Ask HN: Judging startup on hosting company it uses? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Judging startup on hosting company it uses?

3 pointsfunkyy5 comments

I wonder few things. In an age where we have OVH offering dirt cheap reliable servers, Google offering great cloud hosting, Rackspace offering free CDN with its services, but its common to see most startups using Amazon.

I know it is reliable but it seems to be a startup fashion as well. So the question to people that track startups - would you ever judge startup based on hosting it uses? Would you discredit great startup if it would use it for example OVH as hosting provider?

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No, I don't think anybody would judge you on it out-of-the-gate. But, if something went wrong (your site was slow loading, you had troubles scaling etc) then your choice of hosting provider might be the first thing people look at.

Nobody really has a valid reason to critique your hosting choice unless it isn't performing in some way.

Any billing structure can be a bad fit for a particular business model. In the early days most startups might save money using AWS just because their requirements are so small, eg dropbox when their data still fit on a conventional server would have cost a lot less on S3 especially with even a tiny bit of redundancy.

The thing about AWS is that it's basically a one stop shop for everything you need infrastructure wise. Many startups can avoid having specialists for infrastructure in the early stages if the default choice is "use AWS" for all infrastructure decisions.

Choosing not to go the AWS route might mean having someone on staff in the early stages who is dedicated to systems management and engineering. Not every early stage team has access to someone like that so that is the main draw with AWS.

Other cloud providers still haven't caught up to the richness of AWS's offerings, although Google and Microsoft are starting to come close.

No. And AWS isn't that reliable. The thing goes down a lot previously. I wasn't doing anything crazy scalable or needed all the features so I moved off of it due to all the downtime issues it had last year.

No, it won't matter at all.

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