13 ms·

The Five Stages of Hosting

747 points by stilist 15y ago

kijin 15y ago
You forgot another popular option that a lot of people use as an alternative to the "monastery" stage: shared hosting (shudder).
- yanowitz 15y ago
  Virtual Servers (item 2) are essentially a form of this, albeit with slightly more protection. Debugging application performance in a virtualized (and opaque) environment is...a challenge.
  - kijin 15y ago
    I don't think it would be fair to subsume shared hosting under "2. The Dorm Room" just because of performance characteristics. A virtual server gives you a lot more freedom to choose your software stack than most shared hosting plans can ever approximate. Even when it comes to performance, there's a world of difference between the average GoDaddy hosting plan and a medium-sized Linode.
- josephcooney 15y ago
  Agree. I was surprised they overlooked this one. Perhaps they couldn't think of an appropriate metaphor. Prison? Orphanage?
  - jpdoctor 15y ago
    > Prison? Orphanage? Whorehouse.
  - Lazare 15y ago
    I'd suggest slum. It's a place to sleep, but you have no security and no property rights. It's generally unpleasant, and the whole thing could burn down at any moment. And you have (practically) no recourse if you don't like what you're getting. Even the best hosts have laughable SLAs (if they have one at all), and no meaningful performance guarantees.
    - lsc 15y ago
      Show me any reasonably priced service that has a SLA worth reading. Nearly all retail providers have some sort of "if we have downtime, if you complain, we will refund you for the time you were down" SLA. The pennies you get don't compensate you for the time it took to complain, much less the lost business from being down. Look at all the companies advertising a 100% SLA; I mean, even 99.9% is unrealistic in most cases without some very expensive hardware or application-layer redundancy.
  - huskyr 15y ago
    When you're doing something even remotely technically interesting shared hosting isn't an option. However, if you need something for, you know, the restaurant down the street, your nephew's school blog, a small shop that justs wants a Google Map and a contact form i don't think shared hosting is such a bad option. It's really cheap ($20 for a VPS might be low for you, but it isn't for your nephew), doesn't matter that much when it's down, usually easy to set up, etc.
    - josephcooney 15y ago
      Yes. I'm not disputing the usefulness of shared hosting, in fact I called out the fact that it had originally been omitted from the list.
- JoachimSchipper 15y ago
  NearlyFreeSpeech + static site = really cheap hosting that works. Of course, static sites are really easy to host...
moe 15y ago
Aww, this is a gem. Beautifully written and none of the bias and factual errors that you commonly see in articles on this subject.
- mseebach 15y ago
  Plus the metaphor pretty much holds up. That is rare in this kind of post.
crcsmnky 15y ago
The best part? There's no one "right way", each one has it own ups and downs. Too few authors do this these days and think they have all the answers to everyone's problems.
yanowitz 15y ago
This is a great list. I've noticed that I always hate whatever option I'm on that's short of "the condo." And even if you have a condo (or a subdivision of blades), there are still the inevitable screwups that leave you cursing your colo. But we live in an imperfect world. We just have to spend money engineering for it.
reedlaw 15y ago
Where would you go to find a "condo"? There are no links in the article. What is the pricing/reliability/support like having your own server in someone else's data center?
- gojomo 15y ago
  Search for [colocation].
  - moe 15y ago
    Also make sure to hire someone who has done it before if you want to go that route. "Racking" is an art-form in itself and the cabling alone can turn into a real problem[1] down the road if you take it too lightly for too long. You also want to plan for redundancy, power density etc. from the start. Sorting out messy cabling or adding redundancy to a badly managed rack on live hardware is not fun. [1] http://www.vibrant.com/cable-messes.php http://www.vibrant.com/cable-messes.php (for reference, this is what it should look like: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/01/24/when-data-center-cabling-becomes-art/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/01/24/when-data-center-cabling...)
    - CamperBob 15y ago
      Not a huge fan of zipties, honestly... there's a point where it's less trouble to just pull the cable and see what it's attached to, especially since we all get lazy when it comes to labeling our source/dest endpoints. Most of the shots of "cable messes" don't really look that unacceptable to me. I don't complain about messy cables until they start to look more like http://static.cray-cyber.org/General/LARGE/Cyber_860_BP_Skyscraper.JPG http://static.cray-cyber.org/General/LARGE/Cyber_860_BP_Skys... .
      - moe 15y ago
        Matter of pain threshold I guess. Personally I prefer spending the odd hour on tidy zipping and labeling (yes, both ends of the cable) over cable-pulling during an emergency at 4am...
_delirium 15y ago
This is an excellent write-up; I like the metaphors, and it doesn't feel too much like it's trying to force a preordained conclusion. One option I have trouble fitting in, though, is the "run your own server locally". This might be #5, except it's often seen as actually a lower-class option than #4, rather than a step up: before you go all out with a colocated server, how about just a machine with Apache sitting in the office hooked up to your office's business-SDSL line?
- notatoad 15y ago
  it's probably not included because keeping your production server outside of a datacenter is kind of a silly idea. you save some money, but you don't have the cooling, the power conditioning, the network redundancy, or the security of a proper facility.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    I've been running my own servers out of my closet right here, on my ADSL (though formerly business SDSL) line, for over 10 years. A PC on the floor is fine to start with. It can run MySQL, your framework of choice and give you something you can show people. Evidence: I ran and wrote the backend to a site, starting with two PCs on a DSL line, before ultimately being acquired by EA (stopover at Rackspace). For a couple hundred bucks (2x 3GHz 4G RAM) you can have a zillion times more flexibility than any cloudy free plan (Heroku, etc.).
    - ricardobeat 15y ago
      What kind of uplink do you have? An app that starts getting into the thousands of users will quickly saturate a normal ADSL line (1-2mbps up), and an SDSL/T1 connection is many times more expensive than a remote dedicated server.
      - rhizome 15y ago
        Well, you move to hosting before you have thousands of users, silly! I'm talking POC/MVP stuff. My uplink is something like 384Kbit, plenty for showoff purposes.
Lazare 15y ago
The may be off topic, but... At the moment we're mostly using option two (Linode VPS), and it's working pretty well. I've been repeatedly tempted by option option four (colo), but I'm kind of daunted by the task of getting started. I've been burnt by option three (renting a dedicated server) before - it seems like the worst of both worlds. Can anyone recommend a good guide to getting started with colo? Obvious questions include: Where do you go to buy a cheap server? Can you just have it shipped direct to the data centre, or do you need to configure it yourself? How does that even work for startups in a different country to the data centre? Is there anything I should look for in a data centre to make it easier? Do any offer out of band consoles? What sort of costs are we talking about? Is there a break-even point beyond which you really should colo instead of using VPS? Is there a detailed tutorial anywhere on "getting your first coloed server up and running without bricking the stupid thing and needing to spend thousands of dollars getting a data centre technician to fix it"? And so on. :) It seems like there are a LOT of resources to hold your hand as you get up to speed with Linode-type services, but colo is dark magic.
- caw 15y ago
