7 ms·

Servers Deleted

52 points by steiza 16y ago

sramov 16y ago
I can only imagine the horror of running a hosting company. If you want to do it properly, there is no end to complexity. Not to mention the money part. I've always dreamed about running my own niche hosting business, running on dead-stripped Slackware custom boxes for actual serving/hosting and OpenBSD for routers/firewalls/spamd daemons (actually I would not deal with email at all as it is a separate business in itself) etc. All it takes is few seconds thinking about it and then realizing what a crazy talk that is. So hats off to providers with a clue! As for the 99% of cookie-cutter companies/resellers, do a favor to everyone and close your doors.
- bcx 16y ago
  Running a hosting company was actually a pretty profitable business back in the 90s. (It probably still can be if you have a really solid niche). I should write some blog posts on our experience (there were many positives).
  - mstevens 16y ago
    I've been vaguely speculating to myself lately that two good niches might be: * email * good customer service for a price
chuhnk 16y ago
Well this is a given right? I've seen this tip given time and time again, dont scale before you have to. Some may completely object to that but if you are a startup and just trying to get going, grab a server or some resources in the cloud, write your minimum viable product and launch. If you cant handle the load, then scale. Yes you should have a "plan" but that doesnt mean you have to execute it until necessary. I began my life at a startup 1 year after launch. 3 Servers, 1 web server, 2 app/db servers. As load increased and our needs changed we moved to a more complex structure, 2 load balancers with failover, 2 web servers and still 2 app/db servers but beefier. When life got harder we started optimizing web servers software and the database. When traffic grew past that along came another server cluster scaling us to an even greater degree. Do we deal with hardware ourselves? No, managed hosting with dedicated servers. Why? Because we want to let someone else deal with the hardware problems. The cloud doesnt have the resources we need. We scale when we HAVE to, as in the site is going down every day because we cant handle the traffic. We run leaner than some of our competitors and we know this because some of them have gone public with their costs, number of developers and server architecture. 1. Have a plan 2. Find a hosting company you can scale with easily 3. Use the minimal resources necessary 4. When you have to scale determine the cost of optimization vs just adding more hardware. 5. Be Lean
- bcx 16y ago
  I guess what I was trying to say was don't worry about over scaling. But take some time to make sure you aren't over scaling for 6 months in a row :-). So I'd argue. for #3 3) Don't stress out about the minimal resources necessary from day one. Figure out what the minimal resources are over time, and just take advantage of the fact you can delete servers.
there 16y ago
or just lease servers from a "dedicated hosting" company. you get all the benefits of a colocated server (customizability, security, performance) and you can let them deal with hardware failures, upgrades, and obsolescence.
- dpcan 16y ago
  Even this grows into a nightmare. I've been moving dedicated servers to cloud / virtual solutions for the last 4 months. I'm in love with Rackspace Cloud stuff and their support, and will end up saving thousands while providing my clients with a state of the art email system and more redundancy. Plus, with their cloud servers I can replicate and backup easily.
  - there 16y ago
    you didn't explain how it "grows into a nightmare". just pricing or what? i just used rackspace's pricing tool to price out what a virtual server would cost with the same amount of ram and bandwidth i get from one of my dedicated servers; the cloud solution was about $40/month higher.
- bcx 16y ago
  Has anyone done the cost equations? And I'd imagine migration is a bitch on dedicated hosting.
ErrantX 16y ago
I keep meaning to blog about something like this. After my old web host made me really mad the other month I decided to grab a load of virtual servers and be my own web host (hosting client sites, projects etc.) So now I have DNS, database/web servers etc. all under my control on shares that I can chop/change at will. It's turned out to be phenomenally cheaper! Than having 1 dedicated server and a shard hosting package.
- cmelbye 16y ago
  I'd be very interested in seeing a blog post detailing that. That would be very useful for hosting client projects. I'm working on a project that aims to be similar to Heroku but runnable on a handful of virtual servers from any VPS service.
  - jackowayed 16y ago
    Phusion Passenger 3 is going to have a feature similar to that: http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/07/01/the-road-to-passenger-3-technology-preview-3-closing-the-gap-between-development-and-production-rethinking-the-word-easy/ http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/07/01/the-road-to-passenger-3-te... >Imagine having a directory full of Ruby web apps, e.g. ~/Sites. To deploy an app, just drop your application’s directory into ~/Sites. To undeploy it, remove the application’s directory. The application directory’s name is used as the domain name. No manually signaling the web server for a restart.
    - cmelbye 16y ago
      While that sounds very useful, what I'm working on is more along the lines of Heroku's distributed dyno model. In their terminology, a dyno is a Thin web application server process. When an app needs to be started up, it will be possible to determine how many dynos are needed, and they will be automatically started up across the grid of virtual servers and balanced using a custom load balancer.
  - ErrantX 16y ago
    Done: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498399 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498399 If there is anything else you want to know about it, well.. you know the drill :)
cullenking 16y ago
The expense of going with a cloud solution is huge if you have a complicated deployment stack and large hardware requirements. my startup will easily grow into the single 8gig/1tb quad core box we are colocating, and far exceed it when we start seeing some real traffic. From what I expect to need in hardware, I would be sitting at over $3k a month in expense moving to Rackspace Cloud. Ignoring upfront cost of the servers, around $10k, colocating will only run me about $300 a month. I understand you don't have to worry about hardware issues, but I could literally hire a sysadmin to worry about hardware issues for that kind of money. It just doesn't make sense outside of well funded startups or established businesses.
- bcx 16y ago
  Could you elaborate more about why you needed to spend $10K up front? And how you take advantage of your one giant server? Are you using Xen to virtualize a bunch of servers on it? I've always figured colocation + System Admin ends up costing more than a cloud solution. Especially when you need to have enough redundancy so that you don't fall over if a single server fails. In the cloud if a single server fails, it's their problem. In physical space it's your problem or your system admin's problem. How much time can you spare?
  - cullenking 16y ago
    My wording wasn't too clear, sorry. I didn't mean I have spent that money, just that my planned hardware buildout will cost somewhere around $10k to start. Our single server was about $2k to put together 1.5 years ago. We use it for everything - mysql, redis, pool of unicorns, nginx proxying to unicorn pool and a handful of background workers (resque). I have already dealt with drive failures, but I loaded up the 8 hotswappable bays with drives, so it wasn't too scary. However, I am scared for other hardware failure, which is why I want some more machines. I am not using Xen. I can see the benefit for some stuff, but I don't believe it's beneficial for my use case. However, I will make that decision in a more informed manner when I am actually in a position to expand our hardware (money and need). I don't think the colocation costs more. Seriously, I have had great use out of my current server. I figure with a colocated set of 4 servers, $10k initial expenditure + $300 a month for 2 years is $17200, or I can go with rackspace and pay $3000 a month for 2 years, and be $72,000 in the hole. Oh, and after that two years, I don't even have spare hardware to play with!

