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Though not directly related, I wonder how much web hosts like DO and Dreamhost take idle VPSes into account when thinking about their business. I imagine they'r

by dopeboy 11y ago

Though not directly related, I wonder how much web hosts like DO and Dreamhost take idle VPSes into account when thinking about their business. I imagine they're counting on some percentage of their users with the hobby plans to just have one lying around just "in case". The idle stats also probably help them claim "unlimited bandwidth & storage" (in the case of Dreamhost anyways).

toomuchtodo 11y ago
I've both worked for hosting companies, and was also a founder of one ~10 years ago. You most certainly oversell your equipment on shared plans, as its the only way to make money at scale ("we'll make it up on volume!"). Its difficult with bandwidth, but your typical brochureware/static/joomla/drupal site is going to sit idle most of the time. Also, very few sites are going to consume a significant amount of storage space, which is easily mitigate with shared filesystems (NFS back in the day, more likely Gluster or Ceph now depending on use case). Today this lives on of course: you'll notice on AWS' EC2 pricing you can get memory and CPU time commits, but Amazon doesn't give you any sort of bandwidth guarantee for your instance (I don't mean transfer in the aggregate sense, but I mean how many MB/s your instance can sustain).
- jldugger 11y ago
  For the love of god, do not deploy your webapp on gluster. Such regret.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    I keep hearing that unfortunately. Distributed POSIX filesystems are hard, although in my opinion NFSv4 has come a long way (which is why Amazon is using it for its new Elastic Filesystem offering).
- fennecfoxen 11y ago
  > You most certainly oversell your equipment on shared plans, And a lot of time that's fine; quite a few people buying shared hosting are often more concerned about not paying through the nose if their small-time site gets slashdotted than about pumping every ounce of bandwidth they can 24/7.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Oh most definitely. You'd rather not have a denial of money attack. For example, if you were hosting your static site in S3 and getting raked over the coals by Amazon for their expense transfer per GB out rate. Sometimes, better your site go down then you have a huge bill for something you're not monetizing.

by dopeboy 11y ago

toomuchtodo 11y ago

I've both worked for hosting companies, and was also a founder of one ~10 years ago. You most certainly oversell your equipment on shared plans, as its the only way to make money at scale ("we'll make it up on volume!"). Its difficult with bandwidth, but your typical brochureware/static/joomla/drupal site is going to sit idle most of the time. Also, very few sites are going to consume a significant amount of storage space, which is easily mitigate with shared filesystems (NFS back in the day, more likely Gluster or Ceph now depending on use case). Today this lives on of course: you'll notice on AWS' EC2 pricing you can get memory and CPU time commits, but Amazon doesn't give you any sort of bandwidth guarantee for your instance (I don't mean transfer in the aggregate sense, but I mean how many MB/s your instance can sustain).

jldugger 11y ago
For the love of god, do not deploy your webapp on gluster. Such regret.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I keep hearing that unfortunately. Distributed POSIX filesystems are hard, although in my opinion NFSv4 has come a long way (which is why Amazon is using it for its new Elastic Filesystem offering).
fennecfoxen 11y ago
> You most certainly oversell your equipment on shared plans, And a lot of time that's fine; quite a few people buying shared hosting are often more concerned about not paying through the nose if their small-time site gets slashdotted than about pumping every ounce of bandwidth they can 24/7.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Oh most definitely. You'd rather not have a denial of money attack. For example, if you were hosting your static site in S3 and getting raked over the coals by Amazon for their expense transfer per GB out rate. Sometimes, better your site go down then you have a huge bill for something you're not monetizing.