6 ms·

How do you handle massive traffic spikes? Hetzner seems fine for small project / personal / small company websites with predictable load and people who have no

How do you handle massive traffic spikes? Hetzner seems fine for small project / personal / small company websites with predictable load and people who have no problem spending time setting up all of their services they need themselves, it really just sounds like you just aren't the customer AWS wants to attract.

jorangreef 11y ago
"How do you handle massive traffic spikes?" Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin with. If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest that to build a scalable service you yourself would prefer to use servers with necessarily poor price/performance? Or are you saying that it's not possible to use dedicated machines to build a scalable service? Or that one should only use VMs, with their inefficiency and resource contention? How do you reason about disk seek performance? What happens when the spike hits, and another AWS customer on the box starts stealing CPU? Actually, traffic spikes were the reason we moved off AWS. A single dedicated machine at Hetzner gives 10x the headroom at a fraction of the cost. That buys you time and capacity when you need it.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  > If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. precisely. this is the other elephant in the AWS room. the only way to survive a spike without service degradation while vm spin up on that platform is through lambdas/s3 served pages/api gateway - but even lambdas lag behind traffic. but then you need to build your whole architecture for it anyway I'm running on AWS right now, but for other advantages and services, not for its scalability/price performance.
  - ownagefool 11y ago
    Baking your images and set your scaling thresholds lower should be able to largely deal with that. The thing is though, the scaling is nice but most folks just want the auto-recovery. You stick your app over 3 zones, you have autoscaling and you can run with a couple of Ops savy devs and largely forget about it. You no longer need to pay for that dedicated sysadmin who knows how to manage a datacentre when have a small number of technical staff. The extra hosting bills are less than hiring that other person.
    - LoSboccacc 11y ago
      precisely. recoverable multi zone postgres without paying a sysadmin. we can manage basic maintenance on our own, but setting up something like that require a skilled consultant in short burst at each upgrade/maintenance check, and for a small operation like ours it's too expensive if we want to match what amazon gives. we do have a custom AMI that just fetch and build the latest snapshot release when we need auto-scaling or auto-recovery, but our real problem is that we currently depend on sticky session, so users accumulated on the initial instances get sucky performances. (and yes we are currently working on fixing it, we cannot outright serialize sessions on dynamo because, reasons)
- res0nat0r 11y ago
  This sounds like it goes back to my comment in that you aren't AWS' target customer in that you are fine with a bare bones provider and setting up handling all of this yourself. It's shown that many people want all of this outsourced for them and will pay a premium to do so. I always find it a bit silly that every time an AWS service is announced it is compared to some bare minimum other provider that is out there that is cheaper. Of course it is going to be cheaper, but that really is irrelevant.
  - jorangreef 11y ago
    No, the context here was "EC2 Dedicated Hosts" and pinned VMs vs dedicated servers, which is a fair comparison. Or were you actually speaking about things like S3 or WorkMail and traffic spikes related to those?
    - res0nat0r 11y ago
      People pay a premium for the currently 50+ other integrated services in the AWS ecosystem they can leverage vs. spending time and money doing it themselves if they went with another provider, dedicated hosts are no different re: pricing.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
nikanj 11y ago
Not everyone gets these massive traffic spikes. You don't have to be a small company to have easily predictable demand on production servers. The company website can take a beating, but onboarding new customers takes weeks if not months. Plenty of time to plan and scale.
ahofmann 11y ago
We handle traffic spikes with having massive overcapacity while still paying _much_ less than at AWS. In 2008 we started a browsergame that attracted more than 200.000 players. Until 2009 we had to rent big fat servers that could cope with the load and costed over 4000 € per month. Since then hardware got so fast that our PHP software with 500k line of code and 200GB stuff in databases could run on 3-4 dedicated servers that we could rent from almost every german provider for around 300-500 € per month. Since 2014 we have everything on virtual servers hosted by Hosteurope because we wanted managed hosting like AWS and it was even cheaper than running our old dedicated machines. At that time we looked at AWS and we were totally shocked by the prices (we were also shocked how difficult it is to understand the AWS universe)! We're paying less than a tenth for much more performance than we need than we would pay for even the cheapest, 1 year reservation stuff from AWS. Even if our playerbase would triple overnight, our virtual machines would easily cope with that. And upgrading them needs a two clicks and a reboot. Also: we see it as a plus that we have not to deal with all the Amazon stuff, because they have so much APIs, names and complexity in their system. Nobody wants to learn all this and nobody wants to deal with multi-location and replication just because amazon has unreliable servers. German providers seems to have datacenters and servers that don't crash every once in awhile. I'm flabbergasted by how often I read that AWS has broken disks, crashed servers, crashed datacenters, network problems and so on. Since 2008 we had two or three problems in the datacenters at our different providers, with a total downtime of 8 hours. That would be just a little less than 99.99% uptime over all the years... I really wanted to try the new shiny thing that is called AWS but no matter how I looked at it, it is just a very very costly solution for something with built in unreliability.

