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Comment by ddoscampaign | Hacker News Reader

This is brilliant because the main cost of running gear is power draw (PDUs / electrical circuits). Having OEM/ODM blade ARM setup a-la sgi cloudrack/supermicro is the way to drive costs to the floor, in a Backblaze/Google way. Unfortunately, it's a "Dell/Walmart model" hypercommodity where such a business has to maintain massive customer subscriptions to stay cash positive and still just trickles in $.

It's an interesting space, but if I were launching a cloud IaaS/VPS, I would probably optimize for the other extreme of "Apple model" premium/full-service expensive hosting that has fantastic uptime, gear and sales/support for enterprise/startup and IT/web operations... There's some more money in that and less headaches. (The most money seems to be in the upper-middle pricepoint area.)

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> I would probably optimize for the other extreme of "Apple model" premium/full-service expensive hosting that has fantastic uptime, gear and sales/support for enterprise/startup and IT/web operations... There's some more money in that and less headaches. (The most money seems to be in the upper-middle pricepoint area.)

A few weeks ago, I'd say "You mean AWS", but after this morning, and a few other incidents over the last few weeks, I don't think anyone can do fantastic uptime in a virtualized/cloud environment.

There's the rub, isn't it? Companies want to compete on quality, but if you're supposed to architect your application(s) for failure, uptime becomes a lot less important. You then only have price to compete on.

I know Twilio runs in both AWS and Rackspace, depending on various KPIs for shifting load. Seems to be the way the world is headed. I'm curious if containerization like Docker predicts CDNs running your containers for you at the edge...

I have fantastic uptime on linode. Averages probably 9 months?

Is that just uptime as reported by the OS, or actual time between outages? The server can be happily churning away even if its network connection goes down.

I've been on Linode for a while, and have also had a decent experience. However, I wouldn't use uptime as my only metric.

I will vouch for Linode. Also if you've never heard of Ramnode, they are my go-to VPS provider. I build actively monitored infrastructure with downtime notifications on the order of 5 minutes or less, so my story isn't just anecdote. I have bought hundreds of VPS over the years from a huge number of providers, and Ramnode is hands down absolutely the best provider. Excellent uptime and the VPS always feel snappy and responsive. It never feels oversubscribed like every other provider out there. Linode is also very good, too, IME.

Actual time between outages.

I've had a similar experience on Linode as well. In fact, in the few months that I have been using Digital Ocean for a personal server they have had more outages than the past ~2 years on Linode.

DO has really gone downhill. For some time they were top-of-the-heap for me with Ramnode and Linode, but lately (the last two years or so), they have really gone downhill with respect to overall quality.

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