52 points by steiza 16y ago

I can only imagine the horror of running a hosting company. If you want to do it properly, there is no end to complexity. Not to mention the money part. I've always dreamed about running my own niche hosting business, running on dead-stripped Slackware custom boxes for actual serving/hosting and OpenBSD for routers/firewalls/spamd daemons (actually I would not deal with email at all as it is a separate business in itself) etc. All it takes is few seconds thinking about it and then realizing what a crazy talk that is. So hats off to providers with a clue! As for the 99% of cookie-cutter companies/resellers, do a favor to everyone and close your doors.

bcx 16y ago
Running a hosting company was actually a pretty profitable business back in the 90s. (It probably still can be if you have a really solid niche). I should write some blog posts on our experience (there were many positives).
- mstevens 16y ago
  I've been vaguely speculating to myself lately that two good niches might be: * email * good customer service for a price

chuhnk 16y ago

Well this is a given right? I've seen this tip given time and time again, dont scale before you have to. Some may completely object to that but if you are a startup and just trying to get going, grab a server or some resources in the cloud, write your minimum viable product and launch. If you cant handle the load, then scale. Yes you should have a "plan" but that doesnt mean you have to execute it until necessary. I began my life at a startup 1 year after launch. 3 Servers, 1 web server, 2 app/db servers. As load increased and our needs changed we moved to a more complex structure, 2 load balancers with failover, 2 web servers and still 2 app/db servers but beefier. When life got harder we started optimizing web servers software and the database. When traffic grew past that along came another server cluster scaling us to an even greater degree. Do we deal with hardware ourselves? No, managed hosting with dedicated servers. Why? Because we want to let someone else deal with the hardware problems. The cloud doesnt have the resources we need. We scale when we HAVE to, as in the site is going down every day because we cant handle the traffic. We run leaner than some of our competitors and we know this because some of them have gone public with their costs, number of developers and server architecture. 1. Have a plan 2. Find a hosting company you can scale with easily 3. Use the minimal resources necessary 4. When you have to scale determine the cost of optimization vs just adding more hardware. 5. Be Lean

bcx 16y ago
I guess what I was trying to say was don't worry about over scaling. But take some time to make sure you aren't over scaling for 6 months in a row :-). So I'd argue. for #3 3) Don't stress out about the minimal resources necessary from day one. Figure out what the minimal resources are over time, and just take advantage of the fact you can delete servers.

