DISQUS

Real Life Webmaster · 7 months ago

This cloud stuff is getting out of hand. Running multiple VPS servers instead of a dedicated server with dedicated storage is wrong in every way.

Here's how to scale in the real world:
- Develop on a shared host.
- Deploy on a VPS.
- Install a reverse proxy on your VPS.
- Upgrade to a midrange dedicated server.
- Max the RAM on your server.
- Add additional/faster disks to your server.

Then and only then, should you consider:
- Move the database to its own dedicated server, etc.

Fred Oliveira · 7 months ago

I'm afraid you're incorrect, "Real Life Webmaster". Sorry.

Real scaling in the real world means that you'll finetune your DB environment to maximize DB performance, and finetune your app server environment to maximize your request throughput. These are incompatible once you go past a performance threshold which means they can't be done on the same machine (hi there IO bottlenecks) - maximizing your RAM alone will not cut it, and running things on the same VPS just because you can doesn't mean it is the right way to do it.

rryan · 7 months ago

Google Apps + G1 or other Android Phone: push email

smikolay · 7 months ago

godaddy is always running discounts - google promo codes if you're looking for one; has consistently saved me ~20%

warren miller · 7 months ago

hi - even cheaper CDN is simplecdn - 3.9c/Gig. four times cheaper than amazon, and scales well. we were pushing a gig a second through them last week.

makes a HUGE difference in price when your asset requests start ramping up...

jawngee · 7 months ago

Thanks for the tip, haven't heard of them before.

cris · 7 months ago

There is a great BaseCamp alternative that is free. It's Wiggio.com. That will knock a few cents off your overhead. :)

citizenterminal · 7 months ago

After the initial 30-day trial period, Google Apps for Business charges $50/person per month.

jawngee · 7 months ago

Most businesses can get away with the standard version which is free.

Chris · 7 months ago

Yes, but you specifically cite and link to the Business version.

Jonathan · 7 months ago

I'm pretty sure it used to be called "for business" on everything, and then they used "premier" and "standard" pricing. Now there seems to be an intermix of 'for business' and 'premium'

in either event:
it's the same thing, and there's a link on the page.

A Boese · 7 months ago

The prices here are a good start, but look around and you can generally do better...especially with initial hosting. Hosting initially is not even something you need until you are rolling out either alpha or beta. If you insist on hosting anyway, for most applications you can get shared server access for between 100 and 200 a year. For development work, that is fine.

DNS Registration 8.95 (1yr) with namesecure.com

Hosting (~100/yr) HostGator - sometimes laggy but for dev purposes...okay

DNS Managment - afraid.org - Totally free...you give up some subdomains for the right to use.

Monitor your traffic and push for better servers...as needed. If you are anticipating more traffic then make the move. Don't waste money beginning a venture with too much too soon.

Jonathan · 7 months ago

a- Pivotal is free.
b- I'm a fan of this approach:

1 slice
make the slice bigger
get more slices
make them bigger
#some money appears , and you get engineers to manage
switch to ec2 system
expand ec2 system
# real money appears
begin migrating things to dedicated machines, since you have engineers , new legal issues, and want more control

sabat · 7 months ago

Interesting reply -- but why the switch from slicehost -> ec2? what's the benefit?

ATasteForTea · 7 months ago

I like the way you think! This design seems to be created strictly for a start-up or personal site. Do you have a list like this for a larger corporation as well? While this model is fantastic, is it scalable?

Meg

sabat · 7 months ago

Meg -- most of this stuff could easily be used by a large corporation -- for instance, Basecamp is meant for a company of any size (although it's a project management app, so it's useful for project groups *within* a corporation). Same goes for EC2 -- remember, it's from Amazon, and it was developed so that Amazon (a large corporation) could easily and flexibly deal with the demands of web presence. Other stuff, like mail hosting, DNS, etc., are the kinds of things that you *could* outsource, but most big companies like to run themselves.

ATasteForTea · 7 months ago

Thanks for clearing that up! :D

Jeff · 7 months ago

I always enjoy learning what other people think about Amazon Web Services and how they use them. If you want to manage Amazon S3 accounts on Windows check out CloudBerry Explorer that helps to manage S3 on Windows . It is a freeware. http://cloudberrylab.com/

optional · 7 months ago

checkout heroku.com

John · 7 months ago

Re:Google Apps ...
Push email: Check. Sorta. There are free services available that fill the void. Off the top of my head, Seven ( www.seven.com ) for windows mobile is an example of a software-reliant solution. I know there exist similar software-independent solutions as well.

andy · 7 months ago

nice work - although it left me realising i need to learn some more, and that maybe my shared hosting with fasthosts might not take the strain

Dan · 7 months ago

As a non-Borg alternative to GMail, think about Fusemail for small business. At $2 per month per user (gets you 10GB), they have all of the above features, plus push email, and some other good stuff, too.

iflyhigh · 7 months ago

I looked at Fusemail, but their web interface was clunky and not as
smooth as GMail, which was the impetus for us to switch over.

Jeff Barr · 7 months ago

Your S3 + CloudFront math may be off! You don't have to pay S3 transfer charges every time CloudFront serves up an object, only when it is copied from S3 to a CloudFront POP. This should reduce your CDN costs.

iflyhigh · 7 months ago

You're probably right. The pricing I popped in was transfer to S3 for
storage, and then transfer out of CloudFront. Assuming our little user
content generating site did 250gigs a month, what's the more realistic
pricing look like?

Bryan Barker · 7 months ago

How is DNS third party routing an advantage over using a dedicated DNS in a shared environment? Aren't overloads just the amount of traffic your allotted via your hosting?

Are we just talking about the hour it takes for DNS to propagate?

Tim Jaeger · 7 months ago

This is a great post Jon! Breaking the numbers down, especially as it relates to hosting content on the cloud, is invaluable for entrepreneurs getting their apps up and running.

See-ming Lee · 7 months ago

It looks like that you guys have grown quite a bit. I just checked the site and saw that the favicon has changed but everything else is invisible / gone / the site is not happy with my ubuntu client..

Vincent Janelle · 7 months ago

Slicehost includes DNS hosting in their plans, so you could do that as well.