8 ms·

This is a rather unpleasant review of a service we were about to move over to. For companies that have moderate performance requirements (e.g. visitors in the

by adriand 16y ago

This is a rather unpleasant review of a service we were about to move over to. For companies that have moderate performance requirements (e.g. visitors in the range of 30k or 40k per day across a range of web apps and sites), reasonable but by no means expert level server administration skills, the need for a redundant environment to satisfy SLAs with clients (e.g. two app servers + load balancer + master/slave db servers), and the desire to focus mainly on software development instead of server admin, what companies does the HN community recommend? We've been considering Rackspace Cloud and Linode, but are open to any suggestions. We also have a quote for a standard, managed four-server + hardware load balancer deployment in front of us but it is pricey ($3000+/month).

sanswork 16y ago
I've used Rackspace, Amazon and GoGrid. I'm currently almost entirely on GoGrid and just finishing up migrating back off of Amazon for the second time(Migrated some services back to them when they opened west coast). There have been some stability issues in the past year(instances going down for maintenance regularly) but haven't had a problem with that in a while and was advised it was due to them upgrading all the servers in their cluster. The ability to mix dedicated and cloud systems easily has been the killer feature for me. We also prepay and the number of servers we get for the cost is pretty good.
madaxe 16y ago
Linode are wonderful - best support I've had from anyone, ever. Nice instances, too!
- shazow 16y ago
  +1 to Linode.
- catch23 16y ago
  another +1. we moved to linode from rackspace. They don't have that crazy backup limitation that rackspace does, and they're always open to custom inquiries. Rackspace has the big company mentality -- if our interface doesn't have an option for it, it doesn't exist.
  - chopsueyar 16y ago
    I second. Moved from Rackspace to Linode. The bandwidth overage charges are much more reasonable, too.
- boyter 16y ago
  What are they like for CPU usage? I have been looking at VPS.NET and other such providers to ensure I get a reasonable slice of CPU which I can use for other things. Most VPS providers I have come across dont like it if you start working out the millionth digit of Pi, but sometimes you have a task that takes a while and you can't run offsite.
  - madaxe 16y ago
    Great - we've got two moderately large (12+ instances) clusters with them, one in the US, one in the UK - both are fast.
  - easp 16y ago
    I believe each physical host has at least 8 real cores. They give each instance 4 virtual cores. As long as CPU time is available, an instance can use the full capacity of four cores. If there is contention for CPU time, every instance gets an equal share of CPU, which is also their fare share of CPU, because all the instances on a box are the same size/pricepoint. Further, larger instances are shared with a proportionally smaller number of other instances. My experience, which seems to be shared by just about anyone who has published benchmarks, is that Linode is appropriately conservative on the degree to which they oversell CPU, because generally, it appears that a task that wants 100% of four cores does in fact get close to 100% of four cores. The only thing to look out for is that there is quite a difference in single threaded performance between their newer hardware and their older hardware. Our app is written in one of the popular interpreted dynamic languages. Generic benchmarks for that language showeda 2-3x difference on some tests when run on the different hardware, and our app showed similar differences on CPU bound tasks. There are a few implications of this: First, it complicates things when you try to make your staging environment mirror production. The quick check is to look at /proc/cpuinfo and see if clock,cache and model line up. If not, open a ticket and ask them to migrate instances so things match. Second, while they try to size things appropriately so that your guaranteed CPU Is the same, regardless of which generation of host you are on, your peak CPU is going to vary dramatically since you get 4 cores, irregardless.
- tlack 16y ago
  +1. In the past 24 months I've used Rackspace, ThePlanet, SoftLayer, Slicehost, Linode and the terrible Mediatemple. I'm doing all future development on Linode. Their basic VPS is pretty quick for the price and it's online almost instantly. It's still just basic Linux, so you can rig everything you want - no awkward managed interfaces to worry about. I would consider switching to a different company, but for now Linode scratches my itch better than the rest.
  - mt_Sara 16y ago
    I'm sorry to read that you've had a less than stellar experience with us. May I ask what happened? -Sara at (mt) Media Temple
    - tlack 16y ago
      Create an account. Open a service ticket. Wait hours for response. Plus no firewall options on your Nitro servers, at that price range, is ridiculous and way below the standards of the industry.
- easp 16y ago
