6 ms·

I'd say this is a terrible generalisation. Buy a dedicated server with 32gb ram, 16 cores and 4tb of disk for $40 a month and host it there to begin with. Same

by orf 9y ago

I'd say this is a terrible generalisation. Buy a dedicated server with 32gb ram, 16 cores and 4tb of disk for $40 a month and host it there to begin with. Same steps: pay with your card, set up the server and go. Once you get to the point where your cat photo sharing startup cannot be offline for more than 1 minute and so needs geographic failover with scaling load balancing your making enough money to pay for it. Makes no sense to pay thousands of dollars to handle one request a minute and save you running "apt-get install mysql nginx" + spending half a day configuring it

vosper 9y ago
Just make sure you're taking backups. Even if it's just a midnight MySQLdump + zip and upload to S3. Just do something. You can get your code back from Github if the disk on your one server crashes, your data maybe not so much.
- 0xCMP 9y ago
  Yes, just cause it has RAID 5 doesn't mean the processor can't die (happened), or the RAID card in the data center you've never been in can't die (happened), or an unclean shutdown of a VM causes your sparse LVM Volume to die (happened).... Back up your stuff. Probably good to have two servers and have backup versions of your service ready to go on there in event of a disaster + a place to restore your S3 backups in to.
- twothamendment 9y ago
  I worked at a place that was too cheap/cash strapped/stupid to care about backups. We did nightly backups, but then one day I decided to replicate to my own server. I had plenty of room and bandwidth. Why not? It made me sleep better.
djsumdog 9y ago
It depends on time, money and staff. At my last shop, we ran DC/OS and it worked great, but had an eleven person platform team behind it. Using hosted solutions (can we please stop saying cloud?) can save a lot of initial costs. The important thing is you need to devops from the start. You need to design your base so it can be easily ported to another provider or your own. Resist the urge to use AWS or Google specific offerings. Every large shop I've worked at has been in the process of moving off hosted solutions to save money. But they typically got to where they were thanks to being able to quickly stand up servers. There are tools like Terraform that are suppose to make this easier, but often I ended up fighting it so much I started writing my own: http://penguindreams.org/blog/bee2-wrestling-with-the-vultr-api/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/bee2-wrestling-with-the-vultr-... Hiring one dev ops person who can build infrastructure with code can get you really far when trying to save hosting costs early in a startup, plus it will cut down on technical debt later.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  > Hiring one dev ops person who can build infrastructure with code can get you really far when trying to save hosting costs early in a startup, plus it will cut down on technical debt later. Before I moved into security, doing devops as a day gig and consulting, I heard this repeatedly from clients who would bring me in after they already had 8, 10, 12 developers; "we wish we had hired for devops sooner". You wouldn't not provide your devs with a solid workstation, development tooling, etc. Why would you not provide them with an efficient CICD pipeline to enable them to have the highest development velocity possible?
- lima 9y ago
  Red Hat's OpenShift is great for getting a Kubernetes cluster and a CI infrastructure up in no time.
psadri 9y ago
I tend to agree with this approach specially given how much ram/cores you can get on a single box today. You can run what took a cluster of servers 10 years ago on a single box. Just make sure your code doesn't assume that everything is running on the same host. Use some logical names that map out to an actual host, db_write -> 127.0.01 and hopefully later db_write -> db123.cloudfoo.net
hardwaresofton 9y ago
Hey would you mind pointing to where you've seen prices like those? So far the best dedicated servers (VPSes) I've seen have specs like: 4 cores 8GB RAM 160TB disk for ~$36/mo. Here are the places I'm talking about: INIZ (iniz.com) (I currently use them, but they don't have the bes tprice) https://cc.delimiter.com/cart/dedicatedcore-vps/ https://cc.delimiter.com/cart/dedicatedcore-vps/ https://www.delimiter.com/ https://www.delimiter.com/ The last two I am thinking of switching to soon.
- mrgreenfur 9y ago
  OVH has 2 core, 32gb ram public cloud instances for $40/month
- ukd1 9y ago
  hetzner.de robot auctions
  - joshstrange 9y ago
    This. I have one from here [0] and love it ($30/mo) Intel Core i7-2600 2x3TB HD 16GB DDR3 Right now for $40/mo you could get: Intel Core i7-4770 2x240GB SSD 32GB DDR3 [0] https://robot.your-server.de/order/market https://robot.your-server.de/order/market Edit: Just a note with my server and I expect most if they have 2 hard drives you have the option of running in RAID1 or Raw (Maybe RAID0 was an option but I can't remember)
