Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition | Hacker News Reader

Chart of Y Combinator companies' hosting decisions, 2011 edition

jpf.github.com

136 pointsjf72 comments

Mind blown that:

-Some ~40% (stupid pie chart) don't have an SSL cert, but almost all have login/registration page (4 out of 4 that I randomly picked had a login/registration page)

-So many people use GoDaddy as a registrar (they were horrible before SOPA)

-That startups use AWS despite its poor cost/performance

I agree on the SSL & GoDaddy, but AWS? What poor performance?

I think he didn't mean "cost and performance" but rather "cost per performance".

The IO performance of EBS is terrible.

what's horrible about GoDaddy? I used them for domain registration and DNS hosting, and everything went smoothly. The only annoying part, is how they try to sell additional goodies along the domain registration.

the front page ladies weren't too much of disturbance either :)

Seriously? Aside from all of the normal things that are wrong with GoDaddy, where have you been for the past few weeks?

the parent comment refers to them being horrible before SOPA. I was wondering what exactly was horrible. It was all plain and easy for me.

I think he's referring to their recent support for SOPA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3383564

the parent comment refers to them being horrible before SOPA

Ok, maybe it's more to do with stuff like their CEO gunning down elephant's - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/bob-parsons-godaddy...

that's quite bad for the company reputation, but I still don't see any argumentation for they were horrible before SOPA

That's because you're probably looking at things purely from a technical/operational perspective (i.e. can they register my domain easily), whereas the parent commenter is taking into account more general reports about the way GoDaddy does business.

Just because a company is technically competent doesn't mean people want to do business with them.

Exactly..and the use of sex to sell.

ok, point taken, thanks :)

any advice for an alternative registrar with free DNS hosting? Preferably one with native IPv6 reachable DNS servers (which is not the case at godaddy)

Gandi http://www.gandi.net/ has a pretty good reputation, with free DNS hosting. No IPv6 reachable nameservers, however. If you want IPv6 reachable DNS servers, Hurricane Electric offers free DNS hosting https://dns.he.net/; they are a big supporter of IPv6 and so offer a variety of free services to help get it off the ground.

thanks, I'll give Gandi a try with my next domain. I am using some free services from Hurricane Electric, particularly an IPv6 tunnel and also a dynamic DNS after dyndns.com pissed me off.

for production domains, I would still prefer a DNS hosting that is somehow paid for (with godaddy it was included in the registration price).

Stories like the following were more common than they should have been:

http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2011/12/godaddy-a-glimpse-of-...

They were. I've dealt with them on one occasion (had one client insist on using them as a host/registrar), and they are technically incompetent. We've had numerous outages with this client's site, and had one problem that their technical support staff were simply unable to solve after numerous phone calls (they ended up blaming it on the site, which was running on WordPress - hardly an oddity). It ended up being a very simple problem/solution, which I discovered after spending an hour or so researching it.

This topic comes up every time I run this report.

The reasons why people don't like GoDaddy are covered in both of the previous discussions on this report. Well worth reading!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2080469 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=746386

The older reports are broken, for me at least. They show the same stats as this year's report.

Older reports are in the git commit history on the GitHub project for domain-profiler.

Thanks.

Someone posted MySpace passwords to Full-Disclosure, which therefore made it into several list archives. MySpace complained, and GoDaddy suspended the domain name of an extremely well-known archive, apparently without any investigation or contact: http://seclists.org/nmap-hackers/2007/0. This was eventually cleared up, but WTF?

  the front page ladies weren't too much of disturbance either :)

If that's what makes you choose a registrar then you need to seriously grow up. Attitudes like this are why we have so many problems with sexism in the tech world.

no, actually I've seen one of the ladies too many times during the crankygeeks.com shows, and that annoying advertising... probably it worked? :)

Interested to hear about AWS cost/performance too!

There's been a lot of comparison of AWS's cost per performance compared to more bare-metal cloud solutions or dedicated servers.

