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Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition
- whyleyc 15y agoDo you have the 2009 or 2010 editions available anywhere ? Would be good to compare to see trends.
- jf 15y agohttps://github.com/jpf/domain-profiler/commits/master/ycombinator.html https://github.com/jpf/domain-profiler/commits/master/ycombi...
- OoTheNigerian 15y agocan we see the very latest for registrars? So we know if the Godaddy migrate cry really worked.
- Feanim 15y agoThat's already the very latest. "Generated by Joel on 2012-01-17 using his domain-profiler software"
- latch 15y agoMind blown that: -Some ~40% (stupid pie chart) don't have an SSL cert, but almost all have login/registration page (4 out of 4 that I randomly picked had a login/registration page) -So many people use GoDaddy as a registrar (they were horrible before SOPA) -That startups use AWS despite its poor cost/performance
- mattmanser 15y agoI agree on the SSL & GoDaddy, but AWS? What poor performance?
- dextorious 15y agoHe said poor cost/performance. I.e, he means it has less bang for the buck, compared to something like a VPS on Slicehost. Which is true (there are several benchmarks in related price ranges), but AWS offers other things, including a vibrant ecosystem and huge scalability opportunities in different zones etc. A lot of startups can justify the cost, especially as an engineer can cost twenty times more than a couple of machines to start with.
- rplnt 15y agoI think he didn't mean "cost and performance" but rather "cost per performance".
- wlll 15y agoThe IO performance of EBS is terrible.
- xxqs 15y agowhat's horrible about GoDaddy? I used them for domain registration and DNS hosting, and everything went smoothly. The only annoying part, is how they try to sell additional goodies along the domain registration. the front page ladies weren't too much of disturbance either :)
- switz 15y agoSeriously? Aside from all of the normal things that are wrong with GoDaddy, where have you been for the past few weeks?
- xxqs 15y agothe parent comment refers to them being horrible before SOPA. I was wondering what exactly was horrible. It was all plain and easy for me.
- whyleyc 15y agoI think he's referring to their recent support for SOPA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3383564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3383564
- xxqs 15y agothe parent comment refers to them being horrible before SOPA
- whyleyc 15y agoOk, maybe it's more to do with stuff like their CEO gunning down elephant's - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/bob-parsons-godaddy-ceo-elephant-hunt_n_843121.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/bob-parsons-godaddy...
- xxqs 15y agothat's quite bad for the company reputation, but I still don't see any argumentation for they were horrible before SOPA
- kolkey 15y agoInterested to hear about AWS cost/performance too!
- latch 15y agoThere's been a lot of comparison of AWS's cost per performance compared to more bare-metal cloud solutions or dedicated servers. It's been covered a lot of times...here's one that just appeared on HN a few days ago: http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-big-ripoff/ http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-... You can easily get 10x the performance for the same cost. I'm not saying AWS isn't awesome...I'm saying it's much, much more expensive, and I'm surprised that startups full of tech people don't manage their own servers.
- trevorstrohman 15y agoYou can rent 20 AWS on-demand large instances for less money than a junior engineer. If you don't need a lot of machines and AWS saves you any time at all over dedicated hosting, then it's worth it.
- swah 15y agoOk, how do you manage your servers?
- latch 15y agoI'm just very surprised that more startups don't have people who both enjoy the experience and are good at it. Also, people make it sound like EC2 is management-free. It isn't. It might take less time, which is important, and the problems might be different, but it isn't a fire-and-forget solution.
- swah 15y agoI enjoy it, I just don't see how you could do that and get even close to the price of a VPS. In other words: colocation is expensive for a startup.
- andrewjshults 15y agoNot sure about now, but for the summer 2010 batch, Amazon handed out a good chunk of AWS credits (enough to cover the hosting costs of most early stage startups for a while).
- zizee 15y agoIt's worth noting that the people hosting on Heroku have been lumped into the AWS stats. Which is even more expensive performance wise, but has added benefits over self maintained servers.
- nicholasjbs 15y agoI can address two of those points (one for my company and another for YC companies in general): - SSL: We're on that list as HireHive.com, which had a login and used to have an SSL cert, however, we shut it down (i.e., it just redirects now) and now run Hackruiter.com and HackerSchool.com, where our cert is now. We never had logins online without a proper cert. The data from OP is wrong. - So many YC companies use Amazon because Amazon gives large cash credits to YC companies meaning it's effectively free to use for the first couple years. Also, many of us are built on services built on AWS (e.g., we use Dotcloud). EDIT: Typo.
- vidar 15y agoI'd say thats money well spent by Amazon to get all the up and coming companies onto their cloud.
- beambot 15y agoAside from being admitted to YC, is there a formal process to request AWS credits for budding startups...?
- nicholasjbs 15y agoI have no idea, sorry. If you know anyone who works there, I'd try that route. Otherwise, you could try asking for a deal here: http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/aws-sales/ http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/aws-sales/
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- kondro 15y agoI have a feeling that the Godaddy portions of those charts are getting much lower by the minute.
- jf 15y agoI generated a report specifically to show YC startups that were using GoDaddy: https://raw.github.com/jpf/domain-profiler/master/ycombinator-companies-using-godaddy https://raw.github.com/jpf/domain-profiler/master/ycombinato... The exodus away from GoDaddy stopped as soon as they reversed their support of SOPA.