  When the last company I was with bought some colo rack space (we hosted our own data center but had a need for some colo), we purchased the server, installed it, tested it, and set up our own console on our IP range. I don't know what the costs were because that was part of my job. As far as guide to not bricking the thing: Our particular colo required DC power, which is what we configured our Dell with. Open up the box when we got it and -- aw, we can't turn it on. Luckily we had another AC power supply so we swapped that in (hurray modular!). When you go to the colo, bring fuses, particularly if this is the first time you're wiring DC. Grab however many you think you'll need. Then grab some more because you'll futz it up. Test your console (iLO, IPMI, etc) to make sure it's functioning before you leave. Most things at this point you can fix remotely. As far as swapping hard drives and things go we decided to maintain that ourselves. RAID1 + Hot Spare on the OS to keep it running before you get over there to swap the drive.
- micro-ram 15y ago
  I don't see it as simple as pick one from the list. I use a hybrid approach. Colo the servers you need for the cost savings and performance. Then backup your data to the cloud (Amazon S3) with server images ready to launch (Amazon EC2) if you have a major hardware problem with the colo.
there 15y ago
as someone that has done colocation, dedicated hosting, and VPS, i'm a huge fan of dedicated hosting. colocation was expensive and the hardware problems were all mine. i was pretty much tied to my local datacenter because i didn't want to ship a server around (which would be at least a day of downtime). pricing can be hard to compare because of power/space/bandwidth. if the equipment i colocated didn't have IPMI support, it could sometimes take up to a half hour to have a datacenter tech be able to put a remote console online when there were problems. at the end of it, i had a bunch of servers that were worthless on the resale market due to their age. VPSes were never a serious option for the reasons stated in this article. it's impossible to track down performance problems when a dozen other VPS customers on the same server are taxing the CPUs and disks. i do use one that i pay $10/month for just to run a network monitor for some off-network perspective. they can be useful for single-task servers that don't need a lot of processing power like dns servers. with dedicated servers, though, you can signup on a website and within a few hours have a complete server with modern CPUs, disks, and lots of memory assembled, tested, and connected to the internet with a remote console waiting for an o/s installation. when hardware goes bad, the server provider has lots of spare parts waiting around to be swapped in for free. and the best part of all, when you're ready to upgrade or move to a different provider, you just cancel the account and let the provider worry about what to do with the old hardware. i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month.
- jbarham 15y ago
  > i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month. With who?
  - LogicX 15y ago
    I have that exact setup with Voxel.net for $180/mo. Just bought a 8core 16GB, 120GB SSD & 1TB HDD /w 1gbit/sec connection for $141/mo from Incero.com
kmfrk 15y ago
An important addition to the article is that, as you descend the list, you run out of people to blame.
- lsc 15y ago
  "people to blame" only helps if you work for someone else. When you are the boss? more "people to blame" means more people that can cause serious problems if they can't do their job. Having other people that can do something for you so you don't have to is a good thing. Having someone else to blame, if you work for yourself, is the downside to outsourcing, not the upside. Outsourcing is great; but make sure you can always move to another provider if you have trouble with your current provider. Your boss might let you off the hook if a provider screws it up, but your customers won't.
latch 15y ago
I don't currently host anything with them, and I do find the prices a little much (especially RAM, what are they thinking?!), but for dedicated hosting, I think Softlayer has to be mentioned. Their network connectivity and multiple data centers (including Europe and Asia) make them, in my mind, the best alternative to AWS.
LogicX 15y ago
This is an amazing article. I intended to write such a blog article myself. One aspect I intended to cover (and will now do so here) is that of cost. I get very frustrated by cash-strapped startups which from day one are expecting to be 'web-scale' and need to turn up machines at the drop of a hat. Lets get real. I HOPE you have to worry about that... much, much later. I'm quite pleased you started your article mentioning solutions like heroku. Unless you have some special-needs not met by a PaaS, this is where you should start. You should be writing code, not managing servers (this coming from an operations guy who has been managing servers for 12 years, and worked at a webhost). Once you scale far enough that its worth hiring someone to deal with the knowledge required to deal with the maintenance of managing your application stack, OS updates, security, etc -- THEN move on. Not a moment before. Cloud servers are realistically not the price/performance/low-maintenance solution for MOST startups. You should get a VPS (Linode) or dedicated server (from a reputable company which can offer quick SLAs on replacing parts - like 2 hours at voxel.net). Dedicated servers are cheaper than you think. I pay voxel $180/mo for an 8GB quad core 1TB box on 100mbit/sec. It outperforms servers costing twice as much in EC2 - and thats not counting bandwidth or storage. Concerned about reliability? Buy TWO - In different datacenters. -- You're STILL saving money, and you have the exact same level of maintenance overhead as AWS (OS, Updates, full application stack); while reaping the performance benefits of bare-metal. You do NOT want the headaches of colocation. You cannot pay your staff enough to stay local to the server 24/7 and the cost of extra parts on hand to make up the money over dedicated. Your startup is not Google, so I won't get in to having your own datacenter. (Well done pointing out that they're not getting advice from your blog)
- deleted 15y ago
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- metajack 15y ago
  I had some poor experiences with dedicated servers at well known providers. Essentially if the hardware fails, they'd rather fix it than get you into something new so you can be back up and running. My site ended up offline for several hours, several times, so that some tech could run hardware diagnostics, etc. EC2 may be expensive, but if anything goes wrong, I can boot another instance in seconds and abandon the old one. They fix it on their own time. Sure, I could buy more servers so that one down one doesn't affect me, but that's twice as expensive. On EC2 I don't have any penalty for abandoning an instance for any reason. I've actually moved data centers in EC2 when the performance profiles were better on the other side for the same size instances. It was a temporary difference, but migration was pretty much painless. You're voxel suggestion may have a 2 hour SLA for replacing parts, but what happens when they don't know what is wrong? That said, I agree that a person should try for the PaaS and evaluate all the options fairly. I tried Linode, several dedicated hosts, and then finally moved to EC2 on a previous project.
mattbee 15y ago
I wrote a similar article trying to segregate hosting stages (though beware I'm a hosting company promoting a product) - http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2011/11/03/the-cloud-is-your-install-script http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2011/11/03/the-cloud-is-your-inst... . tl;dr version is that I think the ultimate flexibility is in your application's install script. If you can deploy to one host, or several, and collapse or split out caching layers, databases etc. depending on resources available, you have a truly portable application that's ready to scale and/or move ISPs.
deleted 15y ago
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halayli 15y ago
One missing advantage in #3 is the ability to launch instances across continents
apaprocki 15y ago
No one seems to be commenting about the Stately Manor :) Datacenters come with their own set of interesting problems that are just as much fun to solve as programming puzzles. Thermal imaging goggles to design airflow.. Designing extra redundancy into power systems while adding alternative energy to reduce power costs. In this category, rack space and power consumption are almost as important characteristics as ram/ghz.
cwilson 15y ago
