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Ran a remote dedicated server to host apps for several years. While it was an enlightening experience, it was a lot of sleepless nights and high anxiety. Traffi

Ran a remote dedicated server to host apps for several years. While it was an enlightening experience, it was a lot of sleepless nights and high anxiety. Traffic spikes, OS updates, security, and plain old downtime. I've used shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud hosting for apps. They all have their fair share of downtime, but I like shared and cloud hosting the best. It allows me to focus on development, rather than running the server.

zorlem 14y ago
So far I haven't solved the problem of keeping a non-trivial service without any interventions. How does running your servers and services on a PaaS provider solve the need for OS updates and security? What are your typical architecture and operations like? I personally think that OS updates and security fixes/hardening are crucial in all cases if you're running any production site (and even for the dev environment). Granted, some of the colocation providers don't offer services like AWS VPC (and the associated SecurityGroups and ACLs) but that's pretty rare nowadays. In all cases, and Ops or a Sysadmin person is quite important for the stability of your business. The only big advantage I see about using PaaS is the rapid and flexible provisioning of new instances in case you need them. That's why the best solution to me, so far, has been running a combination of bare-metal servers with optional provisioning of additional cloud instances if you need them. The price difference can go to orders of magnitude (even if you factor in the costs of paying somebody to be a system administrator and take care of your servers). Edit: added the last paragraph
seunosewa 14y ago
The issues you had with dedicated servers are easy to fix: Traffic Spikes: Implement caching (most spikes are read-only). Implement queueing of expensive but less essential operations, so they can be delayed during traffic spikes. Make sure your CPU & RAM are 1.5 - 2x what you need. (Don't worry, it will still be cheaper than AWS) Plain Old Downtime: Network outages happen with cloud hosts too. Focus on development: Cloud servers are unmanaged too. OS Updates & Security: This is no more an issue on dedicated servers than it is on cloud servers. It's an OS issue. Were you running Windows Servers. That's the problem!

zorlem 14y ago

So far I haven't solved the problem of keeping a non-trivial service without any interventions. How does running your servers and services on a PaaS provider solve the need for OS updates and security? What are your typical architecture and operations like? I personally think that OS updates and security fixes/hardening are crucial in all cases if you're running any production site (and even for the dev environment). Granted, some of the colocation providers don't offer services like AWS VPC (and the associated SecurityGroups and ACLs) but that's pretty rare nowadays. In all cases, and Ops or a Sysadmin person is quite important for the stability of your business. The only big advantage I see about using PaaS is the rapid and flexible provisioning of new instances in case you need them. That's why the best solution to me, so far, has been running a combination of bare-metal servers with optional provisioning of additional cloud instances if you need them. The price difference can go to orders of magnitude (even if you factor in the costs of paying somebody to be a system administrator and take care of your servers). Edit: added the last paragraph

seunosewa 14y ago

The issues you had with dedicated servers are easy to fix: Traffic Spikes: Implement caching (most spikes are read-only). Implement queueing of expensive but less essential operations, so they can be delayed during traffic spikes. Make sure your CPU & RAM are 1.5 - 2x what you need. (Don't worry, it will still be cheaper than AWS) Plain Old Downtime: Network outages happen with cloud hosts too. Focus on development: Cloud servers are unmanaged too. OS Updates & Security: This is no more an issue on dedicated servers than it is on cloud servers. It's an OS issue. Were you running Windows Servers. That's the problem!