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TLDR: Use Lightsail, Amazon's approximation of a dedicated server. In my opinion, that approach sacrifices pretty much all the benefits that cloud proponents u

TLDR: Use Lightsail, Amazon's approximation of a dedicated server. In my opinion, that approach sacrifices pretty much all the benefits that cloud proponents usually talk about, like only paying for what you actually use or scaling up and down on demand. In fact, I'm not sure what the actual difference would be between Lightsail and a good dedicated hoster that provides backup and failover services.

jakozaur 6y ago
I disagree. Start with LightSail customize later. Too many startups starts with Kubernetes, microservices putting a lot of engineering into infrastruture when they should worry about product market fit and simple server would just do fine.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  You could just as well start with one cheap dedicated server and then migrate to the cloud once you know that you need it. For example, one of my companies is doing hosting and image delivery services for photographers. I started it on one dedicated server, and now 10+ years later it's running on 3 dedicated servers. My hoster does backups and OS upgrades, so there was never any reason to go into the cloud. Except maybe, if I wanted to burn cash on slow performance ;)
- kristopolous 6y ago
  Complex solutions to simple problems pad resumes. It's important. I've been looking for a job recently and my lack of experience with excitedly building expensive overly engineered big piles of stuff to do simple things is really hurting me. When I suggest simple solutions proportional to the problem size people look at me like I'm some kind of simpleminded ninny. And then when I describe working systems I've made using the approach on companies that exited north of 10 million, then they usually just think I'm a bullshitter. 10,000 users? Just do a simple lamp stack on a $10 month vps and don't code it like a moron, it's not hard. And it can be delegated to almost anyone, that's important for longevity. That's it, move on with life. I've even offered to show logs, I mean, it's remarkably bad how hard it is to find work as a cost-cutting product-focused engineer, nobody wants that shit, really. They want autoscale, prometheus, travis, blah blah blah... as fancy and crazy as possible, an empire of infrastructure instead of infrastructure for an empire... It's a damn cult. I'm thinking about giving up and giving in. Maybe spend a month and drop $10,000 or whatever on a bunch of the tech just so I can talk about these things. --- The second thing I'm constantly surprised by is how many obvious things are formalized with fancy names, math equations, papers, etc. Stuff I'd think like literally anyone with half a brain would do. Recently I found out about "CRDT". Apparently I've been doing it for a decade... It's just super simple stuff wrapped in needless formalism, like back when design "patterns" were all the rage. I used to think "why is there a name for that?" it's such basic stuff. So saying "dude, the emperor has no clothes, here, take my coat" - bad interview strategy and it's hard to rectify because there's like 50 naked emperors and silicon valley culture is on a constant rotating basis of seeing the nakedness of 5 of them and ignoring the other 45. Maybe what I should do is just a couple throwaway interviews to focus on finding out the current fads and then be able to give the right cultural signals for the ones I actually want.
  - mulhoon 6y ago
    Great response. We’re all obsessed with infrastructure and over-engineering, myself included. Startups like to think they’re working on the next big thing, so they want to use the tech that the big boys use and bask in their anticipation of scale. You can easily save cost and time to validate your business with smaller hosting approaches, though it does look amateur from the outside. It’s not amateur, it’s smart.
    - kristopolous 6y ago
      Yeah I've been in LA for 12 years which is much more practical for the most part. And it's been fine, profitable, revenue generating, sure. Mysql, php, a bit of python, easy stuff. Honestly I've been wanting to move and try out silicon valley again though and it's been hard because I don't speak that language and frankly I'm skeptical and hostile to it - bad idea. That bad attitude needs to go. I've been in practical startup land too long so I keep getting stonewalled from getting in to the sv world. I'm trying to contribute to some companies open source projects recently and then basically earn my way in through labor since I can't do the virtue signaling. It's only been a few weeks, nothing yet. I gotta learn how to be along for the ride without always trying to reach for the steering wheel. Hopefully by the end of summer I'll find a lead somewhere. It's not about the money, it's kinda actually how I want to spend my time for the next year or two.
antonvs 6y ago
FTA: > We are a team of two people Articles like this reflect the fact that one size does not fit all. > a good dedicated hoster that provides backup and failover services. In theory that sounds reasonable. In practice the ability to completely manage the system via a web console and APIs makes a big difference.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  I have never needed it, but the hosting provider which I use actually has an API that you can use to reboot servers into different OS images, or trigger hardware resets, or do an kvm access. https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Robot_Webservice/en https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Robot_Webservice/en But honestly, if you have only one server, what do you need an API for? It'll be much faster to just configure things by hand. It's not like you'll switch servers very often. Or at least the original article says that they committed to monthly cancelation terms.
- dx034 6y ago
  Even Hetzner as the cheapest VPS and dedicated server provider offers an API to completely manage servers.
  - isatty 6y ago
    You can definitely do cheaper than hetzner (like OVH).
redis_mlc 6y ago
> all the benefits that cloud proponents usually talk about, like only paying for what you actually use or scaling up and down on demand. That's a trope that I have never seen in practise. A company might have some small percentage of clusters that autoscale, but usually there's a bunch of servers that don't. Also, when AWS has control plane problems, autoscaling doesn't work, you get swamped, your health checks fail, and you lose all your servers and you're hosed. So it's better to always over-provision in the first place.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  Same here. Heroku offers auto-scaling for the web dynos, but they advise you to do near-realtime tasks like the thumbnails for image uploads using background workers, for which there is no Auto-scaling.
alain_gilbert 6y ago
The difference would be: - They could have much better service - And bring down their expenses by at least half again I used lightsail, and it's a terrible service. It is very expensive (still) compared to other hosting providers. And if your instance ever go out of memory, it become unresponsive for as long as you don't go manually restart it. On other providers that I use, the OS would just "sacrifice child" (kill the process) and restart it. It's not ideal, but much better than having to go there yourself to restart the whole thing.
- oefrha 6y ago
  Sounds like OOM killer is disabled by default on Lightsail. Shouldn't be hard to turn it back on by modifying a line or two in sysctl.conf.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  I've been using cgroups since way before docker made them cool exactly for this: if one process goes rogue on memory use, make sure only exactly that one crashes. And yes, I fully agree with you. In addition to the other disadvantages, Lightsail also shifts the burden of process monitoring and management onto you.
  - alain_gilbert 6y ago
    I use docker. And yes, it normally just take care of restarting the app whenever something goes wrong. But somehow on lightsail (only), the machine just goes completely unresponsive instead.
Proven 6y ago
I think so too. I just had a quick look at the Lightsail pages and thought "This is just plain old hosting, with hooks into a highly proprietary cloud environment."

