4 ms·

$100/month doesn't really matter to a real business. By the time you are paying employees, renting offices, buying equipment, paying for book-keeping and tax se

$100/month doesn't really matter to a real business. By the time you are paying employees, renting offices, buying equipment, paying for book-keeping and tax services, and other things, you stop caring about $100/month. What you do care about is starting a new project like moving to a colo, which will take up time, money, and distract you from your mission. I think it would be better to put it this way - if you care about $100/month, you should consider co-locating. Otherwise, you need other reasons.

jeremyjh 14y ago
I agree completely, but the OP is talking about a handful of Linodes and he's looking at cost so I would think he fits the bill there. I don't think a start-up should spend their time on Colo. A small business - maybe - the question should be, how big a part of your total expenses is your hosting and bandwidth. For some businesses like a very busy blog, hosting may be a very big part of their total costs (and a meaningful number in absolute terms).
- taligent 14y ago
  Well firstly the OP would be crazy to go with Linode. Secondly there is actually little difference between the amount of time spent managing a VPS versus a dedicated or colo. Hardware failures aren't going to be your biggest concern. It's going to be services going down, database misbehaving, OS misconfigurations, general scaling issues, network dropping out etc e.g. witness all of the AWS/Linode outages almost all of which are due to DC power/networking. And the fact is that my Mac Mini has an equivalent Unixbench/disk test as the Linode instances + AWS m1.xlarge. So it gives you an idea of how much better performance and value you will get from a dedicated or colo.
  - thaumaturgy 14y ago
    You need to qualify your first statement: "the OP would be crazy to go with Linode [because I disagree with how they handled a particular security-related incident]." You should be as transparent as you expect other entities to be.
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  I agree with you. I think this is a good time to (again) point to Pinboard's "The Five Stages of Hosting": http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/ http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/ You should move up the hosting chain as your needs demand it, and not before. Yes, you'll pay more for cloud-hosted solutions, but if one of the racked servers has a power supply failure or a motherboard failure or bad RAM or a failed drive, that's their problem to deal with, not yours -- and at the moment, most of the cloud providers seem to be very good at dealing with it. All of those things are a distraction, and worse still, if you don't have multiple layers of redundancy -- which will add to your costs -- then they can result in down time for your service, which is bad. I, personally, would not move to a dedicated server until the costs for required resources became so egregious in the cloud that I could no longer afford not to use a dedicated server.

jeremyjh 14y ago

I agree completely, but the OP is talking about a handful of Linodes and he's looking at cost so I would think he fits the bill there. I don't think a start-up should spend their time on Colo. A small business - maybe - the question should be, how big a part of your total expenses is your hosting and bandwidth. For some businesses like a very busy blog, hosting may be a very big part of their total costs (and a meaningful number in absolute terms).

taligent 14y ago
Well firstly the OP would be crazy to go with Linode. Secondly there is actually little difference between the amount of time spent managing a VPS versus a dedicated or colo. Hardware failures aren't going to be your biggest concern. It's going to be services going down, database misbehaving, OS misconfigurations, general scaling issues, network dropping out etc e.g. witness all of the AWS/Linode outages almost all of which are due to DC power/networking. And the fact is that my Mac Mini has an equivalent Unixbench/disk test as the Linode instances + AWS m1.xlarge. So it gives you an idea of how much better performance and value you will get from a dedicated or colo.
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  You need to qualify your first statement: "the OP would be crazy to go with Linode [because I disagree with how they handled a particular security-related incident]." You should be as transparent as you expect other entities to be.
thaumaturgy 14y ago
I agree with you. I think this is a good time to (again) point to Pinboard's "The Five Stages of Hosting": http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/ http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/ You should move up the hosting chain as your needs demand it, and not before. Yes, you'll pay more for cloud-hosted solutions, but if one of the racked servers has a power supply failure or a motherboard failure or bad RAM or a failed drive, that's their problem to deal with, not yours -- and at the moment, most of the cloud providers seem to be very good at dealing with it. All of those things are a distraction, and worse still, if you don't have multiple layers of redundancy -- which will add to your costs -- then they can result in down time for your service, which is bad. I, personally, would not move to a dedicated server until the costs for required resources became so egregious in the cloud that I could no longer afford not to use a dedicated server.