    - hardwaresofton 9y ago
      Just found my own :) thanks!
- Veratyr 9y ago
  VPS are not dedicated servers. A dedicated server is a physical hunk of metal for your sole use. You get the entire machine, not a slice of one. A VPS is a regular virtual machine in KVM or Xen or something like that. OVH's SoYouStart has 4c/8t (Xeon E5-1620v2) + 16GB DDR3 ECC + 2x2TB HDD and unmetered 250Mbps bandwidth for $34.99/mo: https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/ https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/ (and there are a bunch of other options if you're wiling to go to $42). Online.net has a Xeon D-1531 (6c/12t) + 32GB DDR4 ECC + 2x250GB SSD and unmetered 300Mbps bandwidth for 29.99 EUR/mo: https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-classic https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-classic (and again, more options slightly higher) Hetzner's serverbidding has a Xeon E3-1245v2 + 16GB DDR3 ECC + 2x3TB HDD and unmetered gigabit for 33.61 EUR/mo: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market https://robot.your-server.de/order/market There are other options around too, these are just the big, well known ones.
curun1r 9y ago
Your characterization of startup cloud costs is laughably outdated. With credits for startups and the ability to go serverless, I've known startups that didn't pay a dime for hosting their entire first year despite reaching the threshold of hundreds of customers and over $1m ARR. One of my friends actually started doing some ML stuff on AWS because he wanted to use his remaining credits before they expired and his production and staging workloads weren't going to get him there. I'd say it makes no sense to buy your 32gb, 16-core single point of fail, waste $40/mo and half a day setting it up and then have to keep it running yourself when you can easily spin up an API in API Gateway/Lambda that dumps data into dynamo/simpledb and front it with a static site in S3. That setup scales well enough to be mentioned on HN without getting hugged to death and is kept running by someone else. And if it is, literally, free for the first year, how is that not a no brainer?
- orf 9y ago
  If your 32gb, 12 core server can't handle the 10 requests a second hacker news frontpage generates then you are doing something wrong. That being said, if you want to handle that by just spinning up more servers then that's a valid strategy - but you have to weigh up the costs. You make a valid point about credits, but after one year you are hit with a huge bill. Hiding the costs of your infrastructure isn't always a good idea. Why not buy 3 servers in different data centers for $120 a month. Is that enough redundancy for your infant startup? Why do you need to pay $100 month for a single 4gb, 4 core VPS from Amazon when you can get 38 cores, 120gb and 16tb disk dedicated servers for the same price?
  - curun1r 9y ago
    > but after one year you are hit with a huge bill That's the thing, it's really not much of a bill if you do it right. Aside from possibly the S3 bandwidth bill, which could easily be avoided by using something like Netlify, nothing in that setup I described will get prohibitively expensive until you reach significant scale. Yes, EC2 is expensive compared to other providers. So don't use EC2. You can build a startup on Amazon's managed services for a lot less and you can build in a way that's pretty easy to get off when the time comes. Just make sure to build in the proper adapters around your business logic. It's not hard to write code that works equally well under Lambda and Express and I assume you can do likewise for Java, C# and Python if you'd prefer to use those runtimes. There are certain classes of startup that don't make sense in the cloud...as others have mentioned, if you've got heavy storage or egress requirements, cloud quickly gets very expensive. But for the majority of startups, particularly B2B, that's not the case and there's ways to build in the cloud that are damn close to free, both in dollars and ops resources. There's a group of technically-minded people who I believe are addicted to managing their own boxes. They got comfortable with doing it back when it was required and now don't want to learn a new way of doing things. But that new way really is faster and cheaper for most small businesses. And if people take some time to experiment with Serverless, Apex or some of the other tools that have sprung up around Lambda/Cloud Functions/Azure Functions, I believe most will see the virtue in moving on from self-managed servers for most workloads.

by orf 9y ago

vosper 9y ago

Just make sure you're taking backups. Even if it's just a midnight MySQLdump + zip and upload to S3. Just do something. You can get your code back from Github if the disk on your one server crashes, your data maybe not so much.