jakozaur 6y ago

I disagree. Start with LightSail customize later. Too many startups starts with Kubernetes, microservices putting a lot of engineering into infrastruture when they should worry about product market fit and simple server would just do fine.

fxtentacle 6y ago
You could just as well start with one cheap dedicated server and then migrate to the cloud once you know that you need it. For example, one of my companies is doing hosting and image delivery services for photographers. I started it on one dedicated server, and now 10+ years later it's running on 3 dedicated servers. My hoster does backups and OS upgrades, so there was never any reason to go into the cloud. Except maybe, if I wanted to burn cash on slow performance ;)
kristopolous 6y ago
Complex solutions to simple problems pad resumes. It's important. I've been looking for a job recently and my lack of experience with excitedly building expensive overly engineered big piles of stuff to do simple things is really hurting me. When I suggest simple solutions proportional to the problem size people look at me like I'm some kind of simpleminded ninny. And then when I describe working systems I've made using the approach on companies that exited north of 10 million, then they usually just think I'm a bullshitter. 10,000 users? Just do a simple lamp stack on a $10 month vps and don't code it like a moron, it's not hard. And it can be delegated to almost anyone, that's important for longevity. That's it, move on with life. I've even offered to show logs, I mean, it's remarkably bad how hard it is to find work as a cost-cutting product-focused engineer, nobody wants that shit, really. They want autoscale, prometheus, travis, blah blah blah... as fancy and crazy as possible, an empire of infrastructure instead of infrastructure for an empire... It's a damn cult. I'm thinking about giving up and giving in. Maybe spend a month and drop $10,000 or whatever on a bunch of the tech just so I can talk about these things. --- The second thing I'm constantly surprised by is how many obvious things are formalized with fancy names, math equations, papers, etc. Stuff I'd think like literally anyone with half a brain would do. Recently I found out about "CRDT". Apparently I've been doing it for a decade... It's just super simple stuff wrapped in needless formalism, like back when design "patterns" were all the rage. I used to think "why is there a name for that?" it's such basic stuff. So saying "dude, the emperor has no clothes, here, take my coat" - bad interview strategy and it's hard to rectify because there's like 50 naked emperors and silicon valley culture is on a constant rotating basis of seeing the nakedness of 5 of them and ignoring the other 45. Maybe what I should do is just a couple throwaway interviews to focus on finding out the current fads and then be able to give the right cultural signals for the ones I actually want.
- mulhoon 6y ago
  Great response. We’re all obsessed with infrastructure and over-engineering, myself included. Startups like to think they’re working on the next big thing, so they want to use the tech that the big boys use and bask in their anticipation of scale. You can easily save cost and time to validate your business with smaller hosting approaches, though it does look amateur from the outside. It’s not amateur, it’s smart.
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    Yeah I've been in LA for 12 years which is much more practical for the most part. And it's been fine, profitable, revenue generating, sure. Mysql, php, a bit of python, easy stuff. Honestly I've been wanting to move and try out silicon valley again though and it's been hard because I don't speak that language and frankly I'm skeptical and hostile to it - bad idea. That bad attitude needs to go. I've been in practical startup land too long so I keep getting stonewalled from getting in to the sv world. I'm trying to contribute to some companies open source projects recently and then basically earn my way in through labor since I can't do the virtue signaling. It's only been a few weeks, nothing yet. I gotta learn how to be along for the ride without always trying to reach for the steering wheel. Hopefully by the end of summer I'll find a lead somewhere. It's not about the money, it's kinda actually how I want to spend my time for the next year or two.

