Comment by metajack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metajack | Hacker News Reader

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I had some poor experiences with dedicated servers at well known providers. Essentially if the hardware fails, they'd rather fix it than get you into something new so you can be back up and running. My site ended up offline for several hours, several times, so that some tech could run hardware diagnostics, etc.

EC2 may be expensive, but if anything goes wrong, I can boot another instance in seconds and abandon the old one. They fix it on their own time.

Sure, I could buy more servers so that one down one doesn't affect me, but that's twice as expensive. On EC2 I don't have any penalty for abandoning an instance for any reason. I've actually moved data centers in EC2 when the performance profiles were better on the other side for the same size instances. It was a temporary difference, but migration was pretty much painless.

You're voxel suggestion may have a 2 hour SLA for replacing parts, but what happens when they don't know what is wrong?

That said, I agree that a person should try for the PaaS and evaluate all the options fairly. I tried Linode, several dedicated hosts, and then finally moved to EC2 on a previous project.

I agree, I love EC2 personally, their mini server plan(or whatever its called) is great for keeping a production version of a project running while its still in an initial phase (very low user base) and then you can scale easily without having to learn anything new as you can run basically things the same as you do locally (I run Ubuntu locally and mainly develop for Tomcat so it makes it really easy to keep things the same on there). I looked at Heroku but as soon as I realized it would be rather expensive just to get regular datbase access (so I could run straight SQL if I needed to, etc) it was out.

FWIW - you can run command-line SQL for all heroku instances: https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-sql-console

The micro instance seems incredibly slow for me running Rails. It runs out of memory while doing a git index-pack.

The micro instance seems to be routinely throttled, for random reasons. My vm was choked for days despite only pulling in ~200 visitors per day. Upgrading to the Small instance has removed all throttling.

I'm running a standard LAMP stack on it, nothing crazy.

hmmm, yeah I have noticed weird behavior a few times, however I run a Java Spring app on there and most of the time it works, its pretty much me that is using it though, I would think that Ruby does use more memory than Java though.

What dedicated hosts did you use?

We've been using Softlayer for years with ~100 servers and have never had this problem. No host is perfect but overall it's been a good experience and a lot cheaper than EC2.

I love Softlayer. Excellent facilities, hardware, network and people. I just wish their RAM pricing wasn't so insane... $200/mo forever to add a $80 8GB stick.

This is certainly true for the common case, but there are certain types of workloads where dedicated is the only way to go. Where I work we were doing a bunch of compute heavy work and we started out on EC2 and recently switched to dedicated hardware, which resulted in a 30-50x performance/price increase.

You can find the full voxel SLA here: http://voxel.net/sla

The nice thing about going with a larger dedicated host like Voxel is that they have extra hardware & servers on hand.

In fact, they even have instant-provisioning of dedicated hardware: http://voxel.net/voxservers

I worked for, and have used dozens of dedicated hosts over the years (I spend far too much time on http://www.webhostingtalk.com ), and can totally agree that these are common issues with dedicated servers.

To each their own; just sharing my $.02 perspective on the situation ;)

The problem I have with Ec2 is their configuration. They have small instances and then large instances. Nothing in the medium range with 4 cores, 2 GB ram, 64 bit etc. So if I were a small company and I need 2 medium instances (which IMO is what most people want) I’ll end up paying .34 * 24 * 30 = $244.8 in Amazon where as in Linode I pay $60 per month.

I run my staging boxes on Ec2 and production on Linode. The small micro instances are good for staging/dev with just $15/month. No other provider I know gives you a VM at such low costs.

Dedicated servers are cheaper for the same performance, so you can afford 2.

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