  I like Linode, but they are wearing a little thin for me. In general, uptimes have been excellent but the physical server hosting one of our VPSs had three emergency reboots in a little over a month before they replaced the hardware. Perhaps they'd already planned to do a replacement after th e second incident but I had no way of knowing. Which brings me to my second beef, which is that they don't share much when closing a ticket. Their explanations are pretty prefunctory. In some cases, like transient network issues I generally can't tell if they've investigated the problem and done something about it or if the first-tier tech just takes a quick look sees it's working now, and punts it back to me to let them know if there are more problems. Similarly, after a major screwup that took down most of the virtual servers they host (including the ones that hosted their own website and web-based management tool), all we got was a brief explanation of what had gone wrong and a status blog hosted on someone elses infrastructure. What I didn't get was a sense of how they were going to guard against anything similar happening again. I'm sticking with them for now, but I'm also feeling like the effort I've put into automating the configuration of our application and all it's dependencies has been time well spent. I can boot a new infrastructure on another service in an hour or so and migrate to it with minimal downtime.
MichaelGG 16y ago
Have you looked at just buying the hardware and colocating it? $400 should get you half a cabinet. Bandwidth can be found for a few dollars a meg. As you're buying redundant servers, you can get refurb/ebay stuff and save on the upfront costs (who cares about next business day service replacemnt if you have spare parts?).
- 3pt14159 16y ago
  Don't. It isn't worth it. Just use AWS or Rackspace or Linode. Outsource hardware management to people that do it for a living.
  - lsc 16y ago
    why not outsource your OS management and use shared hosting, engine yard or appengine? hardware guys willing to do the work of amazon can be had for very little money, even on a short-term contract basis. there are situations where different levels of outsourcing are appropriate. And certainly, if your cost per compute node doesn't matter, few will fault you for going with amazon. But you should be aware that you are paying for that, and in some situations, having a high cost per compute unit will kill you.
    - 3pt14159 16y ago
      This is a fair question, so I don't see why it should be downvoted. The reason outsourcing hardware to AWS or Rackspace makes sense versus hiring hardware guys (usually) doesn't is that you introduce one more link in your failure chain. In My opinion it is far, far more likely that you and your hardware guy are going to mess up ZFS configuration somehow and have it fail when your app gets black swan traffic than Amazon going down. When it comes to Engine Yard, I'm all for that too, in the right circumstances, but you get fairly high lock in. I agree that you get that with AWS too, it just seems more likely that AWS will be around 10 years than it does Engine Yard. But sure, Engine Yard and Heroku are great.
      - lsc 16y ago
nwilkens 16y ago
Softlayer (or AWS) + outsourced server management is great fit for your scenario. Softlayer has great HW / network, and can provide a good base for a scalable infrastructure. AWS EC2 also sounds like a great fit in your environment. Regardless, having a great server admin guide this implementation will be a key part of the chosen architecture success. I run a server management company, so I have a bit of a bias ;)
jackowayed 16y ago
Depends what your app is written in. If I were doing this with a Rails app, I'd use Engine Yard for sure. Engine Yard Cloud makes stuff like load-balanced app servers and master/slave replication really easy (you can do it from the web interface), and they really know what they're doing and have tuned the stack based on that knowledge. I don't know if there are similar offerings that are reasonably priced yet awesome for other languages though.
- fewafjka 16y ago
  For what it's worth, a friend of mine moved a rails site from a dedicated server to engineyard. Her hosting costs went from $350/mo to $1,600/mo, not including having to pay another $1k/mo or so to smtp.com for email marketing.
- gommm 16y ago
  I found engineyard very unflexible... Sure you can create custom recipes to get around that but since they update their system without warning, the custom recipes end up becoming stale...
  - nivertech 16y ago
    Both EngineYard and Heroku run on top of Amazon EC2
    - gommm 16y ago
      Yes, but the problem is that they use their own gentoo based environment that they update as time go... To do anything custom that they didn't plan beforehand, you need to create custom chef recipes that will be executed whenever a new instance is provisioned or if you deploy with their web interface (but not if you deploy with capistrano). The problem is that it's hard to make sure that the custom chef recipes will work when the underlying environment changes and you are not told ahead of time of those changes...
      - stcredzero 16y ago
schammy 16y ago
I hear lots of awesome things about Linode, however they are actually hosted by Rackspace so with Rackspace's known reliability issues... maybe an issue. Another service to consider is VPS.net. We have 6 virtual servers with them. They are cheap and perform well, their control panel is great and they have tons of great pre-configured OS installs. However downtime can sometimes be an issue. Usually it's not major, e.g. a server will just be unavailable for say 30 seconds or maybe a few minutes, but this happens probably an average of once or twice a month for each of our servers so it can get annoying. Like I said though the outages are usually minor. There's only been one that I remember that was major, and lasted several hours. We've been using VPS.net for about 8 months and overall are very happy with them. Not sure I'd recommend them for your setup but we only use them for a custom built CDN and for that it works very well.
- bombs 16y ago
  Are you confusing Linode with Slicehost? Slicehost was acquired by Rackspace.
  - revoltingx 16y ago
    So, to confirm, Linode is NOT hoste by Rackspace?
    - Perihelion 16y ago
      Nope :)
      - revoltingx 16y ago
        Phew, thank you.
- mdgeek 16y ago
  linode servers are hosted on The Planet data centers. Check this link: http://serversiders.com/linode.com http://serversiders.com/linode.com
- 16y ago

