Comment by tedchs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tedchs | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't understand all the hate about MongoHQ's pricing. I run a Mongo replica set in production on bare EC2 and it works well, but there is a lot of reading/research involved in setting it up correctly and handling any Mongo issues that arise. Nothing stops you from doing that, and 10gen even provides a beautiful AWS CloudFormation template to make it easy to provision a replica set with EBS RAID. However if I were not a senior-level Linux engineer I would totally go for a managed service for anything that was revenue-generating. Assuming it's not a personal/bootstrap situation, spending a few hundred bucks a month is better than risking downtime, or just as bad, scaling pains. The value in MongoHQ and others is their people, not their hardware.

It's not the pricing I don't like, it's the relationship between pricing and storage space. I doubt when I go from a 0.5GB database to a 1GB database that they have to double their support team as well.

Heroku's postgres is just as (or more) expensive as mongohq/mongolab, but they don't limit storage at all (except at the dev tier plans).

<-- MongoHQ Cofounder here

Database storage space correlates pretty well to the management complexity, at least with our customer base.

Offering unlimited storage on a DB is somewhat disingenuous, there are effective resource limits that matter long before disk space and those (RAM/IO capacity) are the things that cost actual money.

is there a possibility of foregoing EBS storage, using instance storage, and creating incremental backups to S3 using a secondary server on a replica set? is there a reason this would be a bad idea? seems like it would cost a lot less.

Agreed. I have to do things like store large things in Amazon S3 when I'd really rather just stick it in GridFS. The pricing is just way to high to do anything else.

GridFS is great for convenience, but blobs are not Mongo's strength. Large files should almost always be stored in something like S3, regardless of price.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com