7 ms·

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 100m

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. This seems ridiculously cheap compared to something with comparable RAM/CPU on EC2. Is there a catch?

charliesome 15y ago
No catch, you've just discovered how ridiculously expensive EC2 is.
- statictype 15y ago
  Then why do so many startups (and even established businesses like reddit and Netflix) use EC2?
  - LogicX 15y ago
    Reddit and Netflix have entirely different models at their 'web-scale' They actually DO need to be able to scale servers up and down based on demand-usage, time of day, growth patterns, etc. For them, the extra EC2 cost is negated by being able to spin up an extra 400 instances in the evenings, and turn them back down after everyone goes to sleep. Under the dedicated server model they'd ALWAYS need to have an extra 400 dedicateds to handle that peak load (and in fact would need to have far more to handle additional spikes, projected growth, etc.) Those dedicated servers would sit idle, costing them money most of the time. This is the difference between 'web-scale' and your typical startup's usage pattern.
    - JoachimSchipper 15y ago
      Also, reddit used to have different budgets for servers (lots) and people (very little), so anything that reduced system administration was a win.
    - philwelch 15y ago
      Also, they probably get much better rates from Amazon than you or I.
    - vidarh 15y ago
      > They actually DO need to be able to scale servers up and down based on demand-usage, time of day, growth patterns, etc. Cost wise, your best scenario is usually going to be dedicated or colo + EC2 or similar for overflow / peak. If you do just dedicated hosting you need to leave enough spare capacity that you feel comfortable handling the spikes for whatever the worst case provisioning time your host has. It's still cheaper than EC2. But if you do dedicated + ability to spin up EC2 to take peaks, you can go much closer to the wire with your dedicated hardware, and increase the cost gap to EC2 massively. You don't need as much spare capacity to handle peaks any more. You don't need as much spare capacity to handle failover. It's rare for it to pay off to spin up EC2 instances to handle inter-day "normal" load changes, though - most sites don't have differences that are pronounced enough over short enough intervals for it to be worth it. If you do the dedicated + EC2 model, your EC2 instances needs to be up no more than 6-8 hours or so on average per day before it becomes cheaper to buy more dedicated capacity.
    - statictype 15y ago
      Thanks for the explanation. This comment (and indeed this whole thread) has been very useful to me.
    - baudehlo 15y ago
      I don't think you'll find that reddit actually spins up extra instances though. They simply run 240 instances (right now). So it still seems like an odd choice, given they could probably reduce that to about 50 instances of dedicated hosting.
  - charliesome 15y ago
    You should not make your own technology judgements based solely on what other people are using. There's too many people jumping on the cloud bandwagon who have no clue what they're doing.
    - michaelleland 15y ago
      Making technology decisions based on what others are doing is the fastest way to make minor decisions. There's immense value in asking "what does company x do?" choosing that option, and moving on. In my experience time deliberating is time wasted--it's better to make a decision and move on. You can (and should) change later.
      - Silhouette 15y ago
        > Making technology decisions based on what others are doing is the fastest way to make minor decisions. Sure, but a minor decision is who prints your business stationery or what kind of toilet paper to buy. What hardware/networking platform to build your service on is not a minor decision. It will fundamentally affect the architecture of your entire system, and getting the decision wrong will potentially be expensive-with-a-capital-Failed-Company.
  - dangrossman 15y ago
    Reddit very much regretted using Amazon EC2 EBS disks for their site according to their blog. It killed their site for almost entire days, many times, for a long time. It's taken them months to undo that decision.
    - chc 15y ago
      That was just EBS, not EC2 or any of the other AWS products. Most of AWS is fairly solid AFAIK, just expensive at certain scales.
  - SomeOtherGuy2 15y ago
    Because of the cloud fad. People have always made bad IT decisions based on the flavor of the month. They still do.
dangrossman 15y ago
No; you can get a VPS with those specs in that price range too. It's EC2 that's extremely expensive. I moved $1000/mo in fully utilized EC2 instances to dedicated servers for half the cost.
yaix 15y ago
My hoster of many years charges for a similar setup 60 EUR, "unlimited" bandwidth (whatever you can pump though 100Mbit within a month), RAID10, etc, 75 GB external backup, as a managed server. And at another big hosting company you get an even bigger package for 45 EUR, not managed though. However, I remember that hosting in the US is surprisingly expensive for some reason, and has been for many years. Don't know why.
- edu 15y ago
  What company are you using?
  - yaix 15y ago
    I am using netclusive, but I think they only have a German language site. Others and with English site are Server4you or Hetzner.
  - chappi42 15y ago
    It may be Hetzner (Germany). They have a 45 € root server with i7 quadcore, 16 Gb RAM, 2 x 3 Tb Disk (link: http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produ...). I'm very content with what they provide, even good/friendly support.
    - dasrecht 15y ago
      In my opinion a very good choice. I run a EX4 Box there and i'm more than satisfied with the service they provide. Recently i fired up a Support Request around 5am and got a response 6am when their support team picks up work. during the day you usually don't have to wait longer than one hour for a support response. They have awesome hardware for reasonable prices... i migrated everything i own from ec2 to one EX4 box with 8 cores and 16 gig of ram for less than i payed at EC2...
  - waitwhat 15y ago
    Also have a look at OVH's Kimsufi brand: http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ i7 + 24GB RAM + 2TB disc + 100Mbps for €50 (they geo-restrict their plans, and I think only the French get unlimited bandwidth; UK people have to survive on "just" 15TB/month, for example)
gnosis 15y ago
Paying $140-$190 per month is already ridiculously expensive. I pay about $3 per month for a very low-end xen VPS. Sure, I'm not running anything at all resource intensive on it.. but if I was maybe I'd spring for a higher-end VPS for $6, or if I really wanted to get crazy I'd find a really solid one for about $20 a month. At $140-$190 a month, you'd better be getting a bunch of high-end dedicated servers and fantastic support, or you are getting seriously ripped off. Hell, given the very modest needs of most small startups, having to shell out even $20 a month is a ripoff.
- lamnk 15y ago
  $140 for a second gen i5 and 8GB of ram is pretty reasonable. A $20 VPS is only for pet projects. For a startup it's worth it to invest in a/some dedicated server(s). Having some redundant firepower of dedicated servers so that you don't have to worry about the upgrades for a while presents a sweet spot between saving cost and scalability.