by adriand 16y ago

sanswork 16y ago

I've used Rackspace, Amazon and GoGrid. I'm currently almost entirely on GoGrid and just finishing up migrating back off of Amazon for the second time(Migrated some services back to them when they opened west coast). There have been some stability issues in the past year(instances going down for maintenance regularly) but haven't had a problem with that in a while and was advised it was due to them upgrading all the servers in their cluster. The ability to mix dedicated and cloud systems easily has been the killer feature for me. We also prepay and the number of servers we get for the cost is pretty good.

madaxe 16y ago

Linode are wonderful - best support I've had from anyone, ever. Nice instances, too!

shazow 16y ago
+1 to Linode.
catch23 16y ago
another +1. we moved to linode from rackspace. They don't have that crazy backup limitation that rackspace does, and they're always open to custom inquiries. Rackspace has the big company mentality -- if our interface doesn't have an option for it, it doesn't exist.
- chopsueyar 16y ago
  I second. Moved from Rackspace to Linode. The bandwidth overage charges are much more reasonable, too.
boyter 16y ago
What are they like for CPU usage? I have been looking at VPS.NET and other such providers to ensure I get a reasonable slice of CPU which I can use for other things. Most VPS providers I have come across dont like it if you start working out the millionth digit of Pi, but sometimes you have a task that takes a while and you can't run offsite.
- madaxe 16y ago
  Great - we've got two moderately large (12+ instances) clusters with them, one in the US, one in the UK - both are fast.
- easp 16y ago
  I believe each physical host has at least 8 real cores. They give each instance 4 virtual cores. As long as CPU time is available, an instance can use the full capacity of four cores. If there is contention for CPU time, every instance gets an equal share of CPU, which is also their fare share of CPU, because all the instances on a box are the same size/pricepoint. Further, larger instances are shared with a proportionally smaller number of other instances. My experience, which seems to be shared by just about anyone who has published benchmarks, is that Linode is appropriately conservative on the degree to which they oversell CPU, because generally, it appears that a task that wants 100% of four cores does in fact get close to 100% of four cores. The only thing to look out for is that there is quite a difference in single threaded performance between their newer hardware and their older hardware. Our app is written in one of the popular interpreted dynamic languages. Generic benchmarks for that language showeda 2-3x difference on some tests when run on the different hardware, and our app showed similar differences on CPU bound tasks. There are a few implications of this: First, it complicates things when you try to make your staging environment mirror production. The quick check is to look at /proc/cpuinfo and see if clock,cache and model line up. If not, open a ticket and ask them to migrate instances so things match. Second, while they try to size things appropriately so that your guaranteed CPU Is the same, regardless of which generation of host you are on, your peak CPU is going to vary dramatically since you get 4 cores, irregardless.
tlack 16y ago
+1. In the past 24 months I've used Rackspace, ThePlanet, SoftLayer, Slicehost, Linode and the terrible Mediatemple. I'm doing all future development on Linode. Their basic VPS is pretty quick for the price and it's online almost instantly. It's still just basic Linux, so you can rig everything you want - no awkward managed interfaces to worry about. I would consider switching to a different company, but for now Linode scratches my itch better than the rest.
- mt_Sara 16y ago
  I'm sorry to read that you've had a less than stellar experience with us. May I ask what happened? -Sara at (mt) Media Temple
  - tlack 16y ago
    Create an account. Open a service ticket. Wait hours for response. Plus no firewall options on your Nitro servers, at that price range, is ridiculous and way below the standards of the industry.
easp 16y ago
I like Linode, but they are wearing a little thin for me. In general, uptimes have been excellent but the physical server hosting one of our VPSs had three emergency reboots in a little over a month before they replaced the hardware. Perhaps they'd already planned to do a replacement after th e second incident but I had no way of knowing. Which brings me to my second beef, which is that they don't share much when closing a ticket. Their explanations are pretty prefunctory. In some cases, like transient network issues I generally can't tell if they've investigated the problem and done something about it or if the first-tier tech just takes a quick look sees it's working now, and punts it back to me to let them know if there are more problems. Similarly, after a major screwup that took down most of the virtual servers they host (including the ones that hosted their own website and web-based management tool), all we got was a brief explanation of what had gone wrong and a status blog hosted on someone elses infrastructure. What I didn't get was a sense of how they were going to guard against anything similar happening again. I'm sticking with them for now, but I'm also feeling like the effort I've put into automating the configuration of our application and all it's dependencies has been time well spent. I can boot a new infrastructure on another service in an hour or so and migrate to it with minimal downtime.

