5 ms·

It's even cheaper if you build your servers yourself and colocate them at a datacenter. Of course, not every company has a sysadmin, but if you do, you will sav

by schammy 17y ago

It's even cheaper if you build your servers yourself and colocate them at a datacenter. Of course, not every company has a sysadmin, but if you do, you will save a bundle. This also means supporting them yourself, though, which at times can suck a fat one. At Clicky, we have almost 30 servers, all of which we built ourselves. Up front cost is about $1500 per server, and monthly cost is $75 each. If we were leasing servers of similar capacity (RAID, 8GB+ RAM each) they would cost us a minimum of $400 per server per month, which would total close to $12,000 per month. By doing stuff ourselves we instead pay around $3500 per month (~$2000 hosting, and approx. 1 new server installed per month). That's serious money in the bank. I'm not counting sysadmin salary in that figure though, because I am the sysadmin. Still, if you have the capability, it's worth it.

mtw 17y ago
also the good thing about getting your own servers is having hardware options (like getting SSD drives instead of the regular ones, having a video card (if you do media transcoding), etc.)
- jawngee 17y ago
  You don't need a video card for media transcoding.
  - Periodic 17y ago
    But it can make it much faster. Video cards optimized for a lot of those video-related operations.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - listic 17y ago
    But video transcoding can be faster by a factor of several, if done on a GPU. That's a big deal for those who do video transcoding all the time. The irony is that GPU is a more powerful processor than CPU, just not as versatile and easy to use (only a small subset of programming tools can use it yet) but it changes.
    - jawngee 17y ago
      Show me an open source encoder with GPU support. From my research, when you are doing high quality encodings the speed difference is negligible at best. Also, at web scale encoding time isn't nearly as important as the ability to go parallel which is significantly cheaper and easier to scale using a bunch of EC2 instances. We process 2-300 videos a month, though during competitions we process 10x that in a month. All of the bandwidth, storage, processing is less than $10K a year with an average encoding FPS of 33fps. I would love pointers to sources if this isn't the case and I can do this for massify cheaper. Would be appreciated. EDIT: We also encode 2-3 different versions of the video at varying sizes and bitrates.
      - mey 17y ago
        Lookup CUDA For example http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html#state=detailsOpen;aid=71454a1e-2588-4983-85bd-578a6d501c65 http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html#state=detailsOpe...
        jawngee 17y ago
        There aren't any open source CUDA apps that do transcoding, so far they are all Windows apps. And non-scriptable ones at that, which rules out web scale.
        mey 17y ago
        My point isn't so much picking something off the shelf, its more develop something for yourself. If "web scale" means that the ROI is greater then development effort plus hardware acquisitions compared to your current system then do it.
      - adnam 17y ago
        > Show me an open source encoder with GPU support Have you tried Fluendo? I think it has GPU support to a certain extent. Not sure if this is a help, but here you go: https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/wiki/GPUSupport https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/wiki/GPUSupport
pyre 17y ago
Well, as long as you're making less than $102k/year as a sysadmin for them, they are still saving money on the monthly bill.
- jhancock 17y ago
  sysadmin duties is not always a full-time job. I have a single server in production (4 cores, 8GB, RAID-1). I own it and pay a reasonably-low monthly fee to run it at a good data center through a small provider that has solid skills to back me up if I run into something out of my league. I spent some time installing and configuring it. I documented my install very well. I rarely touch it now. Backups are automated. It runs smooth. If I do have trouble, I have my docs to go back to. Most likely any trouble will be hardware failure. That's the biggest risk of running your own server and only having one. So far, its been 4 years in operation and has more than paid for itself. I have horsepower, memory, and disk space to spare. At this point, if I had a hardware failure expensive enough that caused me to want to toss the server and start over, I could be back up on something new in a day thanks to my trusty docs. So far, 4 years, zero downtime!! The last year, I spend about 2 hours a month doing sysadmin stuff.
mechanical_fish 17y ago
