Hacker News Reader

Comment by RealGeek | Hacker News Reader

Most parts of India suffer power outage of more than 12 hours a day. I understand that you have UPS and power generators, but does it provide enough reliability to run your servers on it?

I have UPS and generator at home; the cost of running a power generator exceeds $1,000 a month but it is still not reliable.

Wouldn't servers at Hetzner cost cheaper and more reliable than hosting in your garage in India? You can get an i7 server with 16 GB RAM is for $60 and 32 GB for $72, and no hardware setup & maintenance cost.

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

View on HN

Ravish, we are based out of Bangalore and so far we never had 12 hours a day power outage. Max we have faced 4-5 hours of power outage for couple of occasions in summer. In general power outage is not more than an hour or two in a week, which is manageable with UPS & Generator combo.

From Hertzer pricing page, add 1Gbit port cost of 50$ a month, data transfer charges etc would make it much more expensive. Considering our usage, we felt private infra would be a better choice.

Do you have 1 Gbit leased line in Bangalore? How much is the data transfer cap and who is your ISP?

There is no data transfer cap for ILLs. We use You & Tulip. 1Gb port i mentioned, as we need high speed communication across nodes. We use Cassandra, Hadoop so internal data transfer rate is very high. So for internal communication 100Mbps creates bottleneck, but definitely sufficient for external communication / bandwidth.

I commented from what i got from pricing page. Apart from basic server cost, there's always associated extension hardware/data/software cost which generally makes it much more expensive.

If you have more details on cloud setup using Hetzner and associated cost, we would be happy to explore.

Hetzner can set up a private gigabit vlan upon request[1]. They charge a one time setup cost for the switch (30 euros) and 15 euros/month/server. Internal and incoming traffic is free. With this setup, internal data transfer is at 1 Gbps while external transfer is at 100Mbps.

  [1] http://devblog.supportbee.com/2012/06/04/building-a-dependable-hosting-stack-using-hetzners-servers/

>> Most parts of India suffer power outage of more than 12 hours a day.

Whoa, this is pretty shocking to me. I knew there were outages, but I'd assumed they were more like 10 minutes at a time. Do all tech startups there have to deal with this problem? Are there office parks catering to businesses that need continuous power?

I don't think any tier 1 Indian cities are facing such long power cuts. I am sure of Mumbai, Ahmadabad and Bangalore as i am connected to several friends in those metros. We are facing not more than 4-5 hours a week, that too only in summers.

Thanks for the follow-up! Very informative, I liked the data center pics from your original post. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com