Ask HN: What provider do you use for Cloud hosting and why? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What provider do you use for Cloud hosting and why?

47 points10smom58 comments

Linode x1000.

I actually have a VPS at both linode and slicehost (originally this was so that I could have a "dev" and "prod" server for my projects. A stupid decision [because it's expensive and my projects don't get much traffic], but an educational one) and the linode one (at least according to ab) outperforms the slicehost.

If you're thinking about getting a VPS, do it immediately. The $20/mo I started spending (now $40) a couple of years ago was probably one of the most important things I've ever done towards furthering my education.

Amen to both points:

1) Linode's been nothing short of great. Simple, quick service and a VPS that's always lightly loaded.

2) Absolutely agreed. I had Linux installed on a home "server", but really never got cranking on web work until I got my own server-in-the-cloud. Hadn't really considered that renting the server might drive my activity (rather than merely enabling it), so that's a nice point.

I have a home mac mini server but not sure how to set it up so useful for my needs. How do you user your home server with the cloud server? BTW I am not the programmer in my startup aspiration. LOL

To make use of your home mac mini server, you're going to need a couple of things...

The first is probably going to be a dynamic dns updater (since your cable modem IP address will likely change). Here is one: http://www.dyndns.com/index1.html

Either that, or call your ISP and ask them for a static IP address. They might charge you a small fee for this (ask to talk to tech support for this).

After you have that, you'll need to log into your router and set up something called port forwarding (I apologize if this sounds obvious. I promise I'm not trying to talk down or anything like that, just trying to cover all of the steps).

Forward port 80 (it might just be called "WWW" or "HTTP" in the router settings. This is how it is on one of the sonicwall appliances we use at work) to the internal IP address of your mac mini server.

Make sure that you set a static IP address for the mac mini. You can do this by going to system prefernces -> Wireless and Networking -> Network -> Advanced -> TCP/IP -> select "manually" from the dropdown menu and fill in an IP address, subnet mask (probably 255.255.255.0) and a gateway.

Once you have port 80 forwarded to your mac mini, and a DNS record set up, you should be able to access your mac mini's web server from the rest of the internet.

I took down the home server when I switched years ago. It's weird, but paying $20/month forced me to figure out how to configure the server to suit my needs, put up a Wordpress blog, etc.

That said, I play 'developer' about 50% of the time, so it's very helpful for me. If you're not a developer, the home server might be enough to keep you tinkering.

If you do want to play developer: install Ubuntu on the Mac Mini. Mac package management is nowhere near as nice as Debian/Ubuntu and, since most servers will eventually wind up running that or CentOS, you should get used to it now.

"...and the linode one (at least according to ab) outperforms the slicehost."

I wonder if this is true across the board though. I imagine both providers have quite a dynamic collection of machines. New machines are being added, plans likely change over time as cash flow increases, etc. Surely not all their machines have the same performance. Some of that might just be luck of the draw. But I have never worked for a hosting provider before, so I wouldn't know.

There is another reason to choose Linode over Slicehost, Linode has consistently improved their offerings over the years through ram increases, hard drive size, etc while slicehost is now at half the ram and other shortcomings for the same price as a Linode.

I really like linode and have been a customer for a few years now so I might be a bit biased.

Would a Linode VPS be much different than an Amazon instance to host a couple of projects without traffic?

I've been thinking about getting something more "proper" than the GoDaddy plan I've been barely using for a couple of years, and was looking at getting a micro instance with Amazon. A reserved micro instance is only $54/year. I've seen Linode mentioned often but I'm wondering if the $240/year are worth it compared to what I would learn using an Amazon instance.

Reserving a micro instance only means that you get discounted usage hourly usage of that instance. You have to pay usage fees on top of that. By my math, 24 hours * 365 days * $.007 per usage hour (VA datacenter) = $61.32 in usage fees. Don't forget the cost of elastic block storage, too, especially if you're going to save snapshots. A full-time micro instance will cost ~$150/yr.

AWS pricing can be complicated, so make sure you read:

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

Oh I see. I figured my number might be a bit misinformed. Yeah, AWS pricing is not simple and I'm not surprised I forgot storage and other things...

