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My strategy: Have a bare minimum of servers (darn things are ridiculously cheap anyway) hosted somewhere reliable near where I live. Any NEW stuff goes into the

My strategy: Have a bare minimum of servers (darn things are ridiculously cheap anyway) hosted somewhere reliable near where I live. Any NEW stuff goes into the cloud. So if I decide I need to service European customers I might rent an EC2 VM in Dublin,Ireland from Amazon and test it out. If that does well I may buy physical servers depending on economics. Any burst traffic would also be handled by virtual servers. If you do the math, CPU in the cloud is just not cheap. Storage in the cloud may seem cheap, but that's only because enterprise storage is so expensive relatively speaking. If you're willing to put some time into it you can get 80-90% of "enterprise" functionality from your cheapo storage as well,thereby beating Amazon's economics. But cloud is easy to provision and good for folks that don't want to deal with operating systems, networking, security, grumpy middle-aged sysadmins (that'd be me) etc etc.

beachgeek 15y ago
The OP's question got me thinking about the expense/cost breakdown. I had calculated this earlier but figured I'd share the numbers in case its of any help. For my project, I bought a new server ~3 years ago which I used for development and hosted from home for my prototypes etc. I paid around 1K for it. I'm finally ready, so I looked at the cost of Amazon EC2 vs. hosting. Two months ago I also bought a switch(new) and a server off Craigslist: total cost $550. My provider has a bandwidth cap, like most. Making certain assumptions about the amount of b/w each user is going to consume etc, I believe I can support 3M users/month off my provider for a little more than $200/mo before I am upgraded to the next b/w tier. For the same amount of CPU/bandwidth etc, making the same assumptions about users I'd pay ~$1K/mo on Amazon EC2. But I'd be able to support around 100K users/mo. Yes I know this is a huge number but its less than 3M. Which is why I'm not going the cloud route. Plus in the worst case I can sell or donate my servers for a tax write-off. I'd love to hear from others as well :)

beachgeek 15y ago

The OP's question got me thinking about the expense/cost breakdown. I had calculated this earlier but figured I'd share the numbers in case its of any help. For my project, I bought a new server ~3 years ago which I used for development and hosted from home for my prototypes etc. I paid around 1K for it. I'm finally ready, so I looked at the cost of Amazon EC2 vs. hosting. Two months ago I also bought a switch(new) and a server off Craigslist: total cost $550. My provider has a bandwidth cap, like most. Making certain assumptions about the amount of b/w each user is going to consume etc, I believe I can support 3M users/month off my provider for a little more than $200/mo before I am upgraded to the next b/w tier. For the same amount of CPU/bandwidth etc, making the same assumptions about users I'd pay ~$1K/mo on Amazon EC2. But I'd be able to support around 100K users/mo. Yes I know this is a huge number but its less than 3M. Which is why I'm not going the cloud route. Plus in the worst case I can sell or donate my servers for a tax write-off. I'd love to hear from others as well :)