charliesome 15y ago

No catch, you've just discovered how ridiculously expensive EC2 is.

statictype 15y ago
Then why do so many startups (and even established businesses like reddit and Netflix) use EC2?
- LogicX 15y ago
  Reddit and Netflix have entirely different models at their 'web-scale' They actually DO need to be able to scale servers up and down based on demand-usage, time of day, growth patterns, etc. For them, the extra EC2 cost is negated by being able to spin up an extra 400 instances in the evenings, and turn them back down after everyone goes to sleep. Under the dedicated server model they'd ALWAYS need to have an extra 400 dedicateds to handle that peak load (and in fact would need to have far more to handle additional spikes, projected growth, etc.) Those dedicated servers would sit idle, costing them money most of the time. This is the difference between 'web-scale' and your typical startup's usage pattern.
  - JoachimSchipper 15y ago
    Also, reddit used to have different budgets for servers (lots) and people (very little), so anything that reduced system administration was a win.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    Also, they probably get much better rates from Amazon than you or I.
  - vidarh 15y ago
    > They actually DO need to be able to scale servers up and down based on demand-usage, time of day, growth patterns, etc. Cost wise, your best scenario is usually going to be dedicated or colo + EC2 or similar for overflow / peak. If you do just dedicated hosting you need to leave enough spare capacity that you feel comfortable handling the spikes for whatever the worst case provisioning time your host has. It's still cheaper than EC2. But if you do dedicated + ability to spin up EC2 to take peaks, you can go much closer to the wire with your dedicated hardware, and increase the cost gap to EC2 massively. You don't need as much spare capacity to handle peaks any more. You don't need as much spare capacity to handle failover. It's rare for it to pay off to spin up EC2 instances to handle inter-day "normal" load changes, though - most sites don't have differences that are pronounced enough over short enough intervals for it to be worth it. If you do the dedicated + EC2 model, your EC2 instances needs to be up no more than 6-8 hours or so on average per day before it becomes cheaper to buy more dedicated capacity.
  - statictype 15y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. This comment (and indeed this whole thread) has been very useful to me.
  - baudehlo 15y ago
    I don't think you'll find that reddit actually spins up extra instances though. They simply run 240 instances (right now). So it still seems like an odd choice, given they could probably reduce that to about 50 instances of dedicated hosting.
- charliesome 15y ago
  You should not make your own technology judgements based solely on what other people are using. There's too many people jumping on the cloud bandwagon who have no clue what they're doing.
  - michaelleland 15y ago
    Making technology decisions based on what others are doing is the fastest way to make minor decisions. There's immense value in asking "what does company x do?" choosing that option, and moving on. In my experience time deliberating is time wasted--it's better to make a decision and move on. You can (and should) change later.
    - Silhouette 15y ago
      > Making technology decisions based on what others are doing is the fastest way to make minor decisions. Sure, but a minor decision is who prints your business stationery or what kind of toilet paper to buy. What hardware/networking platform to build your service on is not a minor decision. It will fundamentally affect the architecture of your entire system, and getting the decision wrong will potentially be expensive-with-a-capital-Failed-Company.
- dangrossman 15y ago
  Reddit very much regretted using Amazon EC2 EBS disks for their site according to their blog. It killed their site for almost entire days, many times, for a long time. It's taken them months to undo that decision.
  - chc 15y ago
    That was just EBS, not EC2 or any of the other AWS products. Most of AWS is fairly solid AFAIK, just expensive at certain scales.
- SomeOtherGuy2 15y ago
  Because of the cloud fad. People have always made bad IT decisions based on the flavor of the month. They still do.