I'd like to add that for different parts of your application, or website, it's ok to use different services. For example, a large majority of tech startups have a WordPress blog that is totally separate from their actual web application. In many cases it also drives the marketing front-end of their website. So while my main application may be on Heroku or AWS, I like to fire up a free PHPFog (I don't work for them, you could use DotCloud, or likely another alternative as well) account, and have my WordPress install setup there. It's insanely easy to setup (it's all Git based), and the free account will get you a long way. It's also nice to know that the WordPress install lives on an entirely different server, so if you get slammed with great press, your entire stack isn't feeling the heat. There are security fears here as well, so I like having it separate.
- dlevine 15y ago
  Or, if your Wordpress site gets hacked, your entire site isn't p0wned. I have a friend who had his WP site hacked last week. Fortunately, he hosts his application on a separate server, so there were no (major) security issues.
- mise 15y ago
  My app has a Wordpress install in a subfolder /blog/. Any suggestions on how to break that out of the app? Apache proxy? 301 redirect to a new subdomain?
aneth 15y ago
Why is it that a well written site can't scale quite large on heroku? (or similar - I use heroku so I'm biased) Perhaps I'm naive, but I feel one can go from heroku to stage 5 if you truly have a blowout. According to their website (http://success.heroku.com/ http://success.heroku.com/) some pretty large websites run there, including Urban Dictionary and Rapportive. Sure, it may cost more, but not more than a full time sysadmin and you are buying efficiency and flexibility. You can buy a lot at heroku for $10,000/month (the minimal cost of a full time deployment / sysadmin / dbadmin,) including I'd imagine some rather hands-on support. This article seems to downplay the great advances that have been made in "cloud" deployment. IMO, a cloud service like heroku beats the pants off of self-operated virtual servers and debatably some of the higher "stages."
- nl 15y ago
  Why is it that a well written site can't scale quite large on heroku? Is anyone claiming that? The linked blog post doesn't make that claim.
  - aneth 15y ago
    It doesn't directly claim that, however calling these "The Five Stages of Hosting" implies that an application will likely progress through these stages as it grows, and that application platforms will be quickly outgrown when any sort of scale is reached. That's a pretty clear implication from the title and I'm calling for counter-evidence, because I don't think it's accurate. I also host on Heroku applications that I hope will grow, and if that's a bad choice, I'd like to know others opinions.
    - nchuhoai 15y ago
      I think you pointed it out, it's the cost. I love Heroku too, however, I can definitely see how Heroku can be much more expensive in the long run. 37signals just recently showed how their recent RAM addition was just a tiny fraction of what they would have payed at Amazon.
    - nl 15y ago
larrys 15y ago
An option was left out which is to have your own T1 running into your own facility (that is not a data center). We did this for years ('96 to 2004) and had much better up time than with colocation with diverse paths and biometric security. We didn't need a generator either. Just an array of industrial batteries hooked up to a power inverter with a line conditioner could keep the equipment running for 24 hours if utility power went down. (This is much cheaper than anything you would buy commercially from APC or Triplite).
- hga 15y ago
  Well, that does trade off risks to your T1 getting knocked out by a backhoe, perhaps power failures between you and the other end of it (e.g. if I bought a business DSL connection from AT&T to run a server at my apartment, I could lose it in a general power outage when the DSLAM's battery ran out). But I can well believe it's better than many co-lo experiences, although all of mine have been positive. Right now I'm helping a friend with one: due to it housing Protected Health Information we pretty much have to run it on our own servers, which I built and he put into a co-lo that he's worked with before for this sort of thing.
  - larrys 15y ago
    "trade off risks to your T1 getting knocked out by a backhoe" Well luckily no backhoe but I did keep, at my own expense, Westell DS1 NIU's around because I had a situation where one went bad and it took the Verizon tech time to go and find one. So I bought a few so he would have the parts around. I also made sure when they strung the fiber from the connection point to our office (several hundred feet through other offices in the ceiling) that it was in orange conduit as opposed to just strung through the building (they were just going to run it like phone wire). I also had them bring an extra fiber through, as well as a fishing wire in case it was ever needed for anything in the future.
- count 15y ago
  A T1? Can you even get hosting that slow these days? At hundreds of dollars/mo for a T1 (or more, depending on where you are at), you can get a dedicated gigabit connection and hardware colo'd somewhere. A T1 in an office is laughable these days.
dangrossman 15y ago
I've been stuck between #3 and #4 for years. I could really, really use more than the 8GB of RAM my largest (rented) servers have. Not being able to build high-RAM servers limits the sites I can build and the features I can offer on the ones I already operate. For example, I built something like Mixpanel 2 years ago, but I never launched it because in load testing it really didn't take a very large client's worth of data to exceed the 4GB of RAM I could afford for a server, and hitting disk would make reporting far too slow. Buying a new server for each client (who may decide to cancel the next day) was not something I wanted to commit to. http://i.imgur.com/DAOEA.png http://i.imgur.com/DAOEA.png I've ended up at Softlayer after trying a number of hosting companies over the past 10 years. They want $25/mo/GB for RAM. It's almost like they want you to pay the one-time cost of the hardware every month... and then some! Yet, supporting all this on my own, I can't really colocate -- I don't have the expertise or the money to get it off the ground, nor can I be there to drive to a data center and fix things if something breaks 24 hours a day. I have no employees. I have 60k users to support myself. It seems like I'll be stuck here for a long time.
- mrud 15y ago
  Hetzner offers Servers with 16GB of Memory at 49€/month (~$64) or 1and1 starting at $129.99. I don't know the current state of dedicated server hosting in USA but you can nowadays can get a lot of hardware very cheap
nchuhoai 15y ago
Love the article, just one note: I think #1 is not necessarily constrained as it may sound. Especially with Heroku, I think it is very easy to upgrade later on for most set ups, not too much special code or conventions. The major one would be probably the read only file system, but I'm sure using Amazon S3 is not that bad
buro9 15y ago
No-one has mentioned mixed hosting, whereby you pick from each category. Something like Varnish you want a lot of RAM for, dedicated suits that well. Web servers tend to be numerous and are just computational power (stitch all this gubbins together and return a string), their number vary according to demand and they suit virtual servers really well. Now databases, these really need good disks, lots of RAM, decent CPUs. They are best dedicated or colocated. When things go wrong with a database server you really want to be able to rule out the invisible magic of other hosts, and the voodoo of being a virtual machine. The best thing I can hope for whilst I scale is to find a provider that will sell me dedicated and public cloud instances that can live on the same VLan and still be reasonably priced. I'm currently still totally with Linode, but with 9 instances, and an over-heated database server I know I'm getting close to the limits of what I can do there without re-focusing on splitting up the app when I could be adding new features.
longemergency 15y ago
Pinboard needs to filter some of the bookmarks that are coming in the site. In the recent stream I constantly see links to depraved sexual acts, including physical and sexual abuse. Often these links are fan fiction but sometimes they are not. Who is reading this stuff and why? What kind of behaviour does this inspire? And why do all Pinboard subscribers need to be exposed to this?
thomasfl 15y ago
The power of strong metaphors strikes again.
rafael-minuesa 15y ago
Regarding the DataCenter, yes, correct, you will need some divine help ...
seltzered_ 15y ago