there 16y ago

or just lease servers from a "dedicated hosting" company. you get all the benefits of a colocated server (customizability, security, performance) and you can let them deal with hardware failures, upgrades, and obsolescence.

dpcan 16y ago
Even this grows into a nightmare. I've been moving dedicated servers to cloud / virtual solutions for the last 4 months. I'm in love with Rackspace Cloud stuff and their support, and will end up saving thousands while providing my clients with a state of the art email system and more redundancy. Plus, with their cloud servers I can replicate and backup easily.
- there 16y ago
  you didn't explain how it "grows into a nightmare". just pricing or what? i just used rackspace's pricing tool to price out what a virtual server would cost with the same amount of ram and bandwidth i get from one of my dedicated servers; the cloud solution was about $40/month higher.
bcx 16y ago
Has anyone done the cost equations? And I'd imagine migration is a bitch on dedicated hosting.

ErrantX 16y ago

I keep meaning to blog about something like this. After my old web host made me really mad the other month I decided to grab a load of virtual servers and be my own web host (hosting client sites, projects etc.) So now I have DNS, database/web servers etc. all under my control on shares that I can chop/change at will. It's turned out to be phenomenally cheaper! Than having 1 dedicated server and a shard hosting package.

cmelbye 16y ago
I'd be very interested in seeing a blog post detailing that. That would be very useful for hosting client projects. I'm working on a project that aims to be similar to Heroku but runnable on a handful of virtual servers from any VPS service.
- jackowayed 16y ago
  Phusion Passenger 3 is going to have a feature similar to that: http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/07/01/the-road-to-passenger-3-technology-preview-3-closing-the-gap-between-development-and-production-rethinking-the-word-easy/ http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/07/01/the-road-to-passenger-3-te... >Imagine having a directory full of Ruby web apps, e.g. ~/Sites. To deploy an app, just drop your application’s directory into ~/Sites. To undeploy it, remove the application’s directory. The application directory’s name is used as the domain name. No manually signaling the web server for a restart.
  - cmelbye 16y ago
    While that sounds very useful, what I'm working on is more along the lines of Heroku's distributed dyno model. In their terminology, a dyno is a Thin web application server process. When an app needs to be started up, it will be possible to determine how many dynos are needed, and they will be automatically started up across the grid of virtual servers and balanced using a custom load balancer.
- ErrantX 16y ago
  Done: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498399 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498399 If there is anything else you want to know about it, well.. you know the drill :)

cullenking 16y ago

The expense of going with a cloud solution is huge if you have a complicated deployment stack and large hardware requirements. my startup will easily grow into the single 8gig/1tb quad core box we are colocating, and far exceed it when we start seeing some real traffic. From what I expect to need in hardware, I would be sitting at over $3k a month in expense moving to Rackspace Cloud. Ignoring upfront cost of the servers, around $10k, colocating will only run me about $300 a month. I understand you don't have to worry about hardware issues, but I could literally hire a sysadmin to worry about hardware issues for that kind of money. It just doesn't make sense outside of well funded startups or established businesses.

bcx 16y ago
Could you elaborate more about why you needed to spend $10K up front? And how you take advantage of your one giant server? Are you using Xen to virtualize a bunch of servers on it? I've always figured colocation + System Admin ends up costing more than a cloud solution. Especially when you need to have enough redundancy so that you don't fall over if a single server fails. In the cloud if a single server fails, it's their problem. In physical space it's your problem or your system admin's problem. How much time can you spare?
- cullenking 16y ago
  My wording wasn't too clear, sorry. I didn't mean I have spent that money, just that my planned hardware buildout will cost somewhere around $10k to start. Our single server was about $2k to put together 1.5 years ago. We use it for everything - mysql, redis, pool of unicorns, nginx proxying to unicorn pool and a handful of background workers (resque). I have already dealt with drive failures, but I loaded up the 8 hotswappable bays with drives, so it wasn't too scary. However, I am scared for other hardware failure, which is why I want some more machines. I am not using Xen. I can see the benefit for some stuff, but I don't believe it's beneficial for my use case. However, I will make that decision in a more informed manner when I am actually in a position to expand our hardware (money and need). I don't think the colocation costs more. Seriously, I have had great use out of my current server. I figure with a colocated set of 4 servers, $10k initial expenditure + $300 a month for 2 years is $17200, or I can go with rackspace and pay $3000 a month for 2 years, and be $72,000 in the hole. Oh, and after that two years, I don't even have spare hardware to play with!