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At Softlayer 16GB is $350/mo more than 2GB, _but_ they almost always have a special double/double for the same price (double the HDDs and double the RAM). So I

At Softlayer 16GB is $350/mo more than 2GB, _but_ they almost always have a special double/double for the same price (double the HDDs and double the RAM). So I just bought a 16GB server for userscripts.org for the 8GB price ($150/mo). http://www.softlayer.com/specials.html http://www.softlayer.com/specials.html

bprater 18y ago
I continue to hear really good things about SoftLayer. Sounds like they are doing something right.
- tdavis 18y ago
  I've yet to find anything they're doing wrong. Honestly a truly amazing hosting company.
FiReaNG3L 18y ago
Now that sound like a good deal
tlrobinson 18y ago
On top of their specials, you can also negotiate better deals with them.
- anotherjesse 18y ago
  You can but it helps to know their online offers. About a year ago I spent many hours talking with a rep who came back with the same boxes and prices we could have configured with their online system. Last week I spent a couple hours chatting with a rep for userscripts.org's new box and he did better than the online prices. I think the difference last year I approached with general requirements, so they spent all their time speccing out multiple systems and figuring out what was the best fit. My second experience I knew what I wanted, so I was able to ask for deals based on specific hardware choices.
catch23 18y ago
Why not just buy a machine and just colo it Softlayer? That way when you do need an additional 8GB, you can pay whatever the current price of 8GB is. These days you can build a 4 to 8 core machine with 16GB ecc memory for around $1500. Hardware is cheap these days... you should be putting most of the money into electricity & bandwidth.
- anotherjesse 18y ago
  For me it is worth it not to have to deal with it. For $529/mo I got: 2x Intel Xeon-Clovertown 5320L-QuadCore [1.86GHz] 4x Seagate Cheetah ST373455SS (10K SCSI drives) Hardware RAID controller 16GB RAM 2TB transfer per month. 100Mbps uplink Peace of mind Sure I could get everything but that last item for less. There is an inflection point where it is more economical to run my own hardware again but I'm not there. For a few hundred more than cost when issues occur a competent support person is helping me within minutes. When (not if) there are issues with my servers, driving to a colo would eat my savings. When you have a hardware issue at softlayer they fix it. They don't have to wait for new hardware as they have a stock. I'd rather be spending my time coding and working on features. Having your own non-mission colo-ed box is awesome, but the cases where dedicated leasing or AWS doesn't make sense are fewer and fewer for bootstrapers. Note: userscripts.org is 3 years old. It ran on a colo-ed box for a year. Then a $200 serverbeach box. But it just outgrew that ( http://userscripts.org/articles/22-2008-overview http://userscripts.org/articles/22-2008-overview for 2008 review with stats )
  - catch23 18y ago
    If you really want something that is peace-of-mind, you should just use something like rightscale.com. We have a giant ad server on there load balanced across 40 ec2 instances running perl code, seems to work well so far. Sometimes an instance will get fussy and we'll just create a new one from scratch by running scripts that essentially fetch everything needed from CPAN and installs, configures, and boots in one step. It's definitely a more expensive solution, but if you want peace of mind, that's probably the way to go.

bprater 18y ago

I continue to hear really good things about SoftLayer. Sounds like they are doing something right.

tdavis 18y ago
I've yet to find anything they're doing wrong. Honestly a truly amazing hosting company.

FiReaNG3L 18y ago

Now that sound like a good deal

tlrobinson 18y ago

On top of their specials, you can also negotiate better deals with them.

anotherjesse 18y ago
You can but it helps to know their online offers. About a year ago I spent many hours talking with a rep who came back with the same boxes and prices we could have configured with their online system. Last week I spent a couple hours chatting with a rep for userscripts.org's new box and he did better than the online prices. I think the difference last year I approached with general requirements, so they spent all their time speccing out multiple systems and figuring out what was the best fit. My second experience I knew what I wanted, so I was able to ask for deals based on specific hardware choices.

catch23 18y ago

Why not just buy a machine and just colo it Softlayer? That way when you do need an additional 8GB, you can pay whatever the current price of 8GB is. These days you can build a 4 to 8 core machine with 16GB ecc memory for around $1500. Hardware is cheap these days... you should be putting most of the money into electricity & bandwidth.

anotherjesse 18y ago
For me it is worth it not to have to deal with it. For $529/mo I got: 2x Intel Xeon-Clovertown 5320L-QuadCore [1.86GHz] 4x Seagate Cheetah ST373455SS (10K SCSI drives) Hardware RAID controller 16GB RAM 2TB transfer per month. 100Mbps uplink Peace of mind Sure I could get everything but that last item for less. There is an inflection point where it is more economical to run my own hardware again but I'm not there. For a few hundred more than cost when issues occur a competent support person is helping me within minutes. When (not if) there are issues with my servers, driving to a colo would eat my savings. When you have a hardware issue at softlayer they fix it. They don't have to wait for new hardware as they have a stock. I'd rather be spending my time coding and working on features. Having your own non-mission colo-ed box is awesome, but the cases where dedicated leasing or AWS doesn't make sense are fewer and fewer for bootstrapers. Note: userscripts.org is 3 years old. It ran on a colo-ed box for a year. Then a $200 serverbeach box. But it just outgrew that ( http://userscripts.org/articles/22-2008-overview http://userscripts.org/articles/22-2008-overview for 2008 review with stats )
- catch23 18y ago
  If you really want something that is peace-of-mind, you should just use something like rightscale.com. We have a giant ad server on there load balanced across 40 ec2 instances running perl code, seems to work well so far. Sometimes an instance will get fussy and we'll just create a new one from scratch by running scripts that essentially fetch everything needed from CPAN and installs, configures, and boots in one step. It's definitely a more expensive solution, but if you want peace of mind, that's probably the way to go.