This seems ridiculously cheap compared to something with comparable RAM/CPU on EC2.
Is there a catch?
They actually DO need to be able to scale servers up and down based on demand-usage, time of day, growth patterns, etc.
For them, the extra EC2 cost is negated by being able to spin up an extra 400 instances in the evenings, and turn them back down after everyone goes to sleep.
Under the dedicated server model they'd ALWAYS need to have an extra 400 dedicateds to handle that peak load (and in fact would need to have far more to handle additional spikes, projected growth, etc.) Those dedicated servers would sit idle, costing them money most of the time.
This is the difference between 'web-scale' and your typical startup's usage pattern.
Cost wise, your best scenario is usually going to be dedicated or colo + EC2 or similar for overflow / peak.
If you do just dedicated hosting you need to leave enough spare capacity that you feel comfortable handling the spikes for whatever the worst case provisioning time your host has.
It's still cheaper than EC2.
But if you do dedicated + ability to spin up EC2 to take peaks, you can go much closer to the wire with your dedicated hardware, and increase the cost gap to EC2 massively. You don't need as much spare capacity to handle peaks any more. You don't need as much spare capacity to handle failover.
It's rare for it to pay off to spin up EC2 instances to handle inter-day "normal" load changes, though - most sites don't have differences that are pronounced enough over short enough intervals for it to be worth it. If you do the dedicated + EC2 model, your EC2 instances needs to be up no more than 6-8 hours or so on average per day before it becomes cheaper to buy more dedicated capacity.
Sure, but a minor decision is who prints your business stationery or what kind of toilet paper to buy.
What hardware/networking platform to build your service on is not a minor decision. It will fundamentally affect the architecture of your entire system, and getting the decision wrong will potentially be expensive-with-a-capital-Failed-Company.
I pay about $3 per month for a very low-end xen VPS. Sure, I'm not running anything at all resource intensive on it.. but if I was maybe I'd spring for a higher-end VPS for $6, or if I really wanted to get crazy I'd find a really solid one for about $20 a month.
At $140-$190 a month, you'd better be getting a bunch of high-end dedicated servers and fantastic support, or you are getting seriously ripped off.
Hell, given the very modest needs of most small startups, having to shell out even $20 a month is a ripoff.
A $20 VPS is only for pet projects. For a startup it's worth it to invest in a/some dedicated server(s). Having some redundant firepower of dedicated servers so that you don't have to worry about the upgrades for a while presents a sweet spot between saving cost and scalability.
However, I remember that hosting in the US is surprisingly expensive for some reason, and has been for many years. Don't know why.
Recently i fired up a Support Request around 5am and got a response 6am when their support team picks up work. during the day you usually don't have to wait longer than one hour for a support response.
They have awesome hardware for reasonable prices... i migrated everything i own from ec2 to one EX4 box with 8 cores and 16 gig of ram for less than i payed at EC2...
i7 + 24GB RAM + 2TB disc + 100Mbps for €50
(they geo-restrict their plans, and I think only the French get unlimited bandwidth; UK people have to survive on "just" 15TB/month, for example)
I have had a box with them on and off (more on than off) for the last couple of years. I'm not doing anything critical there, but have also had no issues. Everything seems rock solid (which it should be -- Wikipedia says that "The company has six datacentres housing more than 100,000 machines.") You can reinstall from the web control panel, they rent KVMs, not sure what else to add.
The major things people tend to bring up in forum postings are:
Kimsufi is the "non-professional" brand, and hardware support is slower than the OVH parent. Nothing ridiculous, but you aren't going to get a bad drive replaced within a couple of hours either.
OVH has "low quality bandwidth". Of course, people making this complaint never quantify exactly what they mean by this. I just tested on my "24G" box, and see 30-40MB/s to cachefly, 90MB/s to Leaseweb in Amsterdam, 75MB/s to Linode in London, 3-4MB/s to Linode in Newark and Atlanta, 12MB/s to SoftLayer in Dallas, 10MB/s to SingleHop in Chicago, 11MB/s to Joe's Data Centre. (Of course these are large test files.)
If you're interested, there's no setup fee and no minimum contract length (check this for yourself, obviously), so I'd say go for it.
5Tb as a limit really shouldn't be a problem for what I would use it for.
Then again for what I currently do 10Mbit would not be much of an issue either to be honest, though I'll ask about the procedure to reset this if I do set a sudden bandwidth spike one month.
There is VAT on top of that listed price, but even with that it is still a good deal if the kit and company are up to scratch. Last time I looked there was an extra cost for paying monthly, but that seems to have been removed.
> You can reinstall from the web control panel
That sounds interesting for a dedicated box. Are they using some for of SAN rather than each machine having its own local drives (so they can "reimage" your machine just by dropping its volume on the SAN array and creating a fresh one from template)? Or is this less instant (more like: make the request via the control panel and in X hours a passing support tech will plug a USB stick in and reboot to reinstall)?
You can customise the partition layout, but otherwise get a standard set of packages for whichever distribution. There's a choice of the usual Linux suspects in 32- and 64-bit, FreeBSD, Open Solaris and Windows Server 2008.
The process is fully automatic and a CentOS install takes about 20 minutes.