The hostel You decide to run a site on 'shared' hosting (e.g. dreamhost, 1&1, godaddy (shudder), etc.) because it looks really cheap and they list so many "unlimited" things. The good: It's surprisingly pretty cozy for your startup wordpress blog about fish, although at that point you start wondering why you didn't just get a wordpress.com account instead, but you justify it by saying you were able to put your custom design theme with lasercats this way. You're not sure why your friends are saying the site feels slow. The bad: Oh, you like to program huh? Sorry our python version is 2 years behind. What's this ruby stuff you speak of? You're hosting user-submitted content on your bunk bed? Get out! Or upgrade to our overpriced "VPS" solution! You give up on the site and throw money away.
- experiment0 15y ago
  The thing is, the price difference between this and a vps is too dramatic. For example, I can get a Lunarpages basic hosting, with "Unlimited" Bandwidth and "Unlimited" Storage for $4.99/mo with support for rails apps and python (not django however). Not to mention a free domain name. However the cheapest linode vps is $19.99/mo. I would LOVE to have a vps to play around on, I would have so much use for it and yet I'm a student living in London and all my money goes towards the cost of living. It makes much more sense for me to go with the cheaper shared hosting as I just can't afford anything more. As an aside, I found http://virpus.com/ http://virpus.com/ the other day and they are selling vps's starting at $3/mo. Does anyone have any experience at all with them?
  - Terretta 15y ago
    Gotta love those "CPU slices" that ensure you'll never dream of touching those "unlimited" limits.
  - pestaa 15y ago
    CloudSigma is in Europe, and has a little lower barrier to entry compared to Linode. I'm on the lookout for an even cheaper solution. Virpus seems to be almost too cheap, so where is the catch?
seltzered_ 15y ago
The hostel You decide to run a site on 'shared' hosting (e.g. dreamhost, 1&1, godaddy (shudder), etc.) because it looks really cheap and they list so many "unlimited" things. The good: It's surprisingly pretty cozy for your startup wordpress blog about fish, although at that point you start wondering why you didn't just get a wordpress.com account instead. The bad: Oh, you like to program huh? Sorry our python version is 2 years behind. What's this ruby stuff you speak of? You're hosting user-submitted content on your bunk bed? Get out! Or upgrade to our overpriced "VPS" solution!
neilmiddleton 15y ago
The article isn't completely accurate in that it states that you need to build your application in a certain way in order to host it on Heroku, which isn't true. I just don't see Heroku in same category as something like GAE. Heroku places no requirements on your code that you wouldn't find through general best practise when building scalable applications. A lot of people will cite the read-only filesystem as a special requirement (which requires S3 or similar), but this is a common requirement with clustered systems. Yes you might have a local SAN that you can use as a local filesystem but the point is the same. With the multiple applications I've deployed to Heroku I don't think any would not run on a 'regular' VPS as is. There's no Heroku specific code in there period. In fact, if I have changed my approach to better suit hosting on Heroku, it's generally been changing it to a better approach that would suit all types of hosting.
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
Going along with the metaphor, shared hosting is like crashing on your friend's couch while you get your life in order and look for a place to live.
hkarthik 15y ago
Great article and this thread is great for checking out some new hosts for dedicated servers. Pricing has gotten pretty good in the last year so I think it's a good time to upgrade from PaaS to Dedicated hosting again. Has anyone had experience with a hybrid dedicated/cloud model? I'd love to stick our Postgres servers on dedicated hardware but then be able to spin web servers as cloud servers when needed for traffic spikes.
jstsch 15y ago
As a small web shop, we went the other way. From 3 (dedicated hosting) to 2 (VPS). It's quite nice to know that when a piece of metal breaks you just get a new machine on the fly. You do need a good host though. Quick e-mail replies and pro-active management of server load is absolutely vital. Happy to have found it (in NL) :)
- gcp 15y ago
  Feel free to mention the name of your hoster.
tzury 15y ago
the homeless -- (*.tumblr, *.posterous and *.wordpress.com) the billboard space -- stackoverflow, facebook, twitter
jiggy2011 15y ago
They forgot my preferred hosting method from my pot smoking college days. A second hand Pentium II in the corner of the lounge, running Slackware with ports 80 and 21 forwarded to it from a cheap belkin router off your domestic DSL connection. Good: Basically free (assuming the power bill is in your landlord's name) , host whatever the hell you like. Bad: Someone might spill the bong water over the power strip and ruin your uptime.
rkalla 15y ago
TIP: I see a lot of people calculating off-the-cuff AWS prices for comparable hardware somewhere else and declaring how expensive it is. Don't forget that 3yr reserved pricing is 48% cheaper than the on-demand costs, so once you know what your hardware reqs are on EC2, you can purchase some reserved instance and more or less cut your costs in half. Pricing out any hardware configuration on EC2 using the on-demand pricing is tear-inducing. For Day 1 release, probably not an option. But at the 6-month mark you probably have a much better idea of what hardware your startup needs and can adjust accordingly. 2 CENTS: For the folks that need something better than a Micro and less expensive than a Large, don't forget about the Medium instances. They aren't in the primary section but down in the "High CPU" section; they are an excellent fit for work that isn't quite big enough for a Large.
larrys 15y ago
I'm thinking of getting another rack at the colo place that I use now. Anyone looking for space on that rack that doesn't have high bandwidth or power needs needs feel free to contact me and I will see if this makes sense for both of us.
A1kmm 15y ago
One thing no one has mentioned is the tax implications of the different choices for startups - something which can be as important as the technical side of things. The OECD model tax convention, which has been adopted by many pairs of countries for their double taxation avoidance agreements (DTAAs) uses the term "permanent establishment" - "a fixed place of business through which the business of the an enterprise is wholly or partly carried on". If a business derives income attributable to a fixed place of business in another country, they will likely need to deal with the tax department of that country. At best, this will mean considerable expenditure (by a bootstrapped startups' standards) on legal compliance, and at worst, could mean considerably more tax is paid. For hosting stages 1-2 in the article, no fixed place can be attributed to the business purchasing the hosting (CPU resources are shared and no CPU fixed CPU is assigned to the business). Disk space may temporarily be associated with a business, but this is under the control of the service provider - it is disk space and not physical disk sectors which are being rented, and the provider is free to move data. However, stages 3-5 mean that a business has a very definite physical location (i.e. place of business) in another country. These types of non-technical issues can often outweigh the technical ones in terms of business priority.
- hessenwolf 15y ago
  Have you seen this be an issue in practice? Our place of business is our registered office.
  - A1kmm 15y ago
    It is a place of business if it meets the definition, and there can be more than one. The definition is somewhat ambiguous, but it is likely that if there is an actual physical place (even if it is just a server) used to offer goods or services for sale to the public, there is a good chance that those sales are attributable to that server, and will be taxed in the country that server is located in. This might not be a problem for an established corporation with the sales volume to justify the tax accountant expenditure and payment overhead needed to comply with tax law in multiple countries, but for a bootstrapped startup it can be an important consideration.
swah 15y ago
I'm a brazilian and EC2 just opened in São Paolo (then I realized its kinda expensive). I'm not sure if 40ms vs 160ms latency is so important for many kinds of web sites. I'm considering a Linode VPS in Dallas. What are other brazilians using?
- abalashov 15y ago
  O que exatamente você quer fazer?
ck2 15y ago
I think the secret is dedicated server costs can only come down so far but VPS prices should get better and better for even better hardware as time goes by. $50/mo can get you a 4-core raid10 xen VPS which is plenty powerful and almost as flexible as dedicated.