I'm not counting sysadmin salary in that figure though, because I am the sysadmin. I think your accounting technique needs to be refined. The time which you routinely spend each month, setting up and updating these systems, is a cost. When a system goes down and you must drop whatever you're doing to fix it, that context switch is an additional cost. Especially if it costs you a night's sleep. You might lose days of productivity on your regular job. When something happens that you didn't foresee, and that you have no experience with -- you are, after all, only a part-time sysadmin, not a professional cloud administrator -- and you have to spend days reading manuals and nagging Dell vendors on the phone, that's a cost. One that is easy to overlook in advance (who likes to sit around, dreaming up the improbable but scary ways that your systems might fail?) but which is very real when averaged over time. And when you get tired of playing sysadmin in your spare time and decide to stop -- perhaps by quitting your job -- replacing you is going to cost your company a fortune, especially if they end up hiring the wrong person, who accidentally corrupts two years' worth of backups and then drops the main database. The thing about paying (e.g.) Amazon is that it isn't just a way of hiring a competent part-time sysadmin. It's also an algorithm for hiring a series of future part-time sysadmins: As long as you keep paying Amazon, they will probably keep finding and hiring the right people. (They are, after all, more experienced at finding good sysadmins than you are.) Or, if they fail at that task, perhaps one of their thousands of other customers will discover that fact before you have to, and you'll hear the news early enough to make a clean and event-free migration to another provider.
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  Paying Amazon does not negate the need for a sysadmin!! Someone still needs to manage all of the software, os, networking and upgrade stuff. Only the hardware part is taken care of for you (which is a relatively small amount.)
  - Periodic 17y ago
    I've seen a few people hand wave around the costs of sys admins and claim that since they have a bunch of cloud-based systems they don't have to worry about it. Then a few days later they complain about getting the APIs to work and their custom software they had to write to store things to S3 instead of local disk. It's a hard trade off to make and I would suggest the following: Go where your strengths are and outsource where they aren't. You can generally save money by doing something yourself, all other things being equal, but you'll generally lose money if you don't know what you're doing and could have hired a professional.
lsc 17y ago
where are you hosted? Also, at 8GiB each, I assume you are using single-socket servers. How come you aren't using dual-socket servers? my experience has been that it's cheaper per gigabyte ram, per watt power, and per core.
lsc 17y ago
are you sure that renting a 8GiB single socket server would cost $400 a month? I wasn't able to rent any at half that price. Hell, I haven't been able to rent 8 core 32GiB ram servers for that much. http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Servers_of_opportunity http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Servers_of_opp... - not one bite at that price. (I've rented a bunch at high setup/low monthly deals... but I'm not doing that anymore. It makes more sense to split them up and sell them as virtual private servers)
- dejb 17y ago
  It might be more marketing and product related in your case. Also when people get to the $400 level they probably want to know that there is someone they can call you can physically access the server 24/7. It isn't clear that this is the case from your material. I'm a VPS customer by the way. Reliable service from what I've seen but I found it a little too 'bared bones'. Wasn't expecting to have to install and configure Apache, Mysql etc. Maybe I chose the wrong image or something. Great for an existing or aspiring sysadmin but too tough for me. But I'm tempted to hold onto the VPS 'just in case' at those prices.
  - lsc 17y ago
    ah. thanks. Yeah. My setup is very bare bones, and you do need a SysAdmin. I am focusing on creating a flexible and inexpensive system where it is possible to do everything you want to do, before I'm going to spend time making a system that makes it easier to do specific things. For instance, I let you run any paravirtualized kernel you like, and you can change kernels without my help. (well, any kernel that works with pvgrub. I've not gotten OpenSolaris working with PVGRUB, though it seems to work on my systems with PyGRUB. ) Yeah, there are many customers who want an easy web-based control panel, and they are better off with linode or slicehost. There are many of us who prefer the command line, though. Scaling a support organization is very difficult, and it's much cheaper, easier, less stressful and more fun to support people who are willing to figure things out for themselves, so why not target those people, and pass on the savings? I'm ramen profitable now at 600 customers; if I double in size again, I'll be edging into the 'more money than I could hope to make from a salary job' range. So I don't need to target everyone. I'm happy in my niche. I'm trying to get something together so that you can build images and share them, like you can for ec2. (only I'm trying to do it with kickstart-like systems, rather than with images, which I think mitigates most of the trust issues. Usually kickstart-like systems result in much 'cleaner' systems; systems that are easier to upgrade.) Personally, I think the biggest weakness of prgmr.com right now is provisioning delay. I need to automate that (and really have no excuse for not doing so before now) as part of that, I need to setup a system where users can do automated 'network installs' of many systems. As for support, yea most of my competitors have better staff hours and better response times than I do. But then, I think I can say that I'm a little bit more experienced than most front-line tech support people. This is the usual small company/large company tradeoff. (and yes, I sleep about 30 minutes from the data center, but hey, you have a serial console, so I expect you to be able to figure most things out yourself.)

