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And this is why my new venture will be going pinboard.in's route and hosting everything on our own machines. More work for me but vastly cheaper and hopefully a

by corford 14y ago

And this is why my new venture will be going pinboard.in's route and hosting everything on our own machines. More work for me but vastly cheaper and hopefully a lot more reliable.

joevandyk 14y ago
Just don't use EBS. Most everything else is pretty stable.
- knodi 14y ago
  Thats easier said than done.
- elliottcarlson 14y ago
  Even then, there seems to be issues with ELB currently.
  - dialtone 14y ago
    ELBs unfortunately use EBS so they are always affected in these cases.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
quaunaut 14y ago
Color me ignorant(no really, I am), but really- cheaper? I thought part of why you used AWS was because short of the biggest properties, running your own servers was more expensive?
- corford 14y ago
  The only way AWS is theoretically cheaper (and even then I find the argument a bit of a stretch) is if you factor in "sysadmin costs". The argument goes that setting up and monitoring your own servers (especially if you go colo rather than renting) is more costly in terms of labour than point and clicking it with AWS. If you strip the labour cost out of the equation, hosting it yourself can be up to an order of magnitude cheaper. Of course stripping the labour cost out is only possible if you can do it yourself :) In my case, I can (as could maciej of pinboard.in fame). Edit: also helps if you can find a well priced data centre or two. For me, I'm planning on going with hetzner.de and ovh.net
  - blacksmythe 14y ago
    >> Of course stripping the labour cost out is only possible >> if you can do it yourself :) Or assign value to your time.
    - corford 14y ago
      The value I assign to the time it takes me to setup the hosting myself is a lot less than the cost of running on AWS. Admittedly, the calculation is made easier by the fact that I'm not building the next Netflix or Heroku, however, neither are 95% of the other start ups out there.
- jdhore 14y ago
  Running your own servers costs more for engineers/devops/sysadmins, but in terms of how much you pay to your provider, hosting your own is FAR cheaper if you have more than 1 or 2 instances. You can get a 10U GigE unmetered colo for $550/month from this place on WHT: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1200231 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1200231 I'm fairly sure that if you have 10 instances at EC2, you're paying FAR more than $550/month. The other benefit EC2 gives you is quick/instant deployment of even really high-end hardware if you quickly out-pace your current capacity and need another box ASAP, whereas even if you were doing dedicated servers, it still takes a hour or two for them to put your new box in a rack and get back to you with the IP and such.
  - fusiongyro 14y ago
    I did the math a couple years ago and dedicated hosting with or without colocation was about 10x cheaper. Maybe things have changed, I dunno.
brador 14y ago
How quickly can you scale up on a spike? That's the key reason I use cloud hosting and it's something you won't know the power of until you need it.
- BryantD 14y ago
  So architect your infrastructure to handle spike loads in the cloud and baseline traffic elsewhere.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
  But couldn't you throw something like Cloudflare in front of your solution to eat some of that spike?
- corford 14y ago
  Quicker than if I was on AWS and needed to scale it up tonight :) Seriously though, because the costs are so much cheaper you just over provision the main machines slightly and keep a spare box or two ready to go. If that isn't enough to smooth out the spike then I guess at least you've got a nice problem to have.
dredmorbius 14y ago
Even if your own infrastructure relies on bare-metal hosting, odds are very good that some external service is going to be based in at least part on AWS or a constituent service for any non-trivial service offering. Your objective of being completely fault-tolerant and independent of Amazon is going to be hard to attain.
- corford 14y ago
  Good point. In my case I think I'm in the clear. The only services I'll be outsourcing are DNS (via dyn.com), backup (via rsync.net) and CDN work via Rackspace. As far as I can tell, none of them have a connection to or rely on Amazon/AWS.
- oinksoft 14y ago
  Fundamentally, Reddit is the exact same sort of website as Hacker News, but Hacker News seems to be operating fine. What are these unavoidable AWS-hosted services you're thinking of? I cannot think of any but I'm sure you know of several.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    HN doesn't serve billions of views.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    If you're running RightScale, you're relying on AWS. Parts of New Relic. An Amazon affiliate service. More generally, other tools such as a CDN, DNS, email delivery services, Facebook authentication, Twitter feeds, OpenStreetMap. Google APIs, mapping, Analytics, and others, all rely on some third-party infrastructure, if not AWS itself. I'm not saying that all sites rely on all of these, but many use one or more. The Web is becoming increasing interconnected in ways that increase fragility.