747 points by stilist 15y ago

kijin 15y ago

You forgot another popular option that a lot of people use as an alternative to the "monastery" stage: shared hosting (shudder).

yanowitz 15y ago
Virtual Servers (item 2) are essentially a form of this, albeit with slightly more protection. Debugging application performance in a virtualized (and opaque) environment is...a challenge.
- kijin 15y ago
  I don't think it would be fair to subsume shared hosting under "2. The Dorm Room" just because of performance characteristics. A virtual server gives you a lot more freedom to choose your software stack than most shared hosting plans can ever approximate. Even when it comes to performance, there's a world of difference between the average GoDaddy hosting plan and a medium-sized Linode.
josephcooney 15y ago
Agree. I was surprised they overlooked this one. Perhaps they couldn't think of an appropriate metaphor. Prison? Orphanage?
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  > Prison? Orphanage? Whorehouse.
- Lazare 15y ago
  I'd suggest slum. It's a place to sleep, but you have no security and no property rights. It's generally unpleasant, and the whole thing could burn down at any moment. And you have (practically) no recourse if you don't like what you're getting. Even the best hosts have laughable SLAs (if they have one at all), and no meaningful performance guarantees.
  - lsc 15y ago
    Show me any reasonably priced service that has a SLA worth reading. Nearly all retail providers have some sort of "if we have downtime, if you complain, we will refund you for the time you were down" SLA. The pennies you get don't compensate you for the time it took to complain, much less the lost business from being down. Look at all the companies advertising a 100% SLA; I mean, even 99.9% is unrealistic in most cases without some very expensive hardware or application-layer redundancy.
- huskyr 15y ago
  When you're doing something even remotely technically interesting shared hosting isn't an option. However, if you need something for, you know, the restaurant down the street, your nephew's school blog, a small shop that justs wants a Google Map and a contact form i don't think shared hosting is such a bad option. It's really cheap ($20 for a VPS might be low for you, but it isn't for your nephew), doesn't matter that much when it's down, usually easy to set up, etc.
  - josephcooney 15y ago
    Yes. I'm not disputing the usefulness of shared hosting, in fact I called out the fact that it had originally been omitted from the list.
JoachimSchipper 15y ago
NearlyFreeSpeech + static site = really cheap hosting that works. Of course, static sites are really easy to host...

moe 15y ago

Aww, this is a gem. Beautifully written and none of the bias and factual errors that you commonly see in articles on this subject.

mseebach 15y ago
Plus the metaphor pretty much holds up. That is rare in this kind of post.

crcsmnky 15y ago

The best part? There's no one "right way", each one has it own ups and downs. Too few authors do this these days and think they have all the answers to everyone's problems.

yanowitz 15y ago

This is a great list. I've noticed that I always hate whatever option I'm on that's short of "the condo." And even if you have a condo (or a subdivision of blades), there are still the inevitable screwups that leave you cursing your colo. But we live in an imperfect world. We just have to spend money engineering for it.

reedlaw 15y ago

Where would you go to find a "condo"? There are no links in the article. What is the pricing/reliability/support like having your own server in someone else's data center?

gojomo 15y ago
Search for [colocation].
- moe 15y ago
  Also make sure to hire someone who has done it before if you want to go that route. "Racking" is an art-form in itself and the cabling alone can turn into a real problem[1] down the road if you take it too lightly for too long. You also want to plan for redundancy, power density etc. from the start. Sorting out messy cabling or adding redundancy to a badly managed rack on live hardware is not fun. [1] http://www.vibrant.com/cable-messes.php http://www.vibrant.com/cable-messes.php (for reference, this is what it should look like: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/01/24/when-data-center-cabling-becomes-art/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/01/24/when-data-center-cabling...)
  - CamperBob 15y ago
    Not a huge fan of zipties, honestly... there's a point where it's less trouble to just pull the cable and see what it's attached to, especially since we all get lazy when it comes to labeling our source/dest endpoints. Most of the shots of "cable messes" don't really look that unacceptable to me. I don't complain about messy cables until they start to look more like http://static.cray-cyber.org/General/LARGE/Cyber_860_BP_Skyscraper.JPG http://static.cray-cyber.org/General/LARGE/Cyber_860_BP_Skys... .
    - moe 15y ago
      Matter of pain threshold I guess. Personally I prefer spending the odd hour on tidy zipping and labeling (yes, both ends of the cable) over cable-pulling during an emergency at 4am...

_delirium 15y ago

This is an excellent write-up; I like the metaphors, and it doesn't feel too much like it's trying to force a preordained conclusion. One option I have trouble fitting in, though, is the "run your own server locally". This might be #5, except it's often seen as actually a lower-class option than #4, rather than a step up: before you go all out with a colocated server, how about just a machine with Apache sitting in the office hooked up to your office's business-SDSL line?

notatoad 15y ago
it's probably not included because keeping your production server outside of a datacenter is kind of a silly idea. you save some money, but you don't have the cooling, the power conditioning, the network redundancy, or the security of a proper facility.
- rhizome 15y ago
  I've been running my own servers out of my closet right here, on my ADSL (though formerly business SDSL) line, for over 10 years. A PC on the floor is fine to start with. It can run MySQL, your framework of choice and give you something you can show people. Evidence: I ran and wrote the backend to a site, starting with two PCs on a DSL line, before ultimately being acquired by EA (stopover at Rackspace). For a couple hundred bucks (2x 3GHz 4G RAM) you can have a zillion times more flexibility than any cloudy free plan (Heroku, etc.).
  - ricardobeat 15y ago
    What kind of uplink do you have? An app that starts getting into the thousands of users will quickly saturate a normal ADSL line (1-2mbps up), and an SDSL/T1 connection is many times more expensive than a remote dedicated server.
    - rhizome 15y ago
      Well, you move to hosting before you have thousands of users, silly! I'm talking POC/MVP stuff. My uplink is something like 384Kbit, plenty for showoff purposes.

Lazare 15y ago

The may be off topic, but... At the moment we're mostly using option two (Linode VPS), and it's working pretty well. I've been repeatedly tempted by option option four (colo), but I'm kind of daunted by the task of getting started. I've been burnt by option three (renting a dedicated server) before - it seems like the worst of both worlds. Can anyone recommend a good guide to getting started with colo? Obvious questions include: Where do you go to buy a cheap server? Can you just have it shipped direct to the data centre, or do you need to configure it yourself? How does that even work for startups in a different country to the data centre? Is there anything I should look for in a data centre to make it easier? Do any offer out of band consoles? What sort of costs are we talking about? Is there a break-even point beyond which you really should colo instead of using VPS? Is there a detailed tutorial anywhere on "getting your first coloed server up and running without bricking the stupid thing and needing to spend thousands of dollars getting a data centre technician to fix it"? And so on. :) It seems like there are a LOT of resources to hold your hand as you get up to speed with Linode-type services, but colo is dark magic.