- rcaught 15y agoThe profiler doesn't seem to take HTTP redirects into consideration, incorrectly reporting the web host and SSL details for Vidyard, though I'm sure for a few others too.
- jf 15y agoYou're correct, currently the "Web Host" is determined solely by what shows up in the A records for the domain. I've been working on updating the profile to determine the host based on where the HTML is ultimately served from, along with some pretty substantial changes in host detection heuristics. These are non-trivial changes. I was hoping to have them done in time for this report, but tradition dictated that I produce this report now.
- reinhardt 15y agoInteresting stats; any chance to get data about the rest of the stack (web server, db, framework, etc)?
- anarchitect 15y agoAre PaaS providers like Heroku appearing as "Amazon" in the web host column? Would be interesting to see this broken down further if that's the case.
- jf 15y agoAgreed. I'm working on updating domain-profiler to better detect PaaS providers like Heroku, GAE, and Azure. In the meantime, you can see who's using Heroku by looking for domains that have an SSL certificate with a certificate type of "*.heroku.com"
- RMacy 15y agoVery interesting -- Im surprised of the large use of GoDaddy SSL and Domain products.
- krambs 15y agoI really thought more would be using CloudFlare.
- mikelbring 15y agoI would be really interested to see what programming stack what all the Y Combinator companies use.
- pospischil 15y agoIs the data collection methodology described somewhere? I'm questioning the accuracy given an error on our data (GoDaddy is not our registrar, namecheap is). It's also a bit suspect that namecheap is not listed as anyone's registrar after so many fled GoDaddy for namecheap a few weeks back.
- pospischil 15y agoOK -- the data is definitely out of date for at least one company (ours, custora). I wonder how common this is? Perhaps the cache was not cleared before generating the output? I forked the repo, ran it on custora.com, and eNom was (correctly) listed as the registrar. I'm re-running the full ycombinator list now, and will update when finished.
- pospischil 15y agoThe results are in, and there isn't a very dramatic difference. Looks like 8 companies have switched away from GoDaddy since the data was collected. I've issued a pull request to jf for the updated stats.
- jf 15y agoMerged, thanks!
- larrys 15y agoIf you're talking about custora.com from my check (which only a registrar can do) you transferred registrar to namecheap at this time: 2012-01-03T05:16:42.0000Z So yes the data was run before that date.
- mattmaroon 15y agoFWIW, draftmix.com was a product of Blue Frog Gaming, Inc. We are a YC funded company. We don't run draftmix anymore, but we are still very much alive. Our main products do still use Softlayer, but we've got some stuff on Amazon too.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- spez 15y agoreddit uses AWS
- nirvana 15y ago(We're not YC funded, but we did get into Startup Chile. Just wanted to share some options for people.) Here's the choices our startup has made: EMAIL: After much investigation, we decided to host our email in Iceland. This is due to the strong privacy laws in Iceland, and wanting a hosted solution outside the USA (and which had technical support, unlike google) We chose: http://1984hosting.com/ http://1984hosting.com/ Pretty happy with them, though occasionally their site will give us a response in icelandic when trying to admin stuff, keeps things exciting! (they're helpful though and do support via email in english.) HOSTING: We're planning to go fully dedicated with Hetzner: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-special http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr... Since our product will require a fair number of nodes and significant processing, the price and performance advantage of Hetzner vs. something like Amazon is very dramatic. (I haven't used Hetzner yet, but from my investigations they get positive remarks) DOMAINS: For years all of our domains have been handled thru Moniker. If you're going to go with a US registrar, don't use Go Daddy or any other consumer registrar. Moniker is set up for domain portfolios and they have very strong security policies and no BS. I'd prefer to have this part of our business be offshore, however, given the propensity in recent years for US judges to rule domains be handed over without just cause. However, I've not found a good international Registrar.
- jesseendahl 15y agoGandi.net is a great international registrar. They are based in Paris, France, and took a public stance against SOPA. They are also the EFF's registrar and have a great web interface. Their slogan is "no bullshit™" I have no affiliation with them, aside from being a very satisfied customer.
- kmfrk 15y agoThey don't seem to have any two-factor authentication, which is a big deal-breaker to me - compared to Name.com. They don't reply to inquiries about it on Twitter, too.
- ispivey 15y agoTo everyone amazed by the various suboptimal decisions that startups make, think of it this way: the easiest, most straightforward solution is always the best one until it's more costly than some alternative. I'd rather have my team working on product than researching domain registrars or hosts, since the odds of your registrar having a meaningful impact on your company's success are very low. Thus "just grab a big box on Rackspace" or "Namecheap is fine, just get it done".
- jf 15y agoI'm glad you mention this because that was the basically the motivation for me to build this tool in the first place. I was selecting a DNS host for the startup I was at and was wondering: "what DNS host do all my friends use?". I found myself doing a lot of dig commands, so I wrote what became domain-profiler. I don't think you should spend a lot of time selecting hosting, but I do think you should put in a little bit of research into what you pick. It really sucks when your website is unavailable for an hour due to issues with your DNS provider - especially when your TTL's are set to an hour.
- ispivey 15y agoYeah, absolutely. Making people better aware of best practices so they don't have to think about it is a great mission!
- DrorY 15y agohow about microsoft's azure? Any stats on that?
- jf 15y agosadtrombone.com