Well this is a given right? I've seen this tip given time and time again, dont scale before you have to. Some may completely object to that but if you are a startup and just trying to get going, grab a server or some resources in the cloud, write your minimum viable product and launch. If you cant handle the load, then scale. Yes you should have a "plan" but that doesnt mean you have to execute it until necessary.
I began my life at a startup 1 year after launch. 3 Servers, 1 web server, 2 app/db servers. As load increased and our needs changed we moved to a more complex structure, 2 load balancers with failover, 2 web servers and still 2 app/db servers but beefier. When life got harder we started optimizing web servers software and the database. When traffic grew past that along came another server cluster scaling us to an even greater degree.
Do we deal with hardware ourselves? No, managed hosting with dedicated servers. Why? Because we want to let someone else deal with the hardware problems. The cloud doesnt have the resources we need. We scale when we HAVE to, as in the site is going down every day because we cant handle the traffic. We run leaner than some of our competitors and we know this because some of them have gone public with their costs, number of developers and server architecture.
1. Have a plan
2. Find a hosting company you can scale with easily
3. Use the minimal resources necessary
4. When you have to scale determine the cost of optimization vs just adding more hardware.
5. Be Lean
I guess what I was trying to say was don't worry about over scaling. But take some time to make sure you aren't over scaling for 6 months in a row :-).
So I'd argue.
for #3
3) Don't stress out about the minimal resources necessary from day one. Figure out what the minimal resources are over time, and just take advantage of the fact you can delete servers.
The expense of going with a cloud solution is huge if you have a complicated deployment stack and large hardware requirements. my startup will easily grow into the single 8gig/1tb quad core box we are colocating, and far exceed it when we start seeing some real traffic. From what I expect to need in hardware, I would be sitting at over $3k a month in expense moving to Rackspace Cloud. Ignoring upfront cost of the servers, around $10k, colocating will only run me about $300 a month. I understand you don't have to worry about hardware issues, but I could literally hire a sysadmin to worry about hardware issues for that kind of money. It just doesn't make sense outside of well funded startups or established businesses.
Actually, I agree with you, being the sysadmin you mention. Unfortunately, the up-front cost seems to be a barrier to many a startup founder. To me, this suggests a lack of good leasing options, though it could be that's because it's not worth making a business out of it.
I understand you don't have to worry about hardware issues
I've always found this assertion to be misleading at best. One still suffers the consequences of hardware failure (both inherent and human error), yet one has very little, if any, ability to prevent them. You're at the mercy of the providers.
It just doesn't make sense outside of well funded startups or established businesses.
I'm not sure it makes sense inside them, either. I've found that the break-even point for buying versus cloud is consistently around 10 months. The rule of thumb for when the transition from cloud to colo makes sense for a startup that doesn't yet have any of their own hardware is about $10k/mo, assuming they're growing at a rapid clip.
The only situation where it would make sense is compute-heavy (but light on memory and I/O) loads that peak much higher than the average. I have yet to encounter such a one, since it's tough to meet the parenthetical requirement, thereby bypassing the Deutsch distributed computing fallacies.
It's not actually that costly to own a colocated server. A decent server will cost you around $2000 which will include 8 cores & 24gigs of memory. You can colocate it for around $60 a month, which is about $227 per month for 12 months, but is approximately equivalent to 12 small amazon instances.
Colocation is still useful in startups if you want to create/delete instances all the time in a development type environment where you're testing out the infrastructure that integrates between VMs.
So if you don't ignore the upfront cost, you break even at the 3 month point using his numbers. His argument is every bit as strong regardless of the shape of your cows.
I do agree with the OC, but I also think his situation leans unusually in favor of the colo option.
That is, 3.7 month break-even is a much stronger argument than 10 months, so I'd be interested in hearing what others have found to be the break-even point with various cloud providers.
I use boxes in the cloud for various things, but not yet for hosting. We have a couple big fast machines in a cage, of the sort that would cost a grand a month if they were on EC2, that we run all our sites from.
Once you have a single project that justifies the colo box, the marginal cost of starting a new project with a new website is zero. No need to configure a $20/month slicehost box and cross your fingers that it can handle a Redditting. You just put it on the monster box that can handle anything you throw at it until it demonstrates that it needs a big machine of its own.
Could you elaborate more about why you needed to spend $10K up front? And how you take advantage of your one giant server?
Are you using Xen to virtualize a bunch of servers on it?
I've always figured colocation + System Admin ends up costing more than a cloud solution. Especially when you need to have enough redundancy so that you don't fall over if a single server fails. In the cloud if a single server fails, it's their problem. In physical space it's your problem or your system admin's problem. How much time can you spare?
My wording wasn't too clear, sorry. I didn't mean I have spent that money, just that my planned hardware buildout will cost somewhere around $10k to start. Our single server was about $2k to put together 1.5 years ago. We use it for everything - mysql, redis, pool of unicorns, nginx proxying to unicorn pool and a handful of background workers (resque). I have already dealt with drive failures, but I loaded up the 8 hotswappable bays with drives, so it wasn't too scary. However, I am scared for other hardware failure, which is why I want some more machines.