Thanks for the reply!

Micro instances are good for certain things, but I wouldn't want to use one for general purposes. I'm not a guru with server performance, but the micro instances seemed very poor. In my case, compiling from source seemed to always take way longer on an Amazon micro instance compared to a VPS with pretty much any other provider.

I have:

  - 7 linodes.
  - ~12 websites hosted collectively.
  - 0 problems
  - 0 complaints.

Highly recommended.

Is that really cloud hosting?

These days I think that's like asking what hosting provider you use and why. There are so many out there which have some sort of cloud elements these days. If going the dedicated server route, Softlayer is among the best. If going VPS, then Rackspace / Slicehost can give you great flexibility with pricing options (and some of the cheapest VPS options if you have low traffic.) EC2 is among the best if you need a well developed swiss army knife / kitchen sink API and wide assortment of services to work with. Heroku is among the best if you work with Ruby and don't want to be bothered with system administration (Lot's of others rising up in this space, and GAE for Python / Java.) Joyent is great if you would rather work in Solaris rather than Linux.

Edit: Forgot to mention Azure for the MS world, though EC2 also offers Windows servers. I should have known to mention Linode since that service is so popular with the HN community. Though the Rackspace options provide more cloud services last I checked.

I would imagine for most use cases, Linode would be a better and more cost-effective option in place of Slicehost, and their level of support is just as good.

Sure, I didn't claim that Slicehost has the best performing machines. The EC2 micros are terrible, but I plugged EC2 for it's API's and other AWS services. Slicehost / Rackspace also has more cloud services the last I checked. But this may not be true anymore or for much longer (cloud storage, CDN, etc)

Softlayer customer here, but not for long.

Some points need to be made about SoftLayer:

1. They have a fantastic network.

2. Point #1 is the only good thing that could be said about them.

They used to be an incredible company, but recently, following the TP merger, they have adopted a policy of capriciously shutting down customers without notice for arbitrary reasons that have nothing to do with TOS or AUP violations.

See the cases of SimpleCDN and SiteGround for examples of this.

Host with SL at your own risk.

There are plenty of good things to say about SoftLayer (and I'll say that they're the best dedicated host by a huge margin) -- including awesome hardware, great prices if you talk to sales, great network, and unrivalled automation in the portal.

As per SimpleCDN, see http://twitter.com/#!/SoftLayer/status/15059240414609408

I think there's more to that story than any of the other parties are letting on.

Edit: But I agree with you that the TP merger has not been without issues. It's like things have ground to a halt over there, which is a real shame. Hopefully it's just a transient thing.

Amazon. We have very large data transfer requirements* plus CloudFront is the cheapest CDN out there as far as I know.

*Spent weeks trying to explain to a large school district's "caching expert" (100,000+ students all going through a $30,000 dedicated caching server) that they do not need to flush the cache every day. He was not convinced. Oy.

Slicehost has definitely plunged into irrelevance, as many predicted after the Rackspace buyout (and Slicehost vehemently denied would happen). I use VPSFarm as well; for $21 per month I get 1 GB RAM and a lot more transfer included. It's been pretty reliable so far; a little downtime but nothing out of the ordinary.

There are some things I'd want to see in Rackspace Cloud (being able to add subordinate accounts for billing and systems management), but yeah, all my new stuff has been on Rackspace.

I have accounts with both Rackspace and Heroku, and Heroku's free account sustained almost 60k hits over the last three days for me like a champ. When I got on LifeHacker, I turned on a dyno because I thought I'd need it, but then I shut it off because it didn't even matter.

Heroku has been great for bootstrapping. I fear though that it's only a matter of time before Salesforce pulls a Chargify like stunt.

Amazon.

- Amazon EC2 instances for web servers

- Amazon Elastic Load Balancers in front of the web servers, also handling SSL termination

- Amazon RDS for MySQL databases on the back end, with automatic failover to a hot spare and zero-downtime full database backups

I reserve EC2 and RDS instances on an annual basis, otherwise the expense would outweigh the benefits for me.

For offsite backups, I run a TonidoPlug in my house. Under a buck a month in electricity usage, runs Ubuntu linux, cron runs the backup scripts each night.