by schammy 17y ago

mtw 17y ago

also the good thing about getting your own servers is having hardware options (like getting SSD drives instead of the regular ones, having a video card (if you do media transcoding), etc.)

jawngee 17y ago
You don't need a video card for media transcoding.
- Periodic 17y ago
  But it can make it much faster. Video cards optimized for a lot of those video-related operations.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- listic 17y ago
  But video transcoding can be faster by a factor of several, if done on a GPU. That's a big deal for those who do video transcoding all the time. The irony is that GPU is a more powerful processor than CPU, just not as versatile and easy to use (only a small subset of programming tools can use it yet) but it changes.
  - jawngee 17y ago
    Show me an open source encoder with GPU support. From my research, when you are doing high quality encodings the speed difference is negligible at best. Also, at web scale encoding time isn't nearly as important as the ability to go parallel which is significantly cheaper and easier to scale using a bunch of EC2 instances. We process 2-300 videos a month, though during competitions we process 10x that in a month. All of the bandwidth, storage, processing is less than $10K a year with an average encoding FPS of 33fps. I would love pointers to sources if this isn't the case and I can do this for massify cheaper. Would be appreciated. EDIT: We also encode 2-3 different versions of the video at varying sizes and bitrates.
    - mey 17y ago
      Lookup CUDA For example http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html#state=detailsOpen;aid=71454a1e-2588-4983-85bd-578a6d501c65 http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html#state=detailsOpe...
      - jawngee 17y ago
        There aren't any open source CUDA apps that do transcoding, so far they are all Windows apps. And non-scriptable ones at that, which rules out web scale.
        mey 17y ago
        My point isn't so much picking something off the shelf, its more develop something for yourself. If "web scale" means that the ROI is greater then development effort plus hardware acquisitions compared to your current system then do it.
    - adnam 17y ago
      > Show me an open source encoder with GPU support Have you tried Fluendo? I think it has GPU support to a certain extent. Not sure if this is a help, but here you go: https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/wiki/GPUSupport https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/wiki/GPUSupport

pyre 17y ago

Well, as long as you're making less than $102k/year as a sysadmin for them, they are still saving money on the monthly bill.

jhancock 17y ago
sysadmin duties is not always a full-time job. I have a single server in production (4 cores, 8GB, RAID-1). I own it and pay a reasonably-low monthly fee to run it at a good data center through a small provider that has solid skills to back me up if I run into something out of my league. I spent some time installing and configuring it. I documented my install very well. I rarely touch it now. Backups are automated. It runs smooth. If I do have trouble, I have my docs to go back to. Most likely any trouble will be hardware failure. That's the biggest risk of running your own server and only having one. So far, its been 4 years in operation and has more than paid for itself. I have horsepower, memory, and disk space to spare. At this point, if I had a hardware failure expensive enough that caused me to want to toss the server and start over, I could be back up on something new in a day thanks to my trusty docs. So far, 4 years, zero downtime!! The last year, I spend about 2 hours a month doing sysadmin stuff.

mechanical_fish 17y ago

I'm not counting sysadmin salary in that figure though, because I am the sysadmin. I think your accounting technique needs to be refined. The time which you routinely spend each month, setting up and updating these systems, is a cost. When a system goes down and you must drop whatever you're doing to fix it, that context switch is an additional cost. Especially if it costs you a night's sleep. You might lose days of productivity on your regular job. When something happens that you didn't foresee, and that you have no experience with -- you are, after all, only a part-time sysadmin, not a professional cloud administrator -- and you have to spend days reading manuals and nagging Dell vendors on the phone, that's a cost. One that is easy to overlook in advance (who likes to sit around, dreaming up the improbable but scary ways that your systems might fail?) but which is very real when averaged over time. And when you get tired of playing sysadmin in your spare time and decide to stop -- perhaps by quitting your job -- replacing you is going to cost your company a fortune, especially if they end up hiring the wrong person, who accidentally corrupts two years' worth of backups and then drops the main database. The thing about paying (e.g.) Amazon is that it isn't just a way of hiring a competent part-time sysadmin. It's also an algorithm for hiring a series of future part-time sysadmins: As long as you keep paying Amazon, they will probably keep finding and hiring the right people. (They are, after all, more experienced at finding good sysadmins than you are.) Or, if they fail at that task, perhaps one of their thousands of other customers will discover that fact before you have to, and you'll hear the news early enough to make a clean and event-free migration to another provider.

