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Over an year this costs you about $1200 for bandwidth + $500 for hardware + electricity/service. Let's say an even $1600 or ~ $135 / month. $135 / month buys y

Over an year this costs you about $1200 for bandwidth + $500 for hardware + electricity/service. Let's say an even $1600 or ~ $135 / month. $135 / month buys you two 1.5GB Linode instances or one 2GB Slicehost instance (I use Slicehost but they seem to be much more expensive compared to Linode). The reason I see renting VPSs, especially at the beginning, as a smart thing is that you are postponing the actual hardware costs towards a later time, when you are (presumably) profitable. And if you decide to cancel the whole thing, it's just a matter of shutting down the instances and that's it. It just seems much more convenient. Now, if you already have the hardware and you trust the electricity/bandwidth provider you could self-host. But investing time and money in hardware and self-hosting might just be the one thing that stops you from doing the right job software-wise. (Of course, unless your service depends precisely on the fine-tuned hardware that you might manage yourself, but I don't think you are in this situation -- it's just a cost discussion).

duck 16y ago
Plus your time to spec and build the boxes and to maintain them. If your time is worth $100 an hour that is going to be a lot more per month than $135.
- chrisbolt 16y ago
  When you're bootstrapping a startup, you're more likely to have time than the money that your time is worth.
omellet 16y ago
You're possibly double counting the bandwidth costs if he's also using the connection for his workstations.
- iamelgringo 16y ago
  That's absolutely correct. I'm already paying that for my connection at home, so the bandwidth costs are going to be a wash.
bsaunder 16y ago
Also Linode and Slicehost handle power and network reliability issues better than your local service providers (probably).
iamelgringo 16y ago
It's not really about cost, although that's part of it. I didn't mention it in my original question, but I also need quite a bit more performance than I'm getting with EC2. It's about getting an order of magnitude more CPU ( Quad ore at 3 Ghz rather than single compute instance on EC2, which is spec'd at a single core 1.0 to 1.2 Ghz Opteron or Xeon from 2007. Ref: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Compute_Unit_and_why_did_you_introduce_it http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Compute_Unit_.... I need the extra CPU for what I'm doing. But, the killer feature for me is about getting several orders of magnitude better on disk IO by using SSD's. I'm doing a ton of relational queries for my site, and the IO speeds on EC2 are killing me. Linode or Rackspace Cloud might be a bit faster than EC2, but the speed differential between SSD's and rotating disk is huge. Running my datastore off of SSD's rather than spinning disks allows me to stick with postgres as my db. While sexy and quite fun, I'm very leery of choosing a NoSQL solution. I really don't want to spend the extra development time bolting the relational features I need onto a non-relational database. So, while it might take me time maintaining the server, it's going to save me a crap load of time.
- fierarul 16y ago
  Well, if it's very high disk IO that you need then you either self-host or colocate. Go with self-hosting and see how far along you get; you can always colocate afterwards.

duck 16y ago

Plus your time to spec and build the boxes and to maintain them. If your time is worth $100 an hour that is going to be a lot more per month than $135.

chrisbolt 16y ago
When you're bootstrapping a startup, you're more likely to have time than the money that your time is worth.

omellet 16y ago

You're possibly double counting the bandwidth costs if he's also using the connection for his workstations.

iamelgringo 16y ago
That's absolutely correct. I'm already paying that for my connection at home, so the bandwidth costs are going to be a wash.

bsaunder 16y ago

Also Linode and Slicehost handle power and network reliability issues better than your local service providers (probably).

iamelgringo 16y ago

It's not really about cost, although that's part of it. I didn't mention it in my original question, but I also need quite a bit more performance than I'm getting with EC2. It's about getting an order of magnitude more CPU ( Quad ore at 3 Ghz rather than single compute instance on EC2, which is spec'd at a single core 1.0 to 1.2 Ghz Opteron or Xeon from 2007. Ref: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Compute_Unit_and_why_did_you_introduce_it http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Compute_Unit_.... I need the extra CPU for what I'm doing. But, the killer feature for me is about getting several orders of magnitude better on disk IO by using SSD's. I'm doing a ton of relational queries for my site, and the IO speeds on EC2 are killing me. Linode or Rackspace Cloud might be a bit faster than EC2, but the speed differential between SSD's and rotating disk is huge. Running my datastore off of SSD's rather than spinning disks allows me to stick with postgres as my db. While sexy and quite fun, I'm very leery of choosing a NoSQL solution. I really don't want to spend the extra development time bolting the relational features I need onto a non-relational database. So, while it might take me time maintaining the server, it's going to save me a crap load of time.

fierarul 16y ago
Well, if it's very high disk IO that you need then you either self-host or colocate. Go with self-hosting and see how far along you get; you can always colocate afterwards.