For home:

- Linode. Got the 1024 for $40/month. I'm pretty happy it fits my usage. Host my home websites, email, vpn, etc.

For work:

Our customers are mostly in New Zealand so it's a real pain. US based providers are cheap but slow to access while NZ providers are expensive (especially for international traffic) and there is a lot less choice. We are finishing rolling out a new GSLB provider ( 3crowd, recommend ) so we can effectively deal with them separately.

Having said that we use the following mainly to serve international customers and NZ overflow:

- Singlehop - Nice, cheap dedicated servers, new servers are deployed in ~3 hours and fairly reliable. Nice user interface and good spec for the price.

- Serverloft - Not quite as good but still pretty cheap. Deployment was slower last time but no real problems.

- Amazon Cloudfront - Playing around with it. Bandwidth is too expensive for day-to-day usage but great for overflows. NZ customers hit California or Singapore so a bit slow although there are rumours of an Australian site coming at some point.

I'm tempted to move the prod/dev environment to a US-based cloud but the latency/bandwidth constants from NZ->US means that files uploads/downloads for devs and internal customer's are probably too slow.

Aside from Amazon there aren't any true cloud providers.

Rackspace, VPS.NET, Linode et al are all just VPS++marketing (_not_ cloud).

What's the difference? (Not a sarcastic or leading question, if VPS isn't "cloud" hosting, then what is?)

In my experience Rackspace is good at providing customer support on top of single managed server instances. Their Cloud Sites and Cloud Files offerings (akin to ec2 and s3) feel less than stable, and their management interface encounters unrecoverable errors many times each session. In their Chicago data center they don't allow moving backup snapshots to s3-like storage, all backups are stored with the server. This alone should be a red flag to anyone who is doing any cloud hosting. It just feels like something they're trying to get into, instead of a core competency.

Amazon on the other hand has a much more diverse offering that feels at least somewhat battle tested and polished. They offer you the ability to clone a running server with single click, backups to s3, CDN, block stores, map-reduce, etc. They've also been around for a while, which isn't proof of a good product but it gives you a better feeling that they're serious about the business of cloud hosting (not just hosting).

Not that Amazon doesn't also have its issues. I've heard multiple reports of servers simply "disappearing", which is worrisome.

This disappearing does not happen as much anymore and they now have a lot of different tools which make recovery much faster. After awhile, you find that some of the things you need to do to protect yourself against such failures is good practice in general and using Amazon probably makes your site more reliable overall. In comparison, when I used SoftLayer, a hardware failure took down a site I had for 4+ hours while an engineer went to the machine, found out what was wrong, fixed it, etc. On Amazon, the same thing would take minutes to recover from.

EC2 is the only provider where you can make API calls to launch 50 servers, have them all booted in a few minutes, then shut them down an hour later. Slicehost's management console will barely load if you have 100 instances, and your servers are all in a single data center. Ditto for Rackspace Cloud. (Both have multiple data centers, but each account is bound to one DC.) I haven't tested Linode beyond booting a single instance on it, but since they bill by the month I assume they're another cloud-ish VPS provider.

Of course, most individuals and small companies would do best to pick a cloud-ish VPS provider. They have much better support than EC2 and small companies usually don't need hundreds of servers.

EC2 is the only provider where you can make API calls to launch 50 servers, have them all booted in a few minutes, then shut them down an hour later

GoGrid (http://www.gogrid.com) also has this ability (they also have cloud-based F5 load balancing and mountable block-level storage). They have datacenters on the West and East coasts, and you can pick one when starting an instance.

While Linode's billing is monthly by default, it's also prorated. This means that when you remove a Linode from your account, the account is issued a prorated service credit for the unused time in the billing period. Service credit is always used for further services before charging the card on file.

In other words, you can spin up multiple Linodes, remove them the next day, and all you're really paying for is the day you had them deployed. There's a document on Linode billing located here: http://library.linode.com/linode-platform/billing/

I should have also mentioned that the Linode API supports what you're describing: http://www.linode.com/api/

Having just gone through evaluating various cloud providers for our high-traffic website, this is my personal definition: utility computing as electricity, meaning unlimited (in both directions) metered access. Most "cloud" companies offer neither: a typical VPS provider requires a contract that stipulates exactly how much you may consume, and when your consumption changes, you pay and wait. Imagine if you had to do that at home... a $25 set up fee and 48 hours to turn on an extra light.

