Hacker News Reader

Comment by continuations | Hacker News Reader

They use Hetzner for dedicated servers, slicehost for VPS, 2 colocation services, and AWS cloud.

For a relatively small site, why do they need so many different hosting providers?

I run admin + staging stuff and my own email on the dedicated servers. The Hetzner box has some offsite backups, too. I want something that won't die at the same time as the website.

I use two colos for redundancy. One is in Sacramento, and it mitigates the earthquake risk of the one in Fremont.

The AWS costs consists of stuff I'm too lazy to go find and delete. Everyone has an unused EC2 instance or S3 bucket somewhere; that's what keeps Amazon in the black.

Interesting. Are colo prices generally that high in the US? May I ask what's included at 600$ for 2(-3?)U of rack-real estate there?

  * What level of support do you have (can you call someone at the 
       DC at 4am and have him hot-swap a failed HD for you)?
  * How many shared or own gigabit or 100mbit uplinks are included? 
       (if >1: can do bonding on your interfaces?)
  * With how many other servers do you share the same circuit-breaker?
  * I guess you have at least 1 UPS + 1 non-UPS power supplies?
  * exceptionally good peering?
  * network/power SLA?
  * 24/7 access to your server?

I worked for a DC in europe some years ago and i'm genuinely intrigued how the price in your spreadsheet for colo-hosting is so much more than what i was used to (~100-150$/U).

$600 is for an entire cabinet, 15A, 100 Mbps bandwidth. HE doesn't offer half-cabinets in that facility, or I would have gotten one.

Note that 15 A is nowhere near enough power to fill it to even 1/3 capacity.

  > Note that 15 A is nowhere near enough power to fill it to even 1/3 capacity.

Yes that's pretty standard, afaik. The dc I worked at had individual circuits even for quarter- and half-cabbinets (2x 16A each), but i don't know how common that is in general. (instead of just putting 4 quarter-cabinets on the same circuits and have 1 customer blow his and 3 others' power)

Sounds like Fremont 1...

Is Pinboard still maintained by just one person?*

(*)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8069474

Yes. Sometimes not even one!

Yeah, I still haven't made up my mind as to whether I should trust all my bookmarks with a guy who seems to have a knack for disappearing alone into strange corners of the world. Even if he is occasionally protected by a company of tanks and a Hind helicopter :)

Just make daily backups. That goes for any bookmarking service you use.

Couldn't you build that into Pinboard (via Dropbox or similar).

Yeah, but then you're trusting me to do the backups for you. That's much less protection.

yep, this in a crontab somewhere is all you need:

  curl -k -o ~/backups/pinboard-backups/pinboard-$(date +\%y\%m\%d).json 'https://api.pinboard.in/v1/posts/all?&auth_token=username:APItokenhere&format=json'

I meant it as a defense against concern against the bus scenario.

The backups would run while the site is live and if it ever spontaneously disappears then users would have an up-to-date backup available.

Better than the other "cloud" options, which end up getting sold or shuttered every year or two.

Also, if you are a customer, you get to follow the hilarious twitter account.*

*This is not true; anyone can and should follow the hilarious twitter account.

If you get the urge to stop paying Amazon, it shouldn't be hard to figure out what you're paying them for.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/...

(Fantastic to see you back on HN, BTW)

This is an old post, but may provide some insight...

https://blog.pinboard.in/2012/05/a_cloud_of_my_own/

I'm sure there's a HN discussion from back then also.

Edit: Lots more on the topic...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ablog.pinboard.in+server

Deleted comment

At one point the FBI accidentally seized his servers. He's pretty paranoid about redundancy and multi-site online data storage after that.

https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/06/faq_about_the_recent_fbi_ra...

That is not correct; see my comment upthread.

My bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com