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I completely agree, having co-located a few projects in my day as well as using dedicated HW through Rackspace. One of your key points is what turns some peopl

I completely agree, having co-located a few projects in my day as well as using dedicated HW through Rackspace. One of your key points is what turns some people towards more managed services: "skills to support it". I'd add time to that factor as well. If I had the support staff, I would co-locate in a second. Heck, one of our previous locations was next-door to a Level 3 co-location facility. It was pretty nice to be able to walk 10 feet and access your hardware.

jeremyjh 14y ago
Great point about the time factor. To be clear I'm not really recommending this to a startup - in a startup your time is probably too valuable for this. For myself the work is just as enjoyable as programming so it makes sense for my side-projects. I'm on-the-fence if I would actually use it in production. But its been pretty hands-free since I initially set it up. Its a pretty small sample size for time, so far it hasn't happened but I could easily have an issue that blows out a whole weekend.
rhizome 14y ago
Relatively none of the AWS/Heroku-type startups of the type most publicized on HN is spending money hiring those skills.
- Xylakant 14y ago
  There's a distinction to be made between AWS and Heroku. If you're hosting on AWS you still need to have someone who's able to maintain a server. With heroku, you don't. So the advantage of AWS over Colo is mainly scalability and the reduced need for expensive hardware. Depending on your apps load behavior, spikes can require that you keep 10 times as much HW than you'd need on the average, that's where AWS really shines. But in the end, the instances you buy at AWS are virtual servers that need a real admin.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    It's a distinction without much of a difference when most are deploying via Rubber, Vagrant, Chef/Puppet/cfengine, etc. to maintain a policy of programmer-deployers. Of course this isn't a rule, but it's prevalent.
    - Xylakant 14y ago
      No, not true. Server maintenance is a job that requires that you track what services are deployed on a server, which ones need security updates, knowledge about how to correctly configure a firewall and lots of other stuff. Deployment via Rubber/Puppet/Chef etc. only changes how you get the needed packages and configuration on the server. It doesn't tell you magically what configuration you need on a system. Nitpick: Vagrant is not a deployment system. It's an awesome tool, but it falls back to puppet/chef for the actual configuration.
      - rhizome 14y ago
        I know what server maintenance is.
        Xylakant 14y ago
        Then I don't get your point. One of the major advantages of heroku over raw AWS is that you don't need to do the server maintenance - it's all done for you. And yet you say that the distinction blurs when people use puppet - which is not true.

jeremyjh 14y ago

Great point about the time factor. To be clear I'm not really recommending this to a startup - in a startup your time is probably too valuable for this. For myself the work is just as enjoyable as programming so it makes sense for my side-projects. I'm on-the-fence if I would actually use it in production. But its been pretty hands-free since I initially set it up. Its a pretty small sample size for time, so far it hasn't happened but I could easily have an issue that blows out a whole weekend.

rhizome 14y ago

Relatively none of the AWS/Heroku-type startups of the type most publicized on HN is spending money hiring those skills.

Xylakant 14y ago
There's a distinction to be made between AWS and Heroku. If you're hosting on AWS you still need to have someone who's able to maintain a server. With heroku, you don't. So the advantage of AWS over Colo is mainly scalability and the reduced need for expensive hardware. Depending on your apps load behavior, spikes can require that you keep 10 times as much HW than you'd need on the average, that's where AWS really shines. But in the end, the instances you buy at AWS are virtual servers that need a real admin.
- rhizome 14y ago
  It's a distinction without much of a difference when most are deploying via Rubber, Vagrant, Chef/Puppet/cfengine, etc. to maintain a policy of programmer-deployers. Of course this isn't a rule, but it's prevalent.
  - Xylakant 14y ago
    No, not true. Server maintenance is a job that requires that you track what services are deployed on a server, which ones need security updates, knowledge about how to correctly configure a firewall and lots of other stuff. Deployment via Rubber/Puppet/Chef etc. only changes how you get the needed packages and configuration on the server. It doesn't tell you magically what configuration you need on a system. Nitpick: Vagrant is not a deployment system. It's an awesome tool, but it falls back to puppet/chef for the actual configuration.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      I know what server maintenance is.
      - Xylakant 14y ago
        Then I don't get your point. One of the major advantages of heroku over raw AWS is that you don't need to do the server maintenance - it's all done for you. And yet you say that the distinction blurs when people use puppet - which is not true.