antonvs 6y ago

FTA: > We are a team of two people Articles like this reflect the fact that one size does not fit all. > a good dedicated hoster that provides backup and failover services. In theory that sounds reasonable. In practice the ability to completely manage the system via a web console and APIs makes a big difference.

fxtentacle 6y ago
I have never needed it, but the hosting provider which I use actually has an API that you can use to reboot servers into different OS images, or trigger hardware resets, or do an kvm access. https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Robot_Webservice/en https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Robot_Webservice/en But honestly, if you have only one server, what do you need an API for? It'll be much faster to just configure things by hand. It's not like you'll switch servers very often. Or at least the original article says that they committed to monthly cancelation terms.
dx034 6y ago
Even Hetzner as the cheapest VPS and dedicated server provider offers an API to completely manage servers.
- isatty 6y ago
  You can definitely do cheaper than hetzner (like OVH).

redis_mlc 6y ago

> all the benefits that cloud proponents usually talk about, like only paying for what you actually use or scaling up and down on demand. That's a trope that I have never seen in practise. A company might have some small percentage of clusters that autoscale, but usually there's a bunch of servers that don't. Also, when AWS has control plane problems, autoscaling doesn't work, you get swamped, your health checks fail, and you lose all your servers and you're hosed. So it's better to always over-provision in the first place.

fxtentacle 6y ago
Same here. Heroku offers auto-scaling for the web dynos, but they advise you to do near-realtime tasks like the thumbnails for image uploads using background workers, for which there is no Auto-scaling.

alain_gilbert 6y ago

The difference would be: - They could have much better service - And bring down their expenses by at least half again I used lightsail, and it's a terrible service. It is very expensive (still) compared to other hosting providers. And if your instance ever go out of memory, it become unresponsive for as long as you don't go manually restart it. On other providers that I use, the OS would just "sacrifice child" (kill the process) and restart it. It's not ideal, but much better than having to go there yourself to restart the whole thing.

oefrha 6y ago
Sounds like OOM killer is disabled by default on Lightsail. Shouldn't be hard to turn it back on by modifying a line or two in sysctl.conf.
fxtentacle 6y ago
I've been using cgroups since way before docker made them cool exactly for this: if one process goes rogue on memory use, make sure only exactly that one crashes. And yes, I fully agree with you. In addition to the other disadvantages, Lightsail also shifts the burden of process monitoring and management onto you.
- alain_gilbert 6y ago
  I use docker. And yes, it normally just take care of restarting the app whenever something goes wrong. But somehow on lightsail (only), the machine just goes completely unresponsive instead.

Proven 6y ago

I think so too. I just had a quick look at the Lightsail pages and thought "This is just plain old hosting, with hooks into a highly proprietary cloud environment."