caw 15y ago
When the last company I was with bought some colo rack space (we hosted our own data center but had a need for some colo), we purchased the server, installed it, tested it, and set up our own console on our IP range. I don't know what the costs were because that was part of my job. As far as guide to not bricking the thing: Our particular colo required DC power, which is what we configured our Dell with. Open up the box when we got it and -- aw, we can't turn it on. Luckily we had another AC power supply so we swapped that in (hurray modular!). When you go to the colo, bring fuses, particularly if this is the first time you're wiring DC. Grab however many you think you'll need. Then grab some more because you'll futz it up. Test your console (iLO, IPMI, etc) to make sure it's functioning before you leave. Most things at this point you can fix remotely. As far as swapping hard drives and things go we decided to maintain that ourselves. RAID1 + Hot Spare on the OS to keep it running before you get over there to swap the drive.
micro-ram 15y ago
I don't see it as simple as pick one from the list. I use a hybrid approach. Colo the servers you need for the cost savings and performance. Then backup your data to the cloud (Amazon S3) with server images ready to launch (Amazon EC2) if you have a major hardware problem with the colo.

there 15y ago

as someone that has done colocation, dedicated hosting, and VPS, i'm a huge fan of dedicated hosting. colocation was expensive and the hardware problems were all mine. i was pretty much tied to my local datacenter because i didn't want to ship a server around (which would be at least a day of downtime). pricing can be hard to compare because of power/space/bandwidth. if the equipment i colocated didn't have IPMI support, it could sometimes take up to a half hour to have a datacenter tech be able to put a remote console online when there were problems. at the end of it, i had a bunch of servers that were worthless on the resale market due to their age. VPSes were never a serious option for the reasons stated in this article. it's impossible to track down performance problems when a dozen other VPS customers on the same server are taxing the CPUs and disks. i do use one that i pay $10/month for just to run a network monitor for some off-network perspective. they can be useful for single-task servers that don't need a lot of processing power like dns servers. with dedicated servers, though, you can signup on a website and within a few hours have a complete server with modern CPUs, disks, and lots of memory assembled, tested, and connected to the internet with a remote console waiting for an o/s installation. when hardware goes bad, the server provider has lots of spare parts waiting around to be swapped in for free. and the best part of all, when you're ready to upgrade or move to a different provider, you just cancel the account and let the provider worry about what to do with the old hardware. i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month.

jbarham 15y ago
> i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month. With who?
- LogicX 15y ago
  I have that exact setup with Voxel.net for $180/mo. Just bought a 8core 16GB, 120GB SSD & 1TB HDD /w 1gbit/sec connection for $141/mo from Incero.com

kmfrk 15y ago

An important addition to the article is that, as you descend the list, you run out of people to blame.

lsc 15y ago
"people to blame" only helps if you work for someone else. When you are the boss? more "people to blame" means more people that can cause serious problems if they can't do their job. Having other people that can do something for you so you don't have to is a good thing. Having someone else to blame, if you work for yourself, is the downside to outsourcing, not the upside. Outsourcing is great; but make sure you can always move to another provider if you have trouble with your current provider. Your boss might let you off the hook if a provider screws it up, but your customers won't.

latch 15y ago

I don't currently host anything with them, and I do find the prices a little much (especially RAM, what are they thinking?!), but for dedicated hosting, I think Softlayer has to be mentioned. Their network connectivity and multiple data centers (including Europe and Asia) make them, in my mind, the best alternative to AWS.

LogicX 15y ago

This is an amazing article. I intended to write such a blog article myself. One aspect I intended to cover (and will now do so here) is that of cost. I get very frustrated by cash-strapped startups which from day one are expecting to be 'web-scale' and need to turn up machines at the drop of a hat. Lets get real. I HOPE you have to worry about that... much, much later. I'm quite pleased you started your article mentioning solutions like heroku. Unless you have some special-needs not met by a PaaS, this is where you should start. You should be writing code, not managing servers (this coming from an operations guy who has been managing servers for 12 years, and worked at a webhost). Once you scale far enough that its worth hiring someone to deal with the knowledge required to deal with the maintenance of managing your application stack, OS updates, security, etc -- THEN move on. Not a moment before. Cloud servers are realistically not the price/performance/low-maintenance solution for MOST startups. You should get a VPS (Linode) or dedicated server (from a reputable company which can offer quick SLAs on replacing parts - like 2 hours at voxel.net). Dedicated servers are cheaper than you think. I pay voxel $180/mo for an 8GB quad core 1TB box on 100mbit/sec. It outperforms servers costing twice as much in EC2 - and thats not counting bandwidth or storage. Concerned about reliability? Buy TWO - In different datacenters. -- You're STILL saving money, and you have the exact same level of maintenance overhead as AWS (OS, Updates, full application stack); while reaping the performance benefits of bare-metal. You do NOT want the headaches of colocation. You cannot pay your staff enough to stay local to the server 24/7 and the cost of extra parts on hand to make up the money over dedicated. Your startup is not Google, so I won't get in to having your own datacenter. (Well done pointing out that they're not getting advice from your blog)

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metajack 15y ago
I had some poor experiences with dedicated servers at well known providers. Essentially if the hardware fails, they'd rather fix it than get you into something new so you can be back up and running. My site ended up offline for several hours, several times, so that some tech could run hardware diagnostics, etc. EC2 may be expensive, but if anything goes wrong, I can boot another instance in seconds and abandon the old one. They fix it on their own time. Sure, I could buy more servers so that one down one doesn't affect me, but that's twice as expensive. On EC2 I don't have any penalty for abandoning an instance for any reason. I've actually moved data centers in EC2 when the performance profiles were better on the other side for the same size instances. It was a temporary difference, but migration was pretty much painless. You're voxel suggestion may have a 2 hour SLA for replacing parts, but what happens when they don't know what is wrong? That said, I agree that a person should try for the PaaS and evaluate all the options fairly. I tried Linode, several dedicated hosts, and then finally moved to EC2 on a previous project.

mattbee 15y ago

I wrote a similar article trying to segregate hosting stages (though beware I'm a hosting company promoting a product) - http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2011/11/03/the-cloud-is-your-install-script http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2011/11/03/the-cloud-is-your-inst... . tl;dr version is that I think the ultimate flexibility is in your application's install script. If you can deploy to one host, or several, and collapse or split out caching layers, databases etc. depending on resources available, you have a truly portable application that's ready to scale and/or move ISPs.

