HN Poll: Want an SSD based webhost? I do. Need feedback... | Hacker News Reader

HN Poll: Want an SSD based webhost? I do. Need feedback...

9 pointsiamelgringo3 comments

EC2's hard drives are really, really slow. A crappy Solid State drive I bought for $150 2 years a go is 50x faster than the fastest EC2 hard drive. Shit's gotta change. Why spend weeks optimizing my DB and SQL queries when an SSD gets me a 50x speed boost. To me it's a no brainer.

I'm talking to the CTO/Founder of a kick ass web host (NephoScale.com) about offering an SSD based option to their service plan. If we get enough interest, we'll be able to offer a Hackers & Founders discount to everyone below.

This web host already has on demand, scriptable cloud hosting ( just like EC2 ), and on top of that, scriptable, on demand, dedicated, single tenant server options, which rocks.

But, I need to tell them what Hacker/Founders want in an SSD based system.

So, can you take 3 minutes and fill out this form.

Cheers, Jonathan -- Haackers & Founders aka iamelgringo on HN

I assume you are talking about Amazon EC2? Shouldn't it be obvious that the slowest part in the network is the weakest link, not necessarily the server. Look at it from the general public's point of view not just the tech world's.

I would be wary of running my app on something that out-performs what normal people see. It would give me a distorted view on the project, although I appreciate that during development you need speed.

But it's more than that. Even if you had the fastest latest SSD servers to offer, all your speed would be lost on a poor network connection.

Your users could be miles away from the nearest big node,or not have access to a big pipe and they'd see no real difference, in performance, and you as a developer with a nice shiny SSD, wonder what their problem is?

I agree you need to get fast responses to web apps, but there are so so many factors that contribute to bad performance issues, the hard drives are just a really small part of what could be going wrong.

I know VPS.net offers FusionIO space, which is suppose to benchmark faster than an SSD.

Interesting. Where would these be physically located?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com