by corford 14y ago

And this is why my new venture will be going pinboard.in's route and hosting everything on our own machines. More work for me but vastly cheaper and hopefully a lot more reliable.

joevandyk 14y ago

Just don't use EBS. Most everything else is pretty stable.

knodi 14y ago
Thats easier said than done.
elliottcarlson 14y ago
Even then, there seems to be issues with ELB currently.
- dialtone 14y ago
  ELBs unfortunately use EBS so they are always affected in these cases.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

quaunaut 14y ago

Color me ignorant(no really, I am), but really- cheaper? I thought part of why you used AWS was because short of the biggest properties, running your own servers was more expensive?

corford 14y ago
The only way AWS is theoretically cheaper (and even then I find the argument a bit of a stretch) is if you factor in "sysadmin costs". The argument goes that setting up and monitoring your own servers (especially if you go colo rather than renting) is more costly in terms of labour than point and clicking it with AWS. If you strip the labour cost out of the equation, hosting it yourself can be up to an order of magnitude cheaper. Of course stripping the labour cost out is only possible if you can do it yourself :) In my case, I can (as could maciej of pinboard.in fame). Edit: also helps if you can find a well priced data centre or two. For me, I'm planning on going with hetzner.de and ovh.net
- blacksmythe 14y ago
  >> Of course stripping the labour cost out is only possible >> if you can do it yourself :) Or assign value to your time.
  - corford 14y ago
    The value I assign to the time it takes me to setup the hosting myself is a lot less than the cost of running on AWS. Admittedly, the calculation is made easier by the fact that I'm not building the next Netflix or Heroku, however, neither are 95% of the other start ups out there.
jdhore 14y ago
Running your own servers costs more for engineers/devops/sysadmins, but in terms of how much you pay to your provider, hosting your own is FAR cheaper if you have more than 1 or 2 instances. You can get a 10U GigE unmetered colo for $550/month from this place on WHT: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1200231 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1200231 I'm fairly sure that if you have 10 instances at EC2, you're paying FAR more than $550/month. The other benefit EC2 gives you is quick/instant deployment of even really high-end hardware if you quickly out-pace your current capacity and need another box ASAP, whereas even if you were doing dedicated servers, it still takes a hour or two for them to put your new box in a rack and get back to you with the IP and such.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  I did the math a couple years ago and dedicated hosting with or without colocation was about 10x cheaper. Maybe things have changed, I dunno.

brador 14y ago

How quickly can you scale up on a spike? That's the key reason I use cloud hosting and it's something you won't know the power of until you need it.

BryantD 14y ago
So architect your infrastructure to handle spike loads in the cloud and baseline traffic elsewhere.
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
But couldn't you throw something like Cloudflare in front of your solution to eat some of that spike?
corford 14y ago
Quicker than if I was on AWS and needed to scale it up tonight :) Seriously though, because the costs are so much cheaper you just over provision the main machines slightly and keep a spare box or two ready to go. If that isn't enough to smooth out the spike then I guess at least you've got a nice problem to have.

dredmorbius 14y ago

Even if your own infrastructure relies on bare-metal hosting, odds are very good that some external service is going to be based in at least part on AWS or a constituent service for any non-trivial service offering. Your objective of being completely fault-tolerant and independent of Amazon is going to be hard to attain.

corford 14y ago
Good point. In my case I think I'm in the clear. The only services I'll be outsourcing are DNS (via dyn.com), backup (via rsync.net) and CDN work via Rackspace. As far as I can tell, none of them have a connection to or rely on Amazon/AWS.
oinksoft 14y ago
Fundamentally, Reddit is the exact same sort of website as Hacker News, but Hacker News seems to be operating fine. What are these unavoidable AWS-hosted services you're thinking of? I cannot think of any but I'm sure you know of several.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  HN doesn't serve billions of views.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  If you're running RightScale, you're relying on AWS. Parts of New Relic. An Amazon affiliate service. More generally, other tools such as a CDN, DNS, email delivery services, Facebook authentication, Twitter feeds, OpenStreetMap. Google APIs, mapping, Analytics, and others, all rely on some third-party infrastructure, if not AWS itself. I'm not saying that all sites rely on all of these, but many use one or more. The Web is becoming increasing interconnected in ways that increase fragility.