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halayli 15y ago

One missing advantage in #3 is the ability to launch instances across continents

apaprocki 15y ago

No one seems to be commenting about the Stately Manor :) Datacenters come with their own set of interesting problems that are just as much fun to solve as programming puzzles. Thermal imaging goggles to design airflow.. Designing extra redundancy into power systems while adding alternative energy to reduce power costs. In this category, rack space and power consumption are almost as important characteristics as ram/ghz.

cwilson 15y ago

I'd like to add that for different parts of your application, or website, it's ok to use different services. For example, a large majority of tech startups have a WordPress blog that is totally separate from their actual web application. In many cases it also drives the marketing front-end of their website. So while my main application may be on Heroku or AWS, I like to fire up a free PHPFog (I don't work for them, you could use DotCloud, or likely another alternative as well) account, and have my WordPress install setup there. It's insanely easy to setup (it's all Git based), and the free account will get you a long way. It's also nice to know that the WordPress install lives on an entirely different server, so if you get slammed with great press, your entire stack isn't feeling the heat. There are security fears here as well, so I like having it separate.

dlevine 15y ago
Or, if your Wordpress site gets hacked, your entire site isn't p0wned. I have a friend who had his WP site hacked last week. Fortunately, he hosts his application on a separate server, so there were no (major) security issues.
mise 15y ago
My app has a Wordpress install in a subfolder /blog/. Any suggestions on how to break that out of the app? Apache proxy? 301 redirect to a new subdomain?

aneth 15y ago

Why is it that a well written site can't scale quite large on heroku? (or similar - I use heroku so I'm biased) Perhaps I'm naive, but I feel one can go from heroku to stage 5 if you truly have a blowout. According to their website (http://success.heroku.com/ http://success.heroku.com/) some pretty large websites run there, including Urban Dictionary and Rapportive. Sure, it may cost more, but not more than a full time sysadmin and you are buying efficiency and flexibility. You can buy a lot at heroku for $10,000/month (the minimal cost of a full time deployment / sysadmin / dbadmin,) including I'd imagine some rather hands-on support. This article seems to downplay the great advances that have been made in "cloud" deployment. IMO, a cloud service like heroku beats the pants off of self-operated virtual servers and debatably some of the higher "stages."

nl 15y ago
Why is it that a well written site can't scale quite large on heroku? Is anyone claiming that? The linked blog post doesn't make that claim.
- aneth 15y ago
  It doesn't directly claim that, however calling these "The Five Stages of Hosting" implies that an application will likely progress through these stages as it grows, and that application platforms will be quickly outgrown when any sort of scale is reached. That's a pretty clear implication from the title and I'm calling for counter-evidence, because I don't think it's accurate. I also host on Heroku applications that I hope will grow, and if that's a bad choice, I'd like to know others opinions.
  - nchuhoai 15y ago
    I think you pointed it out, it's the cost. I love Heroku too, however, I can definitely see how Heroku can be much more expensive in the long run. 37signals just recently showed how their recent RAM addition was just a tiny fraction of what they would have payed at Amazon.
  - nl 15y ago

larrys 15y ago

An option was left out which is to have your own T1 running into your own facility (that is not a data center). We did this for years ('96 to 2004) and had much better up time than with colocation with diverse paths and biometric security. We didn't need a generator either. Just an array of industrial batteries hooked up to a power inverter with a line conditioner could keep the equipment running for 24 hours if utility power went down. (This is much cheaper than anything you would buy commercially from APC or Triplite).

hga 15y ago
Well, that does trade off risks to your T1 getting knocked out by a backhoe, perhaps power failures between you and the other end of it (e.g. if I bought a business DSL connection from AT&T to run a server at my apartment, I could lose it in a general power outage when the DSLAM's battery ran out). But I can well believe it's better than many co-lo experiences, although all of mine have been positive. Right now I'm helping a friend with one: due to it housing Protected Health Information we pretty much have to run it on our own servers, which I built and he put into a co-lo that he's worked with before for this sort of thing.
- larrys 15y ago
  "trade off risks to your T1 getting knocked out by a backhoe" Well luckily no backhoe but I did keep, at my own expense, Westell DS1 NIU's around because I had a situation where one went bad and it took the Verizon tech time to go and find one. So I bought a few so he would have the parts around. I also made sure when they strung the fiber from the connection point to our office (several hundred feet through other offices in the ceiling) that it was in orange conduit as opposed to just strung through the building (they were just going to run it like phone wire). I also had them bring an extra fiber through, as well as a fishing wire in case it was ever needed for anything in the future.
count 15y ago
A T1? Can you even get hosting that slow these days? At hundreds of dollars/mo for a T1 (or more, depending on where you are at), you can get a dedicated gigabit connection and hardware colo'd somewhere. A T1 in an office is laughable these days.

dangrossman 15y ago

I've been stuck between #3 and #4 for years. I could really, really use more than the 8GB of RAM my largest (rented) servers have. Not being able to build high-RAM servers limits the sites I can build and the features I can offer on the ones I already operate. For example, I built something like Mixpanel 2 years ago, but I never launched it because in load testing it really didn't take a very large client's worth of data to exceed the 4GB of RAM I could afford for a server, and hitting disk would make reporting far too slow. Buying a new server for each client (who may decide to cancel the next day) was not something I wanted to commit to. http://i.imgur.com/DAOEA.png http://i.imgur.com/DAOEA.png I've ended up at Softlayer after trying a number of hosting companies over the past 10 years. They want $25/mo/GB for RAM. It's almost like they want you to pay the one-time cost of the hardware every month... and then some! Yet, supporting all this on my own, I can't really colocate -- I don't have the expertise or the money to get it off the ground, nor can I be there to drive to a data center and fix things if something breaks 24 hours a day. I have no employees. I have 60k users to support myself. It seems like I'll be stuck here for a long time.

mrud 15y ago
Hetzner offers Servers with 16GB of Memory at 49€/month (~$64) or 1and1 starting at $129.99. I don't know the current state of dedicated server hosting in USA but you can nowadays can get a lot of hardware very cheap

nchuhoai 15y ago

Love the article, just one note: I think #1 is not necessarily constrained as it may sound. Especially with Heroku, I think it is very easy to upgrade later on for most set ups, not too much special code or conventions. The major one would be probably the read only file system, but I'm sure using Amazon S3 is not that bad

buro9 15y ago

No-one has mentioned mixed hosting, whereby you pick from each category. Something like Varnish you want a lot of RAM for, dedicated suits that well. Web servers tend to be numerous and are just computational power (stitch all this gubbins together and return a string), their number vary according to demand and they suit virtual servers really well. Now databases, these really need good disks, lots of RAM, decent CPUs. They are best dedicated or colocated. When things go wrong with a database server you really want to be able to rule out the invisible magic of other hosts, and the voodoo of being a virtual machine. The best thing I can hope for whilst I scale is to find a provider that will sell me dedicated and public cloud instances that can live on the same VLan and still be reasonably priced. I'm currently still totally with Linode, but with 9 instances, and an over-heated database server I know I'm getting close to the limits of what I can do there without re-focusing on splitting up the app when I could be adding new features.

longemergency 15y ago

Pinboard needs to filter some of the bookmarks that are coming in the site. In the recent stream I constantly see links to depraved sexual acts, including physical and sexual abuse. Often these links are fan fiction but sometimes they are not. Who is reading this stuff and why? What kind of behaviour does this inspire? And why do all Pinboard subscribers need to be exposed to this?

thomasfl 15y ago

The power of strong metaphors strikes again.

rafael-minuesa 15y ago

Regarding the DataCenter, yes, correct, you will need some divine help ...

seltzered_ 15y ago

The hostel You decide to run a site on 'shared' hosting (e.g. dreamhost, 1&1, godaddy (shudder), etc.) because it looks really cheap and they list so many "unlimited" things. The good: It's surprisingly pretty cozy for your startup wordpress blog about fish, although at that point you start wondering why you didn't just get a wordpress.com account instead, but you justify it by saying you were able to put your custom design theme with lasercats this way. You're not sure why your friends are saying the site feels slow. The bad: Oh, you like to program huh? Sorry our python version is 2 years behind. What's this ruby stuff you speak of? You're hosting user-submitted content on your bunk bed? Get out! Or upgrade to our overpriced "VPS" solution! You give up on the site and throw money away.