Windows Azure?

I agree that the examples you provided are not cloud hosting. But there certainly are other true cloud platforms.

How so? Because some of those companies don't actually own and operate the physical data centers?

Rackspace Cloud Sites would be a great example of cloud computing. It behaves like traditional shared hosting, with an easy to use control panel, but behind the scenes it can scale automatically with traffic and load. Obviously the database doesn't scale, but the frontend web servers do, all without user intervention.

EDIT: to the downmodders, please explain how Cloud Sites is not an example of cloud computing. It is a pool of shared hardware and software resources, the details and maintenance of which are abastracted away from the users, with the ability to automatically and infinitely scale up based on demand without user intervention, sold using an IaaS model?

Agreed. Most providers appear to simply slap on the "Cloud" sticker to whatever VPS solution they were providing earlier with absolutely no change in features. These are the features that I believe should be present in any provider that claim themselves to be cloud providers:

1. Ability to scale up or down instances with change in demand.

2. Absolutely zero machine agnostic. I really should be bothered whether I am running a linux/windows/lego machine.

3. Auto configuration and notification - Leave little configuration to me so that I can concentrate more on the stuff I like. But, please do notify me in case the whole system burns down.

4. Easily available APIs that are globally used by all - a user account management, cache management, web UI framework etc.

If you see, there are only a few couple of sites (Google App Engine, Heroku et al.) that satisfy these conditions. Rest all are VPS wolfs on Cloud sheep suits.

  2. Absolutely zero machine agnostic.

I really should be bothered whether I am running a linux/windows/lego machine.

Does this mean most of the cloud servers offer Control panels to make it easy for newbies to manage or do you have to install your own software?

There are some distinguishing factors between IaaS clouds and VPS: paygo pricing (VM & bandwidth), API, self-service automated provisioning, no term commitments, scale-up/down (CPU, memory), VM imaging/cloning/templating, off instance storage. Some VPS providers like Linode, Slicehost, RimuHosting, etc. do offer a few cloud like features, but I wouldn't put them on the same playing field as EC2. If you don't need the additional flexibility and features of cloud, Linode is an excellent VPS provider.

There is also a big difference between PaaS cloud services like AppEngine, Azure and Heroku which require your application to fit within a particular mold (programming language, packaging, deployment), and IaaS cloud providers which offer you the full flexibility of root access to a dedicated server.

newservers.com - "dedicated cloud" - the servers are physical servers but they have a provisioning api. they have the cheapest 48GB boxes we can find, and we're running an app where we need a few very high memory boxes

pros - boxes are cheap relative to EC2, boxes are fast as they're all yours cons - they're slow to provision; up to an hour when you make a request, but the smaller boxes are faster - 10 mins or so. also, only one datacenter, and it's in miami...

Stormondemand is a similar service, and which I'm actually using right now. I believe it's basically a VPS where you get the whole server to yourself.

newservers.com delivers servers with bare metal os installations with no vps.

I know the datacenter very well which newservers.com is primarily based in. Nap of the Americas, it houses most of the biggest service providers and internet brands in the world. The most impressive facility I have ever seen in my life. Combination of Disney World and Fort Knox of datacenters.

I'm not sure how newservers.com is able to sell servers so cheap when their datacenter is so extremely expensive.

Linode 512

1. Awesome support.

2. I got a free voucher, so I essentially have a free server for 5 months. I'm actually considering just paying them anyway.

3. Linode Library is amazing for a Linux noob such as myself - http://library.linode.com/ - Had an OpenVPN server setup and going within an hour. It's a great way to learn Linux, etc

4. Freedom of use - no restrictions on what you use the server for as long as it isn't illegal.

Moved from Amazon to Softlayer because we could get a mix of virtual and dedicated infrastructure at a good price. Amazon wasn't cutting it for the low-latency part of our system. SL hasn't been perfect, but pretty good -- maybe slightly better than Amazon for reliability.

