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When evaluating hosting providers, the quote Engineyard gave us was tremendously expensive. They offered a great deal of value-added services, but we found tha

When evaluating hosting providers, the quote Engineyard gave us was tremendously expensive. They offered a great deal of value-added services, but we found that it would be cheaper to go with the second-most expensive option (Amazon EC2) while also hiring a qualified full-time sysadmin. Whether this was a wise choice or not given our experience with EC2 is up for debate. But even if we had gone with Engineyard and had no problems at all it would be hard to justify a couple developer's salaries for it.

lsb 17y ago
Just out of curiosity, what were your options that were cheaper than EC2, and why'd you reject them?
- Periodic 17y ago
  Please, write it up and post it to HN! It deserves its own discussion.
- stephenjudkins 17y ago
  There were several hosting services that were a good deal cheaper. It costs $576/mo to run an extra large EC2 instance fulltime, while purchasing a server with similar specs only costs $2k or so. The data center across town could give us an equal number of server power for much cheaper. We're in our own data center right now, in another city, and we simply have a contractor we pay to go in and occasionally replace broken equipment. It really is quite cheap to do it this way. Various hosts offered greater degrees of managed services at various prices. None really offered the flexibility that EC2 offered, or offered that much over simply colocating our own servers. With less traffic or fewer servers I can see many of these hosts being a great deal. There also were several places that gave us completely screwy quotes that I can imagine were only meant to trick CEOs who don't know any better. One example is a place that offered us the use of an HTTP load balancer for the "low, low price" of $1000 a month. A lot of places offered expensive managed services, but when talking to the people who would serve us it was clear they didn't know what they were talking about. We did not seriously consider these places. To Engineyard's credit, they were only managed host who sounded like they had knowledge that would be really valuable to us. They also made clear that they would devote significant resources to getting our site working smoothly. We would have paid a premium for this service, but not the premium they asked. EC2 offers an amazing amount of flexibility that we found highly valuable. A sysadmin and developer spent most of a day diagnosing an issue with a DB server that ended up being a flaky drive. In EC2, we would have simply killed the server, fired up a new instance, waited an hour for its replication to catch up, and returned it to the rotation. To return to EC2 we would have to drastically reduce the load on our MySQL instances, since we found that EBS volumes had somewhat unpredictable and not that great performance. Reducing our reliance on MySQL is something we're doing anyways, since on its current course it would have been difficult and expensive to continue scaling up in any data center.
  - lsb 17y ago
    Not to second-guess you, but extra-large reserved instances going full-time for 3 years go for $250/mo via http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/08/lower-pricing-for-amazon-ec2-reserved-instances.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/08/lower-pricing-for-amazon-...
marclove 17y ago
Its worth noting that you get more than just EC2 + a full-time sysadmin with EY (speaking as an EY customer myself), and I don't mean this to question your own decision...that's something we all have to make considering the budgets we have available. With EY, you get EC2 + several heavily experienced sysadmins who work every day on the exact stack that you're working with...they know it in and out like the back of their hand + the EY stack which has been battle-tested for several years now in all sorts of unique situations + performance that you couldn't replicate yourself without all that experience. Again, not attacking your choice at all, I'm just saying that its hard to appreciate all that you're getting until you actually use the service and once you are, its easy to justify the costs.
- stephenjudkins 17y ago
  Yes, Engineyard offered by far the best impression of competence and having sysadmins who would actually work well with us. We've heard great things from everyone we've heard of who uses them. I've also heard great things about the Porsche 911 turbo from everyone who drives one. We were expecting a very expensive quote, but we were all surprised by how high it actually was.

lsb 17y ago

Just out of curiosity, what were your options that were cheaper than EC2, and why'd you reject them?

Periodic 17y ago
Please, write it up and post it to HN! It deserves its own discussion.
stephenjudkins 17y ago
There were several hosting services that were a good deal cheaper. It costs $576/mo to run an extra large EC2 instance fulltime, while purchasing a server with similar specs only costs $2k or so. The data center across town could give us an equal number of server power for much cheaper. We're in our own data center right now, in another city, and we simply have a contractor we pay to go in and occasionally replace broken equipment. It really is quite cheap to do it this way. Various hosts offered greater degrees of managed services at various prices. None really offered the flexibility that EC2 offered, or offered that much over simply colocating our own servers. With less traffic or fewer servers I can see many of these hosts being a great deal. There also were several places that gave us completely screwy quotes that I can imagine were only meant to trick CEOs who don't know any better. One example is a place that offered us the use of an HTTP load balancer for the "low, low price" of $1000 a month. A lot of places offered expensive managed services, but when talking to the people who would serve us it was clear they didn't know what they were talking about. We did not seriously consider these places. To Engineyard's credit, they were only managed host who sounded like they had knowledge that would be really valuable to us. They also made clear that they would devote significant resources to getting our site working smoothly. We would have paid a premium for this service, but not the premium they asked. EC2 offers an amazing amount of flexibility that we found highly valuable. A sysadmin and developer spent most of a day diagnosing an issue with a DB server that ended up being a flaky drive. In EC2, we would have simply killed the server, fired up a new instance, waited an hour for its replication to catch up, and returned it to the rotation. To return to EC2 we would have to drastically reduce the load on our MySQL instances, since we found that EBS volumes had somewhat unpredictable and not that great performance. Reducing our reliance on MySQL is something we're doing anyways, since on its current course it would have been difficult and expensive to continue scaling up in any data center.
- lsb 17y ago
  Not to second-guess you, but extra-large reserved instances going full-time for 3 years go for $250/mo via http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/08/lower-pricing-for-amazon-ec2-reserved-instances.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/08/lower-pricing-for-amazon-...

marclove 17y ago

Its worth noting that you get more than just EC2 + a full-time sysadmin with EY (speaking as an EY customer myself), and I don't mean this to question your own decision...that's something we all have to make considering the budgets we have available. With EY, you get EC2 + several heavily experienced sysadmins who work every day on the exact stack that you're working with...they know it in and out like the back of their hand + the EY stack which has been battle-tested for several years now in all sorts of unique situations + performance that you couldn't replicate yourself without all that experience. Again, not attacking your choice at all, I'm just saying that its hard to appreciate all that you're getting until you actually use the service and once you are, its easy to justify the costs.

stephenjudkins 17y ago
Yes, Engineyard offered by far the best impression of competence and having sysadmins who would actually work well with us. We've heard great things from everyone we've heard of who uses them. I've also heard great things about the Porsche 911 turbo from everyone who drives one. We were expecting a very expensive quote, but we were all surprised by how high it actually was.