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As someone who runs both AWS and my own dedicated servers I'm starting to see a pattern.. MBA types talk about 'new trends', 'data centric startups' and new opp

by utunga 15y ago

As someone who runs both AWS and my own dedicated servers I'm starting to see a pattern.. MBA types talk about 'new trends', 'data centric startups' and new opportunities opened up by AWS and such. OTOH practical advice from real people with successful startups - marco arment, jakewalker, others, seems to focus more on the unseen problems of virtual and advantages of just getting your own server. Am I right?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
mechanical_fish 15y ago
This analysis is a bit too shallow. Marco Arment and idlewords (I don't think you mean jakewalker, who is an attorney; you mean idlewords, who runs Pinboard) fit a specific profile: They've bought dedicated servers before. So there's no learning curve required to buy more dedicated servers. They're more than capable of serving as their own sysadmins, and in fact I believe they do so. So the economy of scale of, e.g., buying some Heroku dynos and letting one admin team administer your machine along with several thousand nigh-identical machines isn't as much of an issue. Their services are well established. Neither Pinboard nor Instapaper are going away, at least on a timescale of years. They have a userbase and a revenue model and are well out of the "experimental" stage. They can afford capital equipment and be sure that said equipment will be utilized. Their services aren't evolving rapidly, on a scale of days or weeks. They don't tend to beta-test features that would require lots of additional hardware if they got popular. Their services scale fairly predictably. These are paid apps with a steady clientele that isn't just chasing fads. By this point I bet Marco can plot the rate of change of Instapaper's paid userbase on a graph and tell you within, say, 25% how big it is likely to be in six months. The service is unlikely to experience unusual usage spikes unless Marco deliberately creates those spikes by e.g. having a sale or releasing a new version. Even iPhone/iPad releases, which might drive sales, tend to occur on a fairly predictable calendar. Their services just aren't all that large on the back end. They don't run big server farms, the kind for which you must spend a few hours per week just managing your inventory of spare parts and un-racking and re-racking things. If your business also fits these criteria, then sure, dedicated servers are easier now than they have ever been, and there are still things you get with dedicated hardware that are harder to find in the cloud. (He's right about the predictable disk I/O.) But my company managers swear that AWS prices, full-freight as they are, are still a bargain relative to the humans and capital required to run our medium-to-large-sized datacenter with dedicated hardware. [Disclosure: I work at an AWS-based Drupal hosting company and have never owned a dedicated server. ;)]
jacques_chester 15y ago
"When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine." - Pablo Picasso.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  Good one.
jakewalker 15y ago
Honored as I am to be mentioned in the same breath as Marco, I'm pretty sure you meant idlewords, who runs pinboard, and not me. I haven't leased a private server since about 2004! I just posted the story.
Luyt 15y ago
"...the unseen problems of virtual [servers] and advantages of just getting your own server. Am I right?" In my experience, you're right. For the same monthly amount of datacenter cost I can either install a pretty beefy machine, or rent a underpowered VPS. A disadvantage of a VPS is that they're always artifically limited in memory, disk space and CPU power, whereas in the case of a real physical server machine I can put as much RAM/drives/CPUs I want. An advantage of VPS would be no hardware cost, no redundancy concerns, easy to add/delete instances, etc. However, for me the advatages of real machines weigh heavier than those of VPS solutions, at least at present.

by utunga 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

mechanical_fish 15y ago

This analysis is a bit too shallow. Marco Arment and idlewords (I don't think you mean jakewalker, who is an attorney; you mean idlewords, who runs Pinboard) fit a specific profile: They've bought dedicated servers before. So there's no learning curve required to buy more dedicated servers. They're more than capable of serving as their own sysadmins, and in fact I believe they do so. So the economy of scale of, e.g., buying some Heroku dynos and letting one admin team administer your machine along with several thousand nigh-identical machines isn't as much of an issue. Their services are well established. Neither Pinboard nor Instapaper are going away, at least on a timescale of years. They have a userbase and a revenue model and are well out of the "experimental" stage. They can afford capital equipment and be sure that said equipment will be utilized. Their services aren't evolving rapidly, on a scale of days or weeks. They don't tend to beta-test features that would require lots of additional hardware if they got popular. Their services scale fairly predictably. These are paid apps with a steady clientele that isn't just chasing fads. By this point I bet Marco can plot the rate of change of Instapaper's paid userbase on a graph and tell you within, say, 25% how big it is likely to be in six months. The service is unlikely to experience unusual usage spikes unless Marco deliberately creates those spikes by e.g. having a sale or releasing a new version. Even iPhone/iPad releases, which might drive sales, tend to occur on a fairly predictable calendar. Their services just aren't all that large on the back end. They don't run big server farms, the kind for which you must spend a few hours per week just managing your inventory of spare parts and un-racking and re-racking things. If your business also fits these criteria, then sure, dedicated servers are easier now than they have ever been, and there are still things you get with dedicated hardware that are harder to find in the cloud. (He's right about the predictable disk I/O.) But my company managers swear that AWS prices, full-freight as they are, are still a bargain relative to the humans and capital required to run our medium-to-large-sized datacenter with dedicated hardware. [Disclosure: I work at an AWS-based Drupal hosting company and have never owned a dedicated server. ;)]

jacques_chester 15y ago

"When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine." - Pablo Picasso.

chopsueyar 15y ago
Good one.

jakewalker 15y ago

Honored as I am to be mentioned in the same breath as Marco, I'm pretty sure you meant idlewords, who runs pinboard, and not me. I haven't leased a private server since about 2004! I just posted the story.

Luyt 15y ago

"...the unseen problems of virtual [servers] and advantages of just getting your own server. Am I right?" In my experience, you're right. For the same monthly amount of datacenter cost I can either install a pretty beefy machine, or rent a underpowered VPS. A disadvantage of a VPS is that they're always artifically limited in memory, disk space and CPU power, whereas in the case of a real physical server machine I can put as much RAM/drives/CPUs I want. An advantage of VPS would be no hardware cost, no redundancy concerns, easy to add/delete instances, etc. However, for me the advatages of real machines weigh heavier than those of VPS solutions, at least at present.