I am not using Xen. I can see the benefit for some stuff, but I don't believe it's beneficial for my use case. However, I will make that decision in a more informed manner when I am actually in a position to expand our hardware (money and need).
I don't think the colocation costs more. Seriously, I have had great use out of my current server. I figure with a colocated set of 4 servers, $10k initial expenditure + $300 a month for 2 years is $17200, or I can go with rackspace and pay $3000 a month for 2 years, and be $72,000 in the hole. Oh, and after that two years, I don't even have spare hardware to play with!
Sorry to jump in, but are there cloud solutions that don't require sysadmin time? All the ones I have looked at give you a "bare" VM or set of VMs, which you then need to configure for your application.
Why spend $10K on servers if you have, all things being equal, 98% chance of failing?
Most startups fail. You should be prepared to fail cheaply. You can always spend $50K on servers once you are successful. Let's say you spend $1K/month on cloud-based servers. That's quite a lot of horsepower. If you fail in 6 months, you are still $4K less broken that you would be had you spent $10K in the first place.
If you succeed, you will able to spend as much as you need in servers to keep your bases covered and still add and remove cloud-based servers to lessen your load on demand.
the problem is that the $1K/month in 'the cloud' buys you servers that would cost $4K to buy. Even I (and as far as I can tell, nobody else using Xen has lower prices) price things out so I cover my hardware in four months.
The advantage to 'cloud' stuff is that if you have servers with less than 32GiB ram, the economics of owning get much, much worse, mostly due to hosting costs. If you have tiny little servers, VPSs really are cheaper over the long term... of course, 'serious business' hosting usually requires larger servers, so we're back to saying that you save a lot of money buying if you are big.
After my old web host made me really mad the other month I decided to grab a load of virtual servers and be my own web host (hosting client sites, projects etc.)
So now I have DNS, database/web servers etc. all under my control on shares that I can chop/change at will.
It's turned out to be phenomenally cheaper! Than having 1 dedicated server and a shard hosting package.
I'd be very interested in seeing a blog post detailing that. That would be very useful for hosting client projects. I'm working on a project that aims to be similar to Heroku but runnable on a handful of virtual servers from any VPS service.
>Imagine having a directory full of Ruby web apps, e.g. ~/Sites. To deploy an app, just drop your application’s directory into ~/Sites. To undeploy it, remove the application’s directory. The application directory’s name is used as the domain name. No manually signaling the web server for a restart.
While that sounds very useful, what I'm working on is more along the lines of Heroku's distributed dyno model. In their terminology, a dyno is a Thin web application server process. When an app needs to be started up, it will be possible to determine how many dynos are needed, and they will be automatically started up across the grid of virtual servers and balanced using a custom load balancer.
I can only imagine the horror of running a hosting company. If you want to do it properly, there is no end to complexity. Not to mention the money part.
I've always dreamed about running my own niche hosting business, running on dead-stripped Slackware custom boxes for actual serving/hosting and OpenBSD for routers/firewalls/spamd daemons (actually I would not deal with email at all as it is a separate business in itself) etc. All it takes is few seconds thinking about it and then realizing what a crazy talk that is.
So hats off to providers with a clue! As for the 99% of cookie-cutter companies/resellers, do a favor to everyone and close your doors.
Running a hosting company was actually a pretty profitable business back in the 90s. (It probably still can be if you have a really solid niche). I should write some blog posts on our experience (there were many positives).
or just lease servers from a "dedicated hosting" company. you get all the benefits of a colocated server (customizability, security, performance) and you can let them deal with hardware failures, upgrades, and obsolescence.
Even this grows into a nightmare. I've been moving dedicated servers to cloud / virtual solutions for the last 4 months.
I'm in love with Rackspace Cloud stuff and their support, and will end up saving thousands while providing my clients with a state of the art email system and more redundancy. Plus, with their cloud servers I can replicate and backup easily.
you didn't explain how it "grows into a nightmare". just pricing or what? i just used rackspace's pricing tool to price out what a virtual server would cost with the same amount of ram and bandwidth i get from one of my dedicated servers; the cloud solution was about $40/month higher.
I began my life at a startup 1 year after launch. 3 Servers, 1 web server, 2 app/db servers. As load increased and our needs changed we moved to a more complex structure, 2 load balancers with failover, 2 web servers and still 2 app/db servers but beefier. When life got harder we started optimizing web servers software and the database. When traffic grew past that along came another server cluster scaling us to an even greater degree.
Do we deal with hardware ourselves? No, managed hosting with dedicated servers. Why? Because we want to let someone else deal with the hardware problems. The cloud doesnt have the resources we need. We scale when we HAVE to, as in the site is going down every day because we cant handle the traffic. We run leaner than some of our competitors and we know this because some of them have gone public with their costs, number of developers and server architecture.
1. Have a plan 2. Find a hosting company you can scale with easily 3. Use the minimal resources necessary 4. When you have to scale determine the cost of optimization vs just adding more hardware. 5. Be Lean