experiment0 15y ago
The thing is, the price difference between this and a vps is too dramatic. For example, I can get a Lunarpages basic hosting, with "Unlimited" Bandwidth and "Unlimited" Storage for $4.99/mo with support for rails apps and python (not django however). Not to mention a free domain name. However the cheapest linode vps is $19.99/mo. I would LOVE to have a vps to play around on, I would have so much use for it and yet I'm a student living in London and all my money goes towards the cost of living. It makes much more sense for me to go with the cheaper shared hosting as I just can't afford anything more. As an aside, I found http://virpus.com/ http://virpus.com/ the other day and they are selling vps's starting at $3/mo. Does anyone have any experience at all with them?
- Terretta 15y ago
  Gotta love those "CPU slices" that ensure you'll never dream of touching those "unlimited" limits.
- pestaa 15y ago
  CloudSigma is in Europe, and has a little lower barrier to entry compared to Linode. I'm on the lookout for an even cheaper solution. Virpus seems to be almost too cheap, so where is the catch?

seltzered_ 15y ago

The hostel You decide to run a site on 'shared' hosting (e.g. dreamhost, 1&1, godaddy (shudder), etc.) because it looks really cheap and they list so many "unlimited" things. The good: It's surprisingly pretty cozy for your startup wordpress blog about fish, although at that point you start wondering why you didn't just get a wordpress.com account instead. The bad: Oh, you like to program huh? Sorry our python version is 2 years behind. What's this ruby stuff you speak of? You're hosting user-submitted content on your bunk bed? Get out! Or upgrade to our overpriced "VPS" solution!

neilmiddleton 15y ago

The article isn't completely accurate in that it states that you need to build your application in a certain way in order to host it on Heroku, which isn't true. I just don't see Heroku in same category as something like GAE. Heroku places no requirements on your code that you wouldn't find through general best practise when building scalable applications. A lot of people will cite the read-only filesystem as a special requirement (which requires S3 or similar), but this is a common requirement with clustered systems. Yes you might have a local SAN that you can use as a local filesystem but the point is the same. With the multiple applications I've deployed to Heroku I don't think any would not run on a 'regular' VPS as is. There's no Heroku specific code in there period. In fact, if I have changed my approach to better suit hosting on Heroku, it's generally been changing it to a better approach that would suit all types of hosting.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago

Going along with the metaphor, shared hosting is like crashing on your friend's couch while you get your life in order and look for a place to live.

hkarthik 15y ago

Great article and this thread is great for checking out some new hosts for dedicated servers. Pricing has gotten pretty good in the last year so I think it's a good time to upgrade from PaaS to Dedicated hosting again. Has anyone had experience with a hybrid dedicated/cloud model? I'd love to stick our Postgres servers on dedicated hardware but then be able to spin web servers as cloud servers when needed for traffic spikes.

jstsch 15y ago

As a small web shop, we went the other way. From 3 (dedicated hosting) to 2 (VPS). It's quite nice to know that when a piece of metal breaks you just get a new machine on the fly. You do need a good host though. Quick e-mail replies and pro-active management of server load is absolutely vital. Happy to have found it (in NL) :)

gcp 15y ago
Feel free to mention the name of your hoster.

tzury 15y ago

the homeless -- (*.tumblr, *.posterous and *.wordpress.com) the billboard space -- stackoverflow, facebook, twitter

jiggy2011 15y ago

They forgot my preferred hosting method from my pot smoking college days. A second hand Pentium II in the corner of the lounge, running Slackware with ports 80 and 21 forwarded to it from a cheap belkin router off your domestic DSL connection. Good: Basically free (assuming the power bill is in your landlord's name) , host whatever the hell you like. Bad: Someone might spill the bong water over the power strip and ruin your uptime.

rkalla 15y ago

TIP: I see a lot of people calculating off-the-cuff AWS prices for comparable hardware somewhere else and declaring how expensive it is. Don't forget that 3yr reserved pricing is 48% cheaper than the on-demand costs, so once you know what your hardware reqs are on EC2, you can purchase some reserved instance and more or less cut your costs in half. Pricing out any hardware configuration on EC2 using the on-demand pricing is tear-inducing. For Day 1 release, probably not an option. But at the 6-month mark you probably have a much better idea of what hardware your startup needs and can adjust accordingly. 2 CENTS: For the folks that need something better than a Micro and less expensive than a Large, don't forget about the Medium instances. They aren't in the primary section but down in the "High CPU" section; they are an excellent fit for work that isn't quite big enough for a Large.

larrys 15y ago

I'm thinking of getting another rack at the colo place that I use now. Anyone looking for space on that rack that doesn't have high bandwidth or power needs needs feel free to contact me and I will see if this makes sense for both of us.

A1kmm 15y ago

One thing no one has mentioned is the tax implications of the different choices for startups - something which can be as important as the technical side of things. The OECD model tax convention, which has been adopted by many pairs of countries for their double taxation avoidance agreements (DTAAs) uses the term "permanent establishment" - "a fixed place of business through which the business of the an enterprise is wholly or partly carried on". If a business derives income attributable to a fixed place of business in another country, they will likely need to deal with the tax department of that country. At best, this will mean considerable expenditure (by a bootstrapped startups' standards) on legal compliance, and at worst, could mean considerably more tax is paid. For hosting stages 1-2 in the article, no fixed place can be attributed to the business purchasing the hosting (CPU resources are shared and no CPU fixed CPU is assigned to the business). Disk space may temporarily be associated with a business, but this is under the control of the service provider - it is disk space and not physical disk sectors which are being rented, and the provider is free to move data. However, stages 3-5 mean that a business has a very definite physical location (i.e. place of business) in another country. These types of non-technical issues can often outweigh the technical ones in terms of business priority.

hessenwolf 15y ago
Have you seen this be an issue in practice? Our place of business is our registered office.
- A1kmm 15y ago
  It is a place of business if it meets the definition, and there can be more than one. The definition is somewhat ambiguous, but it is likely that if there is an actual physical place (even if it is just a server) used to offer goods or services for sale to the public, there is a good chance that those sales are attributable to that server, and will be taxed in the country that server is located in. This might not be a problem for an established corporation with the sales volume to justify the tax accountant expenditure and payment overhead needed to comply with tax law in multiple countries, but for a bootstrapped startup it can be an important consideration.

swah 15y ago

I'm a brazilian and EC2 just opened in São Paolo (then I realized its kinda expensive). I'm not sure if 40ms vs 160ms latency is so important for many kinds of web sites. I'm considering a Linode VPS in Dallas. What are other brazilians using?

abalashov 15y ago
O que exatamente você quer fazer?

ck2 15y ago

I think the secret is dedicated server costs can only come down so far but VPS prices should get better and better for even better hardware as time goes by. $50/mo can get you a 4-core raid10 xen VPS which is plenty powerful and almost as flexible as dedicated.