0xCMP 9y ago
Yes, just cause it has RAID 5 doesn't mean the processor can't die (happened), or the RAID card in the data center you've never been in can't die (happened), or an unclean shutdown of a VM causes your sparse LVM Volume to die (happened).... Back up your stuff. Probably good to have two servers and have backup versions of your service ready to go on there in event of a disaster + a place to restore your S3 backups in to.
twothamendment 9y ago
I worked at a place that was too cheap/cash strapped/stupid to care about backups. We did nightly backups, but then one day I decided to replicate to my own server. I had plenty of room and bandwidth. Why not? It made me sleep better.

djsumdog 9y ago

It depends on time, money and staff. At my last shop, we ran DC/OS and it worked great, but had an eleven person platform team behind it. Using hosted solutions (can we please stop saying cloud?) can save a lot of initial costs. The important thing is you need to devops from the start. You need to design your base so it can be easily ported to another provider or your own. Resist the urge to use AWS or Google specific offerings. Every large shop I've worked at has been in the process of moving off hosted solutions to save money. But they typically got to where they were thanks to being able to quickly stand up servers. There are tools like Terraform that are suppose to make this easier, but often I ended up fighting it so much I started writing my own: http://penguindreams.org/blog/bee2-wrestling-with-the-vultr-api/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/bee2-wrestling-with-the-vultr-... Hiring one dev ops person who can build infrastructure with code can get you really far when trying to save hosting costs early in a startup, plus it will cut down on technical debt later.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
> Hiring one dev ops person who can build infrastructure with code can get you really far when trying to save hosting costs early in a startup, plus it will cut down on technical debt later. Before I moved into security, doing devops as a day gig and consulting, I heard this repeatedly from clients who would bring me in after they already had 8, 10, 12 developers; "we wish we had hired for devops sooner". You wouldn't not provide your devs with a solid workstation, development tooling, etc. Why would you not provide them with an efficient CICD pipeline to enable them to have the highest development velocity possible?
lima 9y ago
Red Hat's OpenShift is great for getting a Kubernetes cluster and a CI infrastructure up in no time.

psadri 9y ago

I tend to agree with this approach specially given how much ram/cores you can get on a single box today. You can run what took a cluster of servers 10 years ago on a single box. Just make sure your code doesn't assume that everything is running on the same host. Use some logical names that map out to an actual host, db_write -> 127.0.01 and hopefully later db_write -> db123.cloudfoo.net

hardwaresofton 9y ago

Hey would you mind pointing to where you've seen prices like those? So far the best dedicated servers (VPSes) I've seen have specs like: 4 cores 8GB RAM 160TB disk for ~$36/mo. Here are the places I'm talking about: INIZ (iniz.com) (I currently use them, but they don't have the bes tprice) https://cc.delimiter.com/cart/dedicatedcore-vps/ https://cc.delimiter.com/cart/dedicatedcore-vps/ https://www.delimiter.com/ https://www.delimiter.com/ The last two I am thinking of switching to soon.

