I'm curious what other Startups are pursuing as a means of hosting their web apps.<p>I personally choose having a physical server at a location (I typically buy or build the server myself)<p>The basis of my choice relies on the breadth of configuration and customization that can be done when you have root access to a 100% dedicated server.<p>As a background: I'm currently working on a Startup that's in the Healthcare IT realm and the web app that we're building is very resource intensive and requires many different packages.<p>Now granted not everyone is in the same boat and doesn't require that much flexibility but I'm curious how many still do choose to have a physical dedicated server.<p>Eventually if the startup that I'm working on takes off, I will most likely need to use some sort of elastic hosting (Amazon), but this comes after you see whether your idea has legs and that you can raise funding required to build out the infrastructure required. In the meantime having a physical server cuts down on costs (no monthly recurring costs, just the 1-time fee for the server and $10/mo extra to be able to host off my Internet, and I have a fully 100% dedicated server). Best part about this option is if the Startup fails, the server can be used for the next endeavor and I'm still only paying just $10/mo for dedicated hosting.<p>Paying for a similar hosting setup that I have now would probably cost me several hundred dollars a month.<p>Please state your choice/preference below and any pros/cons that you've come across
We use both: Dedicated servers (at rackspace) running a private cloud for our website and shop plus various cloud based systems (EC2, Rackspacecloud, et al.) for testing and non-mission-critical stuff. You can create mission critical stuff on cloud servers, but you must "embrace failure", i.e. build the whole setup with failures in mind. We have an extensive post about our setup in our blog: <a href="http://www.paessler.com/blog/2011/11/15/networking-basics/failure-tolerant-online-business-step-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.paessler.com/blog/2011/11/15/networking-basics/fa...</a>
We're in between: full-on dedicated servers with SoftLayer for more intense tasks. We like being able to have other people work on the machine without having to drive to a data center in the middle of nowhere, but knowing that we have 100% of the hardware at our disposal (as opposed to virtualized disks and sporadic performance on EC2). It's really not that expensive either and we can still bring new machines online in a couple of hours if necessary.
We currently use two hand built servers that are clones of each other behind a firewall. We've replaced them recently with much faster machines, sticking our databases and indexes on SSD's etc, and we take the retired servers and give them directly to the developers so they can build and test whatever they want in the exact same environment.
We buy physical servers in a managed datacenter. They provide the box and KVM access to it. We pay a reasonable price for top of the line hardware thats not on our balance sheet. We do all of the software bits (OS, updates, deploying software) and if the server has a bad drive or somehow else breaks the data center folks deal with it.
We use 2 physical servers at Rackspace sitting behind a Cisco firewall. They are mirror images of each other and they load balance between them. Should one fail the other covers us until both are operational again. Rackspace handles hardware issues, backups, and monitoring. We do everything else via remote access.