Any benchmarking numbers off top of your head?

Windows Azure

Since we run on .Net and SQL Server it felt like the right choice. Microsoft has some really nice C# libraries that make accessing things like Blobs, Table Storage and Queues dead simple.

The auto scale up and down based on request thresholds is worth the price of admission alone. I am sure that other provides have something like this but I was able to get it going in about 15 mintues after watching the Azure demo video.

- 14 webapps on AppEngine, all small and all profitable

- 1 Linode for internal webapps

- 1 Linode for some fancy data mining

- S3 for backups

I highly recommend all those services if you undestand their strengths.

Have hosted with RimuHosting (years), Slicehost (1 year) and VPS.NET (2 weeks).

Slicehost VPS's by far had the worst real-world performance for me. After a year and multiple Slashdot or Digg front page stories taking down the site. I found that I had to scale to approximately 2x of what I thought I would need in order for the site to stay up.

More specifically, I had to scale to twice what other services were able to keep my site up on. So if I could get by on a 4GB instance on Rimu, AWS or Linode, that meant on Slicehost I needed somewhere between a 6GB and 8GB instance. Multiple times I found for my site to be responsive (Apache + PHP FCGID) I was always buying bigger instances on Slicehost than anywhere else. The disk I/O was one of the biggest problems.

To keep the site stable on Slicehost and support the traffic I ended up spending twice what I budgeted for, for a few months before giving up.

VPS.NET is really cool conceptually (I think it's like Heroku with the 'cells' of power you apply to your server) but I kept getting VPS failures. 3 times in 1 week and support would take increasingly longer and longer to bring the server back up. When you make your living from writing and publishing, have your site just be dead for an entire day is painful.

RimuHosting has been my favorite by far. I eventually went to a dedicated with them, but they are a quiet group of smart new zealanders with an ugly-ass website but excellent hardware and service. I don't have down-time with them and their overages for bandwidth is cheaper than AWS from Colo4Dallas -- $0.10/GB or less. They really should advertise that, BW is a killer for some folks (like me).

All that being said, if you like a nicer website and the real-time scaling functionality that Slicehost or Linode provide, I've heard lots of good things about Linode (and many comments here seem to verify that) so they seem like a safe bet.

Some quick-reference numbers looking at AWS versus RimuHosting are below... I had these handy when I update my comparisons every few months just to see what is out there. Thought someone might find them interesting.

AWS Bandwidth per Year - $0.15/GB

----------------

1,000 * 0.15 * 12 = $1800

AWS RESERVED INSTANCES per Year

----------------

Small

227.50 + (0.03 * 24 * 365) = 490.30 + 1800 = $2290.30

Large (Most Comparable to Dedicated Below)

910 + (0.12 * 24 * 365) = 1961.20 + 1800 = $3761.20

XLarge

1820 + (0.24 * 24 * 365) = 3922.40 + 1800 = $5722.40

RimuHosting Dedicated per Year

----------------

4-core HT-enabled/12GB Dedicated/1TB Bandwidth

306 * 12 = $3672

REFERENCES

1. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

2. http://rimuhosting.com/order/startorder1.jsp?hom=t-ded

For a startup that might be short on resources, Rimuhosting will perform sysadmin work for you at $40/hr. That may not seem like a big deal, but their sysadmins are knowledgeable, and always provide a detailed account of the work they've performed. I've yet to find another company with as dedicated a support staff as Rimu.

I absolutely agree there. They have this policy of doing admin work for free as long as it takes less than 30 mins -- and I've never asked for a fix that took longer than 30 mins, these guys are quick.

Everything from debugging connection issues (possibly hardware problem) to fixing a breaking build of apache for me from source in a few mins.

Great group of folks.

I use VPS.net. My project isn't in production yet, but I have a few clients on it. Love the flexibly and features.

Just so you all know, sites like Linode and Slicehost are NOT cloud hosting but actually VPS hosting

I'm using AppEgine and love what it does for me, it's also free to start.

Anyone know of any non-US based cloud services with reasonable capacity?

iweb.com is in canada. I was considering them as well. anyone know anything about them? how do they compare. I like the name. :)

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