mrgreenfur 9y ago
OVH has 2 core, 32gb ram public cloud instances for $40/month
ukd1 9y ago
hetzner.de robot auctions
- joshstrange 9y ago
  This. I have one from here [0] and love it ($30/mo) Intel Core i7-2600 2x3TB HD 16GB DDR3 Right now for $40/mo you could get: Intel Core i7-4770 2x240GB SSD 32GB DDR3 [0] https://robot.your-server.de/order/market https://robot.your-server.de/order/market Edit: Just a note with my server and I expect most if they have 2 hard drives you have the option of running in RAID1 or Raw (Maybe RAID0 was an option but I can't remember)
  - hardwaresofton 9y ago
    Just found my own :) thanks!
Veratyr 9y ago
VPS are not dedicated servers. A dedicated server is a physical hunk of metal for your sole use. You get the entire machine, not a slice of one. A VPS is a regular virtual machine in KVM or Xen or something like that. OVH's SoYouStart has 4c/8t (Xeon E5-1620v2) + 16GB DDR3 ECC + 2x2TB HDD and unmetered 250Mbps bandwidth for $34.99/mo: https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/ https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/ (and there are a bunch of other options if you're wiling to go to $42). Online.net has a Xeon D-1531 (6c/12t) + 32GB DDR4 ECC + 2x250GB SSD and unmetered 300Mbps bandwidth for 29.99 EUR/mo: https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-classic https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-classic (and again, more options slightly higher) Hetzner's serverbidding has a Xeon E3-1245v2 + 16GB DDR3 ECC + 2x3TB HDD and unmetered gigabit for 33.61 EUR/mo: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market https://robot.your-server.de/order/market There are other options around too, these are just the big, well known ones.

curun1r 9y ago

Your characterization of startup cloud costs is laughably outdated. With credits for startups and the ability to go serverless, I've known startups that didn't pay a dime for hosting their entire first year despite reaching the threshold of hundreds of customers and over $1m ARR. One of my friends actually started doing some ML stuff on AWS because he wanted to use his remaining credits before they expired and his production and staging workloads weren't going to get him there. I'd say it makes no sense to buy your 32gb, 16-core single point of fail, waste $40/mo and half a day setting it up and then have to keep it running yourself when you can easily spin up an API in API Gateway/Lambda that dumps data into dynamo/simpledb and front it with a static site in S3. That setup scales well enough to be mentioned on HN without getting hugged to death and is kept running by someone else. And if it is, literally, free for the first year, how is that not a no brainer?

orf 9y ago
If your 32gb, 12 core server can't handle the 10 requests a second hacker news frontpage generates then you are doing something wrong. That being said, if you want to handle that by just spinning up more servers then that's a valid strategy - but you have to weigh up the costs. You make a valid point about credits, but after one year you are hit with a huge bill. Hiding the costs of your infrastructure isn't always a good idea. Why not buy 3 servers in different data centers for $120 a month. Is that enough redundancy for your infant startup? Why do you need to pay $100 month for a single 4gb, 4 core VPS from Amazon when you can get 38 cores, 120gb and 16tb disk dedicated servers for the same price?
- curun1r 9y ago
  > but after one year you are hit with a huge bill That's the thing, it's really not much of a bill if you do it right. Aside from possibly the S3 bandwidth bill, which could easily be avoided by using something like Netlify, nothing in that setup I described will get prohibitively expensive until you reach significant scale. Yes, EC2 is expensive compared to other providers. So don't use EC2. You can build a startup on Amazon's managed services for a lot less and you can build in a way that's pretty easy to get off when the time comes. Just make sure to build in the proper adapters around your business logic. It's not hard to write code that works equally well under Lambda and Express and I assume you can do likewise for Java, C# and Python if you'd prefer to use those runtimes. There are certain classes of startup that don't make sense in the cloud...as others have mentioned, if you've got heavy storage or egress requirements, cloud quickly gets very expensive. But for the majority of startups, particularly B2B, that's not the case and there's ways to build in the cloud that are damn close to free, both in dollars and ops resources. There's a group of technically-minded people who I believe are addicted to managing their own boxes. They got comfortable with doing it back when it was required and now don't want to learn a new way of doing things. But that new way really is faster and cheaper for most small businesses. And if people take some time to experiment with Serverless, Apex or some of the other tools that have sprung up around Lambda/Cloud Functions/Azure Functions, I believe most will see the virtue in moving on from self-managed servers for most workloads.