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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic but this is a good thread to ask in:

Those of you running startups that don't colocate your own hardware, and don't run in a cloud, where do you rent servers from these days?

Most of my stuff is at Softlayer, but their RAM pricing is killer ($25/mo/GB).

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It might not work for you if you're US based (and want your servers in a datacentre you can easily fly/drive to) but I hear a lot of good things about www.hetzner.de and the prices are fantastic. I plan to use them for the venture I'm currently working on.

Hetzner.de is awesome. They are cheap and reliable which is a combination you don't see often

Unfortunately, being in Germany and using desktop-grade hardware means high latency and (comparatively) high failure rates. That's why it's cheap.

Germany isn't badly connected and any extra latency can be largely mitigated by using a CDN for your static assets.

As for desktop-grade hardware - I haven't seen this mentioned by anyone else. Any links to back it up?

If that's true (and I doubt it is), it's avoidable if you use their extremely well priced colo option (which is what I'm going for).

> are you referring to the latency

Yes, "high latency" was referring to the latency. A CDN for static assets doesn't mitigate the fact that the initial request, and everything dynamic is on the wrong side of the planet for most startups' users.

> Any links to back it up?

Hetzner.de. They list the hardware in the boxes. It's desktop processors, desktop motherboards, desktop hard drives and non-ECC RAM in all the cheap server lines.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

7200RPM hard drives, Core/Athlon processors and non-ECC RAM don't belong in servers.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2009/10/dram-study-turns-ass...

According to Google's study, you would expect about 2 memory errors per day per server running 24/7. You need ECC RAM.

> I doubt it is

It's rude to publicly call someone a liar without evidence.

I think you're over blowing the latency problem. European users interact with US hosted startups all day long and it's not like you hear us complaining.

Re: hardware. The choice is nice to have and their EX6 and up packages are "proper" server grade (as in Xeon and ECC). EX6 machines start at EUR69 which is fantastic if you ask me.

Edit: as for rudeness - chalk it up more to a disagreement over what constitutes "desktop-grade hardware" (and your omission of their higher level hardware offerings)

SL has become very expensive in the last couple of years (we host primarily there at Disqus).

For Sentry I'm using Incero, but will likely be switching to Hivelocity (or something similar), as I currently don't have internal network and that's a big, annoying deal for me.

Also, if you're loooking for deals or more information on hosts: webhostingtalk.com

Funny that we'd run into each other here again - Hivelocity is super cheap, I still have a massive, single server there and have used them for ~3 years now and actually all those servers I replaced were with them! They usually have really good specials, incredible value. But their live support is useless, the best thing they can do is log tickets on your behalf for the real support. Most of the time that doesn't matter.

SoftLayer have much better support, geographically diverse locations and a wicked suite of offerings. They're also giving startups $1000/month credit for 12 months, I got almost instantly accepted... I was still asking questions and then the rep was all "I made you an account here's the details".

https://www.softlayer.com/partners/catalyst

I wasnt aware about that credit, that's actually really nice!

I used to have a really good deal with SL about 2-3 years ago, and when I was looking around for Sentry they were my first stop. Unfortunately the prices had gone up a lot while I was gone, and for a reasonable DB server it was looking to be pretty pricey.

How many nodes did you say you were going to use that you got accepted so fast? I've been using Rackspace Cloud and AWS for small demo deploys, but we are still shopping around for a cloud provider.

It may have helped that we were already on ~12 servers but I don't think they're discriminating, they have terms like unused credit not rolling over so they can't be expecting everyone to use it all.

Softlayer will drop their RAM price to $12.50/mo/GB just for asking. Seriously, just ring up and they will offer it to you in a heartbeat.

After a bit more chatting with a sales guy I managed to get the price per gig of RAM well below that.

Softlayer is a bit expensive out of the box, but I've found them very open to negotiation.

I started with two Linode basic vps. I keep them just because their customer support is great, and even let me stay one month without paying when I had problems with money. Also, all inbound traffic is free (basically it's what these two machines do).

Now, from UP2VPS[1] you can get a pretty good deal (1GB memory, 1TB transfer) for just $6/month.

[1]: http://up2vps.com/

Their customer service is "dreadful". The support guys are as unhelpful as it can be.

But if you don't need a support, their service is very affordable and good.

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