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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 da

by 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.

by catch23 18y ago

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.