aaronblohowiak 17y ago
Paying Amazon does not negate the need for a sysadmin!! Someone still needs to manage all of the software, os, networking and upgrade stuff. Only the hardware part is taken care of for you (which is a relatively small amount.)
- Periodic 17y ago
  I've seen a few people hand wave around the costs of sys admins and claim that since they have a bunch of cloud-based systems they don't have to worry about it. Then a few days later they complain about getting the APIs to work and their custom software they had to write to store things to S3 instead of local disk. It's a hard trade off to make and I would suggest the following: Go where your strengths are and outsource where they aren't. You can generally save money by doing something yourself, all other things being equal, but you'll generally lose money if you don't know what you're doing and could have hired a professional.

lsc 17y ago

where are you hosted? Also, at 8GiB each, I assume you are using single-socket servers. How come you aren't using dual-socket servers? my experience has been that it's cheaper per gigabyte ram, per watt power, and per core.

lsc 17y ago

are you sure that renting a 8GiB single socket server would cost $400 a month? I wasn't able to rent any at half that price. Hell, I haven't been able to rent 8 core 32GiB ram servers for that much. http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Servers_of_opportunity http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Servers_of_opp... - not one bite at that price. (I've rented a bunch at high setup/low monthly deals... but I'm not doing that anymore. It makes more sense to split them up and sell them as virtual private servers)

dejb 17y ago
It might be more marketing and product related in your case. Also when people get to the $400 level they probably want to know that there is someone they can call you can physically access the server 24/7. It isn't clear that this is the case from your material. I'm a VPS customer by the way. Reliable service from what I've seen but I found it a little too 'bared bones'. Wasn't expecting to have to install and configure Apache, Mysql etc. Maybe I chose the wrong image or something. Great for an existing or aspiring sysadmin but too tough for me. But I'm tempted to hold onto the VPS 'just in case' at those prices.
- lsc 17y ago
  ah. thanks. Yeah. My setup is very bare bones, and you do need a SysAdmin. I am focusing on creating a flexible and inexpensive system where it is possible to do everything you want to do, before I'm going to spend time making a system that makes it easier to do specific things. For instance, I let you run any paravirtualized kernel you like, and you can change kernels without my help. (well, any kernel that works with pvgrub. I've not gotten OpenSolaris working with PVGRUB, though it seems to work on my systems with PyGRUB. ) Yeah, there are many customers who want an easy web-based control panel, and they are better off with linode or slicehost. There are many of us who prefer the command line, though. Scaling a support organization is very difficult, and it's much cheaper, easier, less stressful and more fun to support people who are willing to figure things out for themselves, so why not target those people, and pass on the savings? I'm ramen profitable now at 600 customers; if I double in size again, I'll be edging into the 'more money than I could hope to make from a salary job' range. So I don't need to target everyone. I'm happy in my niche. I'm trying to get something together so that you can build images and share them, like you can for ec2. (only I'm trying to do it with kickstart-like systems, rather than with images, which I think mitigates most of the trust issues. Usually kickstart-like systems result in much 'cleaner' systems; systems that are easier to upgrade.) Personally, I think the biggest weakness of prgmr.com right now is provisioning delay. I need to automate that (and really have no excuse for not doing so before now) as part of that, I need to setup a system where users can do automated 'network installs' of many systems. As for support, yea most of my competitors have better staff hours and better response times than I do. But then, I think I can say that I'm a little bit more experienced than most front-line tech support people. This is the usual small company/large company tradeoff. (and yes, I sleep about 30 minutes from the data center, but hey, you have a serial console, so I expect you to be able to figure most things out yourself.)