It's been covered a lot of times...here's one that just appeared on HN a few days ago: http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-...

You can easily get 10x the performance for the same cost.

I'm not saying AWS isn't awesome...I'm saying it's much, much more expensive, and I'm surprised that startups full of tech people don't manage their own servers.

You can rent 20 AWS on-demand large instances for less money than a junior engineer. If you don't need a lot of machines and AWS saves you any time at all over dedicated hosting, then it's worth it.

Ok, how do you manage your servers?

I'm just very surprised that more startups don't have people who both enjoy the experience and are good at it.

Also, people make it sound like EC2 is management-free. It isn't. It might take less time, which is important, and the problems might be different, but it isn't a fire-and-forget solution.

I enjoy it, I just don't see how you could do that and get even close to the price of a VPS. In other words: colocation is expensive for a startup.

Not sure about now, but for the summer 2010 batch, Amazon handed out a good chunk of AWS credits (enough to cover the hosting costs of most early stage startups for a while).

It's worth noting that the people hosting on Heroku have been lumped into the AWS stats. Which is even more expensive performance wise, but has added benefits over self maintained servers.

I can address two of those points (one for my company and another for YC companies in general):

- SSL: We're on that list as HireHive.com, which had a login and used to have an SSL cert, however, we shut it down (i.e., it just redirects now) and now run Hackruiter.com and HackerSchool.com, where our cert is now. We never had logins online without a proper cert. The data from OP is wrong.

- So many YC companies use Amazon because Amazon gives large cash credits to YC companies meaning it's effectively free to use for the first couple years. Also, many of us are built on services built on AWS (e.g., we use Dotcloud).

EDIT: Typo.

I'd say thats money well spent by Amazon to get all the up and coming companies onto their cloud.

Aside from being admitted to YC, is there a formal process to request AWS credits for budding startups...?

I have no idea, sorry. If you know anyone who works there, I'd try that route. Otherwise, you could try asking for a deal here: http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/aws-sales/

Interesting stats; any chance to get data about the rest of the stack (web server, db, framework, etc)?

I'm always looking for clever ways to determine that information :)

Have you seen underthesite.com?

And http://trends.builtwith.com/

I would be really interested to see what programming stack what all the Y Combinator companies use.

I second that. There are so many possible combinations these days

http://stackparts.com/

Is the data collection methodology described somewhere? I'm questioning the accuracy given an error on our data (GoDaddy is not our registrar, namecheap is).

It's also a bit suspect that namecheap is not listed as anyone's registrar after so many fled GoDaddy for namecheap a few weeks back.

OK -- the data is definitely out of date for at least one company (ours, custora). I wonder how common this is? Perhaps the cache was not cleared before generating the output?

I forked the repo, ran it on custora.com, and eNom was (correctly) listed as the registrar.

I'm re-running the full ycombinator list now, and will update when finished.

The results are in, and there isn't a very dramatic difference.

Looks like 8 companies have switched away from GoDaddy since the data was collected.

I've issued a pull request to jf for the updated stats.

Merged, thanks!

If you're talking about custora.com from my check (which only a registrar can do) you transferred registrar to namecheap at this time:

2012-01-03T05:16:42.0000Z

So yes the data was run before that date.

Are PaaS providers like Heroku appearing as "Amazon" in the web host column? Would be interesting to see this broken down further if that's the case.

Agreed. I'm working on updating domain-profiler to better detect PaaS providers like Heroku, GAE, and Azure.

In the meantime, you can see who's using Heroku by looking for domains that have an SSL certificate with a certificate type of "*.heroku.com"

That's only if they are using the free wildcard ssl addon. If they have their own cert and domain name (most do) then they won't show up like that.

Oh, good point. I don't know how I missed that. Thanks!

Do you have the 2009 or 2010 editions available anywhere ?

