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After reading Maciej's last post about his "cathedral" of a server, I moved NewsBlur off of half a dozen Linode VPSs (512MB and 2GB machines, for app/task and d
by conesus 15y ago
After reading Maciej's last post about his "cathedral" of a server, I moved NewsBlur off of half a dozen Linode VPSs (512MB and 2GB machines, for app/task and db respectively) and onto a hosting provider that offered both dedicated bare metal and a variety of VPS configs.
I'm now paying $405 / month for 6 servers, and they range from 2 dedicated db machines with 12GB and 16GB of memory to 1GB virtualized app and task servers that cost $10 to $20 per month.
What I've learned is that where it really matters, in terms of I/O performance, the dedicated servers make great machines, naturally. But the insanely cheap VPSs, which I use for distributed feed fetchers (task servers) and web servers, are wonderful because they are so inexpensive. I have redundant load-balanced machines, so when I need to take down an app server or it fails for some reason, nginx immediately routes around it. And it's costing me only $10 / month per machine.
And task servers have served me especially well as VPS. It depends on the intensity of the task, but for such a small expense, you get 4 cores and enough memory to go nuts. And if you're pulling off a task queue, you can programmatically spin up more to deal with a higher queue load. When you move entirely to dedicated machines, your spin up time is on the order of hours to get it prepped and connected.
I'm just thrilled that many decent hosting providers (with <table>s for salespeople) offer both. I wouldn't last without being able to have a mixed setup.
- plinio_silva 15y agoWhat provider is that?
- RealGeek 15y agoSounds like StormOnDemand.com by LiquidWeb
- conesus 15y agoI use reliablehostingservices.net. Been solid for about 6 months now. Billing sucks (credit card for every server because I bought a few of them at different times -- so different billing cycles), but that's part of the benefit.
- mgkimsal 15y agoGlad to see another reliablehostingservices.net customer - been using them for > 1 year. Decent value for money, I do wish they had a good selection all the time - it's a little hit/miss at times - but overall happy with them!
- dspillett 15y agoYep. If your usual working set (code+data), or better still your entire working set, fits into RAM easily and doesn't see a lot of write activity (where in RAM or not it needs to be copied to disk at some point), cheap VMs are often a no-brainer. The I/O hit will only seriously affect you if you need to reset he VM so the working set needs priming in RAM again. As soon as you need I/O bandwidth (much writing, or a data-set that doesn't fit easily in RAM) you need a physical machine as the I/O contention between you and other VMs will completely kill performance. So as you say: real machines for significant database work and cheap VMs for your web servers and other worker tasks is often the most cost effective arrangement. Don't go too cheap on the VMs though for production work. I generally avoid "burstable RAM" options as I find them less reliable (I'd rather have a fixed amount that can all reliably be allocated as needed, than unpredictable reliability forcing me to put procedures in place to deal with unexpected OOM situations). And make sure you properly test the bandwidth carrying capacity: I've seen cheap hosts get good reviews where the reviewer tested incoming bandwidth but filed to test outgoing - this is not all that useful as a hosts outgoing bandwidth usually sees much more contention than the incoming.