After reading Maciej's last post about his "cathedral" of a server, I moved NewsBlur off of half a dozen Linode VPSs (512MB and 2GB machines, for app/task and db respectively) and onto a hosting provider that offered both dedicated bare metal and a variety of VPS configs.<p>I'm now paying $405 / month for 6 servers, and they range from 2 dedicated db machines with 12GB and 16GB of memory to 1GB virtualized app and task servers that cost $10 to $20 per month.<p>What I've learned is that where it really matters, in terms of I/O performance, the dedicated servers make great machines, naturally. But the insanely cheap VPSs, which I use for distributed feed fetchers (task servers) and web servers, are wonderful because they are so inexpensive. I have redundant load-balanced machines, so when I need to take down an app server or it fails for some reason, nginx immediately routes around it. And it's costing me only $10 / month per machine.<p>And task servers have served me especially well as VPS. It depends on the intensity of the task, but for such a small expense, you get 4 cores and enough memory to go nuts. And if you're pulling off a task queue, you can programmatically spin up more to deal with a higher queue load. When you move entirely to dedicated machines, your spin up time is on the order of hours to get it prepped and connected.<p>I'm just thrilled that many decent hosting providers (with <table>s for salespeople) offer both. I wouldn't last without being able to have a mixed setup.
"Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time."<p>My god that is good. I spent two weeks about three years ago going around the country looking at data centers to move our systems to (30+ servers that were currently in a co-lo and we were looking to go to managed/leased).<p>We'd get pricing estimates that changed by the time of day and who emailed it to us. The shopping process made the migration seem easy.
As someone who runs both AWS and my own dedicated servers I'm starting to see a pattern.. MBA types talk about 'new trends', 'data centric startups' and new opportunities opened up by AWS and such. OTOH practical advice from real people with successful startups - marco arment, jakewalker, others, seems to focus more on the unseen problems of virtual and advantages of just getting your own server. Am I right?
I particularly like this nugget:<p>> Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time.
I can relate to this guy. About month back I noticed that one of my servers (VPS at HostV) had dropped and hadn't come back for a week. It's used for dev stuff and acts mainly as storage for repo archives. Long story short, HostV had suffered some sort of file system problem, all my files were gone and they didn't even bother to send me an email. I can live without the files and shit happens but not emailing the customer, that's just idiotic.
One thing I additionally take into account is reviews of customers on <a href="http://www.webhostingtalk.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webhostingtalk.com/</a>
Softlayer are great at this. Their sites lists prices over $1200 but talk to sales and you can get it close to cut in half and if you order enough servers you'll get it at 75% discount. I guess the value of sales staff knowing about the customer is quite high.
comparing contegix managed hosting to others like AWS is apples and oranges. There is no level of AWS where you get a team of sysadmins answering your emails within seconds, 24/7.<p>contegix is worth every penny.
I've had several sites with Dreamhost for a long time and am very satisfied so far. They give you a lot for a low price. I don't use their Dedicated packages however, just shared and VPS.
I'm curious to know why he chose the company he did among all the companies he looked at. I agree with the concerns about the difficulty of sourcing these services, and this may be a large part of why AWS is successful-- they provide the service as a utility.<p>One of the cheaper companies on his spreadsheet is hetzner.de They have dedicated servers that go down in size to about $20 a month:
<a href="http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x2" rel="nofollow">http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x2</a><p>Note that their price includes VAT. If you're not a EU company, you don't pay the VAT and so the actual price is cheaper.<p>For our needs, we're going to start off buying a cluster. Probably 4-5 machines. As load grows, we'll add nodes and larger nodes over time. (A nice feature of Riak is that you can do this, just give the ring time to rebalance and you can migrate from one set of hosts to a larger one relatively quickly.)<p>VPS offerings lose a lot of their appeal in the face of a $20/month 1GB dedicated server! And with no setup cost, it is pretty elastic, though as you get to larger dedicated servers hetzner has a setup cost.<p>I'm not shilling for hetzner, I am just sharing them because I'm considering being a customer and and curious as to what others think about them. Also, curious if anyone else is facing the "we need to start with a cluster of machines, but we're a tiny startup at this point" issue...
<i>If your server enclosures are made of elemental silver and polished daily with static-free cloths by computer science PhDs who are related by blood to Edgar Dijkstra, then I definitely want to know about that. Put a paragraph about it right under your price chart.</i><p>Now, that certainly would be something to pay for. Who provides that?