jorangreef 11y ago

"How do you handle massive traffic spikes?" Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin with. If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest that to build a scalable service you yourself would prefer to use servers with necessarily poor price/performance? Or are you saying that it's not possible to use dedicated machines to build a scalable service? Or that one should only use VMs, with their inefficiency and resource contention? How do you reason about disk seek performance? What happens when the spike hits, and another AWS customer on the box starts stealing CPU? Actually, traffic spikes were the reason we moved off AWS. A single dedicated machine at Hetzner gives 10x the headroom at a fraction of the cost. That buys you time and capacity when you need it.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
> If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. precisely. this is the other elephant in the AWS room. the only way to survive a spike without service degradation while vm spin up on that platform is through lambdas/s3 served pages/api gateway - but even lambdas lag behind traffic. but then you need to build your whole architecture for it anyway I'm running on AWS right now, but for other advantages and services, not for its scalability/price performance.
- ownagefool 11y ago
  Baking your images and set your scaling thresholds lower should be able to largely deal with that. The thing is though, the scaling is nice but most folks just want the auto-recovery. You stick your app over 3 zones, you have autoscaling and you can run with a couple of Ops savy devs and largely forget about it. You no longer need to pay for that dedicated sysadmin who knows how to manage a datacentre when have a small number of technical staff. The extra hosting bills are less than hiring that other person.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    precisely. recoverable multi zone postgres without paying a sysadmin. we can manage basic maintenance on our own, but setting up something like that require a skilled consultant in short burst at each upgrade/maintenance check, and for a small operation like ours it's too expensive if we want to match what amazon gives. we do have a custom AMI that just fetch and build the latest snapshot release when we need auto-scaling or auto-recovery, but our real problem is that we currently depend on sticky session, so users accumulated on the initial instances get sucky performances. (and yes we are currently working on fixing it, we cannot outright serialize sessions on dynamo because, reasons)
res0nat0r 11y ago
This sounds like it goes back to my comment in that you aren't AWS' target customer in that you are fine with a bare bones provider and setting up handling all of this yourself. It's shown that many people want all of this outsourced for them and will pay a premium to do so. I always find it a bit silly that every time an AWS service is announced it is compared to some bare minimum other provider that is out there that is cheaper. Of course it is going to be cheaper, but that really is irrelevant.
- jorangreef 11y ago
  No, the context here was "EC2 Dedicated Hosts" and pinned VMs vs dedicated servers, which is a fair comparison. Or were you actually speaking about things like S3 or WorkMail and traffic spikes related to those?
  - res0nat0r 11y ago
    People pay a premium for the currently 50+ other integrated services in the AWS ecosystem they can leverage vs. spending time and money doing it themselves if they went with another provider, dedicated hosts are no different re: pricing.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]

nikanj 11y ago

Not everyone gets these massive traffic spikes. You don't have to be a small company to have easily predictable demand on production servers. The company website can take a beating, but onboarding new customers takes weeks if not months. Plenty of time to plan and scale.

ahofmann 11y ago

We handle traffic spikes with having massive overcapacity while still paying _much_ less than at AWS. In 2008 we started a browsergame that attracted more than 200.000 players. Until 2009 we had to rent big fat servers that could cope with the load and costed over 4000 € per month. Since then hardware got so fast that our PHP software with 500k line of code and 200GB stuff in databases could run on 3-4 dedicated servers that we could rent from almost every german provider for around 300-500 € per month. Since 2014 we have everything on virtual servers hosted by Hosteurope because we wanted managed hosting like AWS and it was even cheaper than running our old dedicated machines. At that time we looked at AWS and we were totally shocked by the prices (we were also shocked how difficult it is to understand the AWS universe)! We're paying less than a tenth for much more performance than we need than we would pay for even the cheapest, 1 year reservation stuff from AWS. Even if our playerbase would triple overnight, our virtual machines would easily cope with that. And upgrading them needs a two clicks and a reboot. Also: we see it as a plus that we have not to deal with all the Amazon stuff, because they have so much APIs, names and complexity in their system. Nobody wants to learn all this and nobody wants to deal with multi-location and replication just because amazon has unreliable servers. German providers seems to have datacenters and servers that don't crash every once in awhile. I'm flabbergasted by how often I read that AWS has broken disks, crashed servers, crashed datacenters, network problems and so on. Since 2008 we had two or three problems in the datacenters at our different providers, with a total downtime of 8 hours. That would be just a little less than 99.99% uptime over all the years... I really wanted to try the new shiny thing that is called AWS but no matter how I looked at it, it is just a very very costly solution for something with built in unreliability.