startups. Companies that can grow XXXX% a month for first few months, companies that are very careful where they spend money and where they allocate resources.
  - ersoft 11y ago
    Good luck scaling vultr beyond 30 servers. My company is using vultr for over 1 year and we were running about 40-50 servers during peak load. Here problems start to appear very often: - We nearly failed our launch due to failure to increase server capacity during peak traffic, Vultr didn't have any more instances in that datacenter. This happened a lot of times and support always answered "We don't know when we will add more capacity". - Periodic network partitions. In the last two months we experienced a lot of network partitions both on public and private network, some of them lasting for about 2-3 days, our fleet beeing totally partitioned in 2-3 distinct blocks. Even new instances started had private network down (100% packet loss). - Technical support. We opened a few support tickets asking when private network will be fixed. Usually they respond that everything is fine and I have a configuration issue. I reply with ping/mtr logs and finally they agree there is a problem (which can be easy tested by themselves anyway). Then, they fix the issue after 1-2 days. Good luck fixing this yourself when your external load balancers have no public network connection, and new provisioned instances don't have it, too :) - They changed instance types. The instances started months ago have a powerful CPU at 3.6Ghz which is shown in all their advertised benchmarks against DO/AWS/etc. Now they are offering 2.4Ghz CPU which is about 60% slower. When I told them about this I received an predefined template response like: "Thanks for your inquiry, we are constantly revising our hardware to meet customer needs". - They increased pricing. First, the instance pricing was 20% lower than on DO. Then, they changed the price as beeing the same as DO and added a 20% discount. Then, they removed this discount, just telling everybody that they ended the discount period, nothing about the price increase :). So, we are in the process of migrating everything to Google Cloud. We've been testing it on a staging cluster of 10 nodes and everything works smoothly, so we are in the process of moving the production cluster too. Be aware of small instance types (f1-micro and g1-small), they have very small CPU capacity for production load. Also, Google offers us a lot of hosted stuff we don't need to manage anymore: DNS, Mysql, Datastore, Object store, etc. We were using Amazon S3 before, but peering from other datacenters (eg Vultr Datacenter, DO) sucks, constantly getting network timeouts, increased latency, etc.

by funkyy 11y ago

Johnny555 11y ago

I don't think AWS is chasing the Small Business market (but they probaby want the Medium Business market), they are looking for the enterprise market. I doubt AWS turns much, if any profit on a 4 server implementation when support costs are factored in. Instead of 100 4 server customers, they'd rather have a 400 server customer. If I had a small static site that could be served by a few dedicated servers, I probably wouldn't use AWS myself. But, for me, the power of AWS is the elasticity - I can scale from 100 servers to over a 1000 servers and back down to 100 servers in one day - and those servers are distributed across 3 regions. And I have nearly a petabyte of data in S3. If I ran my app on dedicated servers, I'd need to pay for 1000 servers to handle my peak load, and I'd need a large petabyte-scale storage array (well several of them for redundancy). I'm probably biased in thinking that my use case is more what AWS is seeking since they provide a good API and powerful tools to enable exactly this use case.

funkyy 11y ago
But that is what I am saying. If there is a startup, it builds infrastructure that is easy to scale. In a year they end up having 500 servers. Are they interesting to AWS? Sure. Are they interested to move their infrastructure from quite good setup that works to completely new provider? Not likely. Medium sized high growing startups cannot really afford moving to new infrastructure until they got proper funding. I can scale Vultr from 100 servers to 1,000 in 1 day as well (most time this takes is to click things through, not sure if AWS have buy XXX servers at once but if they do, thats good then). And once again, I am not saying about small websites/static sites. I am talking about startups. Companies that can grow XXXX% a month for first few months, companies that are very careful where they spend money and where they allocate resources.
- ersoft 11y ago
  Good luck scaling vultr beyond 30 servers. My company is using vultr for over 1 year and we were running about 40-50 servers during peak load. Here problems start to appear very often: - We nearly failed our launch due to failure to increase server capacity during peak traffic, Vultr didn't have any more instances in that datacenter. This happened a lot of times and support always answered "We don't know when we will add more capacity". - Periodic network partitions. In the last two months we experienced a lot of network partitions both on public and private network, some of them lasting for about 2-3 days, our fleet beeing totally partitioned in 2-3 distinct blocks. Even new instances started had private network down (100% packet loss). - Technical support. We opened a few support tickets asking when private network will be fixed. Usually they respond that everything is fine and I have a configuration issue. I reply with ping/mtr logs and finally they agree there is a problem (which can be easy tested by themselves anyway). Then, they fix the issue after 1-2 days. Good luck fixing this yourself when your external load balancers have no public network connection, and new provisioned instances don't have it, too :) - They changed instance types. The instances started months ago have a powerful CPU at 3.6Ghz which is shown in all their advertised benchmarks against DO/AWS/etc. Now they are offering 2.4Ghz CPU which is about 60% slower. When I told them about this I received an predefined template response like: "Thanks for your inquiry, we are constantly revising our hardware to meet customer needs". - They increased pricing. First, the instance pricing was 20% lower than on DO. Then, they changed the price as beeing the same as DO and added a 20% discount. Then, they removed this discount, just telling everybody that they ended the discount period, nothing about the price increase :). So, we are in the process of migrating everything to Google Cloud. We've been testing it on a staging cluster of 10 nodes and everything works smoothly, so we are in the process of moving the production cluster too. Be aware of small instance types (f1-micro and g1-small), they have very small CPU capacity for production load. Also, Google offers us a lot of hosted stuff we don't need to manage anymore: DNS, Mysql, Datastore, Object store, etc. We were using Amazon S3 before, but peering from other datacenters (eg Vultr Datacenter, DO) sucks, constantly getting network timeouts, increased latency, etc.