dangrossman 15y ago

No; you can get a VPS with those specs in that price range too. It's EC2 that's extremely expensive. I moved $1000/mo in fully utilized EC2 instances to dedicated servers for half the cost.

yaix 15y ago

My hoster of many years charges for a similar setup 60 EUR, "unlimited" bandwidth (whatever you can pump though 100Mbit within a month), RAID10, etc, 75 GB external backup, as a managed server. And at another big hosting company you get an even bigger package for 45 EUR, not managed though. However, I remember that hosting in the US is surprisingly expensive for some reason, and has been for many years. Don't know why.

edu 15y ago
What company are you using?
- yaix 15y ago
  I am using netclusive, but I think they only have a German language site. Others and with English site are Server4you or Hetzner.
- chappi42 15y ago
  It may be Hetzner (Germany). They have a 45 € root server with i7 quadcore, 16 Gb RAM, 2 x 3 Tb Disk (link: http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produ...). I'm very content with what they provide, even good/friendly support.
  - dasrecht 15y ago
    In my opinion a very good choice. I run a EX4 Box there and i'm more than satisfied with the service they provide. Recently i fired up a Support Request around 5am and got a response 6am when their support team picks up work. during the day you usually don't have to wait longer than one hour for a support response. They have awesome hardware for reasonable prices... i migrated everything i own from ec2 to one EX4 box with 8 cores and 16 gig of ram for less than i payed at EC2...
- waitwhat 15y ago
  Also have a look at OVH's Kimsufi brand: http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/ i7 + 24GB RAM + 2TB disc + 100Mbps for €50 (they geo-restrict their plans, and I think only the French get unlimited bandwidth; UK people have to survive on "just" 15TB/month, for example)

gnosis 15y ago

Paying $140-$190 per month is already ridiculously expensive. I pay about $3 per month for a very low-end xen VPS. Sure, I'm not running anything at all resource intensive on it.. but if I was maybe I'd spring for a higher-end VPS for $6, or if I really wanted to get crazy I'd find a really solid one for about $20 a month. At $140-$190 a month, you'd better be getting a bunch of high-end dedicated servers and fantastic support, or you are getting seriously ripped off. Hell, given the very modest needs of most small startups, having to shell out even $20 a month is a ripoff.

lamnk 15y ago
$140 for a second gen i5 and 8GB of ram is pretty reasonable. A $20 VPS is only for pet projects. For a startup it's worth it to invest in a/some dedicated server(s). Having some redundant firepower of dedicated servers so that you don't have to worry about the upgrades for a while presents a sweet spot between saving cost and scalability.