Would be good to compare to see trends.

https://github.com/jpf/domain-profiler/commits/master/ycombi...

To everyone amazed by the various suboptimal decisions that startups make, think of it this way: the easiest, most straightforward solution is always the best one until it's more costly than some alternative.

I'd rather have my team working on product than researching domain registrars or hosts, since the odds of your registrar having a meaningful impact on your company's success are very low. Thus "just grab a big box on Rackspace" or "Namecheap is fine, just get it done".

I'm glad you mention this because that was the basically the motivation for me to build this tool in the first place. I was selecting a DNS host for the startup I was at and was wondering: "what DNS host do all my friends use?". I found myself doing a lot of dig commands, so I wrote what became domain-profiler.

I don't think you should spend a lot of time selecting hosting, but I do think you should put in a little bit of research into what you pick. It really sucks when your website is unavailable for an hour due to issues with your DNS provider - especially when your TTL's are set to an hour.

Yeah, absolutely. Making people better aware of best practices so they don't have to think about it is a great mission!

The profiler doesn't seem to take HTTP redirects into consideration, incorrectly reporting the web host and SSL details for Vidyard, though I'm sure for a few others too.

You're correct, currently the "Web Host" is determined solely by what shows up in the A records for the domain.

I've been working on updating the profile to determine the host based on where the HTML is ultimately served from, along with some pretty substantial changes in host detection heuristics. These are non-trivial changes. I was hoping to have them done in time for this report, but tradition dictated that I produce this report now.

I have a feeling that the Godaddy portions of those charts are getting much lower by the minute.

I generated a report specifically to show YC startups that were using GoDaddy: https://raw.github.com/jpf/domain-profiler/master/ycombinato...

The exodus away from GoDaddy stopped as soon as they reversed their support of SOPA.

FWIW, draftmix.com was a product of Blue Frog Gaming, Inc. We are a YC funded company. We don't run draftmix anymore, but we are still very much alive. Our main products do still use Softlayer, but we've got some stuff on Amazon too.

I really thought more would be using CloudFlare.

can we see the very latest for registrars? So we know if the Godaddy migrate cry really worked.

That's already the very latest. "Generated by Joel on 2012-01-17 using his domain-profiler software"

Very interesting -- Im surprised of the large use of GoDaddy SSL and Domain products.

reddit uses AWS

how about microsoft's azure? Any stats on that?

sadtrombone.com

(We're not YC funded, but we did get into Startup Chile. Just wanted to share some options for people.)

Here's the choices our startup has made:

EMAIL: After much investigation, we decided to host our email in Iceland. This is due to the strong privacy laws in Iceland, and wanting a hosted solution outside the USA (and which had technical support, unlike google)

We chose: http://1984hosting.com/ Pretty happy with them, though occasionally their site will give us a response in icelandic when trying to admin stuff, keeps things exciting! (they're helpful though and do support via email in english.)

HOSTING: We're planning to go fully dedicated with Hetzner: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

Since our product will require a fair number of nodes and significant processing, the price and performance advantage of Hetzner vs. something like Amazon is very dramatic. (I haven't used Hetzner yet, but from my investigations they get positive remarks)

DOMAINS: For years all of our domains have been handled thru Moniker. If you're going to go with a US registrar, don't use Go Daddy or any other consumer registrar. Moniker is set up for domain portfolios and they have very strong security policies and no BS.

I'd prefer to have this part of our business be offshore, however, given the propensity in recent years for US judges to rule domains be handed over without just cause. However, I've not found a good international Registrar.

Gandi.net is a great international registrar. They are based in Paris, France, and took a public stance against SOPA. They are also the EFF's registrar and have a great web interface. Their slogan is "no bullshit™"

I have no affiliation with them, aside from being a very satisfied customer.

They don't seem to have any two-factor authentication, which is a big deal-breaker to me - compared to Name.com. They don't reply to inquiries about it on Twitter, too.

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