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Unless you need AWS for the scaling it offers, it tends to be the worst possible host you could choose. And even if you need the scaling, a mixed stack with de

by ryanlol 10y ago

Unless you need AWS for the scaling it offers, it tends to be the worst possible host you could choose. And even if you need the scaling, a mixed stack with dedis and EC2 on demand shouldn't be hard to run.

eropple 10y ago
> Unless you need AWS for the scaling it offers, it tends to be the worst possible host you could choose. Unless, in turn, you use reserved instances, which bring the price down to equal or cheaper than most other options. "dedis and EC2 on demand" is an order of magnitude more complex, probably actually more expensive, and increases your failure cases significantly.
- ryanlol 10y ago
  I think you're a little out of touch with hosting prices these days. https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/details-servers.xml?range=HOST&id=2016-HOST-32L https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/details-servers.xml... For 12 months will cost you about $800 A somewhat comparable EC2 instance (that still has way lower specs) m3.2xlarge will have an up-front cost of $1772, and an hourly cost of $0.146. So you'd be looking at a total yearly bill of $3051, which would pay for 3 of those dedis. I honestly don't know how anyone could describe that as competitive. > "dedis and EC2 on demand" is an order of magnitude more complex, probably actually more expensive. If you're one of the few people that actually need the rapid scaling that EC2 can provide, sure. But that's an extremely specific and rare use case.
  - blahi 10y ago
    Cloud platforms like AWS offer other things besides just scaling. Like Hadoop processing, hosted databases, email infrastructure, DNS services and the list goes on and on.
  - eropple 10y ago
    I'm alarmingly familiar with OVH. And their hardware failures. And their slow support exactly when you need them most. And their poor inventory control, leaving popular system configurations unavailable when I (or, rather, my clients) need them. I'm also familiar with exactly how misleading a specs comparison ends up when you can architect an application to leverage burstable instances and rapid auto-scaling, letting you require little expenditure during slow periods while still responding gracefully to load. This isn't some deep-magic thing for sites with tens of thousands of instances, either--I've had clients with ten total instances benefit both financially and operationally from building out fairly straightforward elastic capacity (not least because the same code paths necessary for elasticity also makes things like setting up development environments single-click affairs, which enables deeper and more complete testing of the application to ensure correctness). Even were a $2200 premium a credible number, that's eleven hours of my billing rate. Reimplementing what AWS provides even a fairly straightforward system--easy, API-driven system deployment and configuration (and while OVH's public cloud APIs can enable some of this, your "dedis" cannot), straightforward and API-controlled support services of more or less any stripe, integrated system monitoring and alerting--would be hundreds of hours of work, be a worse solution, and require ongoing maintenance. (A decent hosting provider will offer some of that, of course. But not all. And you'll pay for it.)
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      > I'm alarmingly familiar with OVH. And their hardware failures. And their slow support exactly when you need them most. And their poor inventory control, leaving popular system configurations unavailable when I (or, rather, my clients) need them. That's good to know. I was contemplating going with them for my next project. AWS it is then! The only problem I see with AWS is the configuration overhead. Want storage? Well, we have a separate service for that! Now you have to understand the pricing, the API, etc. just to integrate it into your stack. I completely understand how this modular approach helps with scaling, but when starting out it just feels like way too much overhead, especially for a single dev like me.
      - eropple 10y ago
        It can certainly feel like a lot of overhead, but in many ways I think it's the "eat your vegetables" part of really understanding what you're building and, through the development of your infrastructure, figuring out where your pain points lie. I do some advisory stuff for students and bootstrapping startups that are looking to work in cloud environments. Feel free to drop me an email (in my profile) if you'd like to chat.
  - byefruit 10y ago
    What makes this comparison even more crazy is that those AWS prices don't include any (very expensive) bandwidth or block devices. Also, once you're paying upfront for reserved instances you've lost one of the major advantages in your cashflow scaling with your usage.
    - eropple 10y ago
      Reserved instances can be reserved for only a percentage of available hours.

by ryanlol 10y ago

eropple 10y ago

> Unless you need AWS for the scaling it offers, it tends to be the worst possible host you could choose. Unless, in turn, you use reserved instances, which bring the price down to equal or cheaper than most other options. "dedis and EC2 on demand" is an order of magnitude more complex, probably actually more expensive, and increases your failure cases significantly.

ryanlol 10y ago
I think you're a little out of touch with hosting prices these days. https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/details-servers.xml?range=HOST&id=2016-HOST-32L https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/details-servers.xml... For 12 months will cost you about $800 A somewhat comparable EC2 instance (that still has way lower specs) m3.2xlarge will have an up-front cost of $1772, and an hourly cost of $0.146. So you'd be looking at a total yearly bill of $3051, which would pay for 3 of those dedis. I honestly don't know how anyone could describe that as competitive. > "dedis and EC2 on demand" is an order of magnitude more complex, probably actually more expensive. If you're one of the few people that actually need the rapid scaling that EC2 can provide, sure. But that's an extremely specific and rare use case.
- blahi 10y ago
  Cloud platforms like AWS offer other things besides just scaling. Like Hadoop processing, hosted databases, email infrastructure, DNS services and the list goes on and on.
- eropple 10y ago
  I'm alarmingly familiar with OVH. And their hardware failures. And their slow support exactly when you need them most. And their poor inventory control, leaving popular system configurations unavailable when I (or, rather, my clients) need them. I'm also familiar with exactly how misleading a specs comparison ends up when you can architect an application to leverage burstable instances and rapid auto-scaling, letting you require little expenditure during slow periods while still responding gracefully to load. This isn't some deep-magic thing for sites with tens of thousands of instances, either--I've had clients with ten total instances benefit both financially and operationally from building out fairly straightforward elastic capacity (not least because the same code paths necessary for elasticity also makes things like setting up development environments single-click affairs, which enables deeper and more complete testing of the application to ensure correctness). Even were a $2200 premium a credible number, that's eleven hours of my billing rate. Reimplementing what AWS provides even a fairly straightforward system--easy, API-driven system deployment and configuration (and while OVH's public cloud APIs can enable some of this, your "dedis" cannot), straightforward and API-controlled support services of more or less any stripe, integrated system monitoring and alerting--would be hundreds of hours of work, be a worse solution, and require ongoing maintenance. (A decent hosting provider will offer some of that, of course. But not all. And you'll pay for it.)
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    > I'm alarmingly familiar with OVH. And their hardware failures. And their slow support exactly when you need them most. And their poor inventory control, leaving popular system configurations unavailable when I (or, rather, my clients) need them. That's good to know. I was contemplating going with them for my next project. AWS it is then! The only problem I see with AWS is the configuration overhead. Want storage? Well, we have a separate service for that! Now you have to understand the pricing, the API, etc. just to integrate it into your stack. I completely understand how this modular approach helps with scaling, but when starting out it just feels like way too much overhead, especially for a single dev like me.
    - eropple 10y ago
      It can certainly feel like a lot of overhead, but in many ways I think it's the "eat your vegetables" part of really understanding what you're building and, through the development of your infrastructure, figuring out where your pain points lie. I do some advisory stuff for students and bootstrapping startups that are looking to work in cloud environments. Feel free to drop me an email (in my profile) if you'd like to chat.
- byefruit 10y ago
  What makes this comparison even more crazy is that those AWS prices don't include any (very expensive) bandwidth or block devices. Also, once you're paying upfront for reserved instances you've lost one of the major advantages in your cashflow scaling with your usage.
  - eropple 10y ago
    Reserved instances can be reserved for only a percentage of available hours.