The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.
In particular, have you ever run a site that consistently serves over 25 Terabytes of traffic/month, or have you worked with someone who has?
I guarantee you that no company I have worked for in the last 15 years, could have ever run this type of infrastructure for $7K/month. Its absolutely amazing.
I've currently got active accounts with all three of those VPS providers - I love them, and use them every day - particularly Linode, but also Slicehost/Rackspace, and DigitalOcean. I even have a bare metal server at ServerBeach - which I realize I need to shut down...
At this exact instant I have six terminal windows open across DO/Linode. I host a moderately popular California Food Blog, and have about 15 years experience in various companies that have had hosting responsibilities.
I'm not saying you can't do great things with the VPS providers - I'm just suggesting that the tradeoff between saving $2-$3k (at most) with Digital Ocean, would be more than made up by the technology risk, hassle of having to re-invent a lot of the services that you get automatically from AWS.
That could change sometime in the (near) future - but right now, AWS is an easy (and honestly, all things considered, relatively cheap) solution for this type of application.
What technology risk is there in setting up Varnish and nginx on Digital Ocean? Or better yet some kind of out-of-the-box open source CDN. You would save a lot more than $2-3k.
You could simply serve the content out of nginx, but you wouldn't see the performance benefits of keeping your content closest to the end user.
Note - there is another option - Deploy on multiple Platforms and be smart with your DNS balancing (http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/services/global-traffic-director/) when serving content. Particularly now that Digital Ocean is in Singapore/Amsterdam/NewYork I can think of some useful things I could do with $10/month droplet (2 Terabytes of Transfer) $300/month, in theory, gets me 20 Terabytes in Asia, 20 Terabytes in Europe, 20 Terabytes in North America. Now, whether DO would shut me down if I actually started using that Transfer is another question altogether...
Would love to see any recent input.
I.E. The people who bought the servers, racked the servers, went down to the CoLo at night, set up the virtualization environment, hooked up the routers, configured the routers, the switches, the firewalls, the vlans -- those people I am including.
I'm not including the DBAs who manage the schema, people who push the code, do the design, etc...
True, but lets not compare offerings of the past to now. There is still room for practical efficiency gains.
$60/mo for a dedicated server, $20/mo for CloudFlare. The dedicated server only serves 1 TB of it, the other 24 TB is static assets cached and served directly by CloudFlare.
Here's a screenshot of CloudFlare Analytics for the last 30 days: http://d.pr/i/6Z8S/5GU2Ni8t
So, what this really comes down to (after a good nights sleep) - is what type of traffic/transactions are you running on your back end infrastructure.
If the data is static, then you can probably (these days) cut your costs for 25 Terabytes/month from $8K to $800 (or, in your extraordinary case, $80), simply by being a bit intelligent as to how you make use of VPS/CDN/CloudFlare Transfer allocations.
On the flip side, if much of the data you are transferring out is the result of dynamic back end transactions, queries, and generation, then it's unclear to me that you can (easily) recognize the savings that you might see when generating static content.
I'm interested in knowing if CloudFlare will start throttling/shutting down people who pay $20 and use 25 TBytes in the long term though - that alone, for some organizations, will cost them more than the extra $8K they would pay to AWS (who, have zero problem with you using 25TB, 250TB, 2.5PB, etc...)
Funny thing - back when I was using 10 TB/mo, my site was hosted entirely on DreamHost's $9/mo shared hosting. I moved mostly because I was starting to get several hours a month of downtime - presumably, they were gently nudging me off their service.
I've seen plenty of $60-$100 dedicated servers come with unlimited-use 100Mbit connections, which work out to 16ish TB/mo before you start getting to 50% saturation. Of course, those are still subsidized in that that pricing is possible only because most people who buy it don't max out a 100Mbit connection.
Still, though, S3's 9-12¢/GB bandwidth pricing seems a bit high. Bandwidth at DigitalOcean (presumably unsubsidized) is 2¢/GB, which comes out to a much more manageable $500 for 25 TB.
With dynamic content, CloudFlare has Railgun, which takes advantage of the fact that dynamic content is usually mostly static. Still, though, if you have 25 TB of dynamic content, I presume bandwidth stops becoming the limiting factor in your cost of operation.
They could get an even better deal by just going through a dedicated server provider (or even better, colocating).
There's little advantage with choosing DO versus going with a dedicated server provider (and again, colocating). I guess the advantage would be the control panel that they wouldn't use, having a few one-click stacks that they won't use, stuff like that.
If someone can afford a $7,000 AWS bill they can afford to put some money towards hardware and an onApp license if they want "cloudy" stuff. To colocate their hardware it would probably run them anywhere from $400-$800 a month depending on where they go. Their total bill would be decreased by $5500 a month. The upfront investment of the hardware wouldn't be more than $12,000 either. LOE? Probably two weeks with a competent sysadmin.
Yes you can have issues with your hardware and stuff and then you have to take care of that, but if you're good with your DC, they're great to you.
For one datacenter, but CloudFront gets you 40+.
I don't know what datacentres tend to charge for data transfer, but as that's the largest item on the bill, it's the more salient point.
Also, just because it's not on the bill doesn't mean they're not using other AWS services; there are several free ones.
Think of it another way - what would be more valuble - RubyGems hosted on CDN, or RubyGems on DO and give a couple of grants for talent hackers to work on their gems fulltime for a few months. (ala GSoC)
Even if you ARE concerned about latency, have one download server in the US (E.g. DO), one in Europe (e.g. Hetzner) and one in SE Asia (Not sure who's cheap and good-ish there), and you'd still be a 1/4 the cost of AWS bandwidth or less.
A self set up Linode CDN with all six location Tokyo, JP London, UK Newark, NJ Atlanta, GA Dallas, TX Fremont, CA
Would have provided 48TB of Pooled bandwidth at a very decent speed and cost around $480. Linode's Network are great, much better then DO. I am not sure if it match CloudFront, which isn't exactly the fastest CDN anyway.
http://psyphi.net/blog/2013/12/content-delivery-network-cdn-...
I have 10 fingers, so that is definitely not "countless" hours of work. And No, Maintenance are minimal or non existent. You could even get smaller VPS behind each node balancer as HA. Since Linode VPS ( Unlike DO ) are deployed on physically different hardware.
While i say it is fair enough to use AWS because money doesn't matter, i thought there are definitely some better alternative for the same price( if you really cared about latency ) or cheaper options.
Everything needed to build the rubygems.org stack can be found at https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems-aws