MichaelGG 16y ago

Have you looked at just buying the hardware and colocating it? $400 should get you half a cabinet. Bandwidth can be found for a few dollars a meg. As you're buying redundant servers, you can get refurb/ebay stuff and save on the upfront costs (who cares about next business day service replacemnt if you have spare parts?).

3pt14159 16y ago
Don't. It isn't worth it. Just use AWS or Rackspace or Linode. Outsource hardware management to people that do it for a living.
- lsc 16y ago
  why not outsource your OS management and use shared hosting, engine yard or appengine? hardware guys willing to do the work of amazon can be had for very little money, even on a short-term contract basis. there are situations where different levels of outsourcing are appropriate. And certainly, if your cost per compute node doesn't matter, few will fault you for going with amazon. But you should be aware that you are paying for that, and in some situations, having a high cost per compute unit will kill you.
  - 3pt14159 16y ago
    This is a fair question, so I don't see why it should be downvoted. The reason outsourcing hardware to AWS or Rackspace makes sense versus hiring hardware guys (usually) doesn't is that you introduce one more link in your failure chain. In My opinion it is far, far more likely that you and your hardware guy are going to mess up ZFS configuration somehow and have it fail when your app gets black swan traffic than Amazon going down. When it comes to Engine Yard, I'm all for that too, in the right circumstances, but you get fairly high lock in. I agree that you get that with AWS too, it just seems more likely that AWS will be around 10 years than it does Engine Yard. But sure, Engine Yard and Heroku are great.
    - lsc 16y ago

nwilkens 16y ago

Softlayer (or AWS) + outsourced server management is great fit for your scenario. Softlayer has great HW / network, and can provide a good base for a scalable infrastructure. AWS EC2 also sounds like a great fit in your environment. Regardless, having a great server admin guide this implementation will be a key part of the chosen architecture success. I run a server management company, so I have a bit of a bias ;)

jackowayed 16y ago

Depends what your app is written in. If I were doing this with a Rails app, I'd use Engine Yard for sure. Engine Yard Cloud makes stuff like load-balanced app servers and master/slave replication really easy (you can do it from the web interface), and they really know what they're doing and have tuned the stack based on that knowledge. I don't know if there are similar offerings that are reasonably priced yet awesome for other languages though.

fewafjka 16y ago
For what it's worth, a friend of mine moved a rails site from a dedicated server to engineyard. Her hosting costs went from $350/mo to $1,600/mo, not including having to pay another $1k/mo or so to smtp.com for email marketing.
gommm 16y ago
I found engineyard very unflexible... Sure you can create custom recipes to get around that but since they update their system without warning, the custom recipes end up becoming stale...
- nivertech 16y ago
  Both EngineYard and Heroku run on top of Amazon EC2
  - gommm 16y ago
    Yes, but the problem is that they use their own gentoo based environment that they update as time go... To do anything custom that they didn't plan beforehand, you need to create custom chef recipes that will be executed whenever a new instance is provisioned or if you deploy with their web interface (but not if you deploy with capistrano). The problem is that it's hard to make sure that the custom chef recipes will work when the underlying environment changes and you are not told ahead of time of those changes...
    - stcredzero 16y ago

schammy 16y ago

I hear lots of awesome things about Linode, however they are actually hosted by Rackspace so with Rackspace's known reliability issues... maybe an issue. Another service to consider is VPS.net. We have 6 virtual servers with them. They are cheap and perform well, their control panel is great and they have tons of great pre-configured OS installs. However downtime can sometimes be an issue. Usually it's not major, e.g. a server will just be unavailable for say 30 seconds or maybe a few minutes, but this happens probably an average of once or twice a month for each of our servers so it can get annoying. Like I said though the outages are usually minor. There's only been one that I remember that was major, and lasted several hours. We've been using VPS.net for about 8 months and overall are very happy with them. Not sure I'd recommend them for your setup but we only use them for a custom built CDN and for that it works very well.

bombs 16y ago
Are you confusing Linode with Slicehost? Slicehost was acquired by Rackspace.
- revoltingx 16y ago
  So, to confirm, Linode is NOT hoste by Rackspace?
  - Perihelion 16y ago
    Nope :)
    - revoltingx 16y ago
      Phew, thank you.
mdgeek 16y ago
linode servers are hosted on The Planet data centers. Check this link: http://serversiders.com/linode.com http://serversiders.com/linode.com
16y ago