All of my personal sites are on Slicehost, and I can't say enough good things about them. I've also got one client site on Heroku and, while there has been a learning curve, I really love the amount of server administration I have to do (which is "none").
Using a couple of dedicated root servers from hetzner => http://www.hetzner.de/en/
don't know exactly how the connection to the usa is but around europe it's super fast...and cheaper than aws, slicehost or similar.
I've been with them for I think about three or four years. I havn't thought to rate their service on cordiality, but they've been perfectly competent and fast the few times I've needed them.
From http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#how-do-i-get-my-fair-share-of-... , they state that you get access to the full CPU of the box (if idle/best case), or access to your fair share of the CPU (if fully loaded/worst case). For the smallest plans this could mean 1/40th the overall CPU if under load. They only put accounts of the same size on each machine.
yeah i saw that, but still. how much is my minimum share? i scanned their site and couldn't find any hardware info, perhaps i'm missing it - maybe it's not really that important since i get to use more than the minimum if the CPU isn't maxed out.
Linode host boxen have dual quad core processors. Each Linode has access to 4 cores.
For their smallest plan (512MB/$19.95 a month), there are an average of 40 Linodes per box. So, on paper, you are "guaranteed" 1/20 of 4 cores. In reality (according to Linode staff), most host boxes are for all intents and purposes idle most of the time, so if you need to, you can max out those 4 cores.
Found their machines to be faster than Slicehost, the service to be superb, they have datacenters around the world that you can select to be your location (I chose London, UK as my users are here), and recently they upgraded the RAM for free in all VMs they run.
Hosting with them has been a delight. Slicehost are a very close 2nd in my opinion, but Linode are #1 currently.
I used SoftLayer for a few years. They're a great dedicated server provider. Perhaps even the best in unmanaged. But.. I downgraded to Linode to save some money and was amazed at how performant even their small VPSes are. I could run what I ran on a $200 box at SoftLayer for about $80 spanning 2 VPSes at Linode, no trouble.
Sure, but things go out of date, staleness creeps in and new providers or those that have changed their game won't be reflected.
I've no problem with questions like "What's the best..?" being asked again and again. If the answer never changed then fair enough, but thankfully the answer does change and we benefit from discovering what others are doing now.
Yeah, fair enough a lot of those posts are a bit old (although Linode/Slicehost seem to be dominant still). Removed the link to YC archive, it won't add much value to this discussion.
I like the Slicehost admin system more than Linode's, but Linode got servers in Europe which is a big plus - and Linode have better specs than Slicehost as well.
We have half a rack at a colo in Portland. All our public sites live on a single fast box.
Before that, everything was running off a fast desktop machine sitting behind a Business DSL line at Sam's house. I'd highly recommend that option, since it's so cheap compared to VPS and you get to use as big a box as you like (and as many too). You only really outgrow it when your bandwidth starts to max out the line, which is a lot later than you'd expect.
Twiddla survived it's first few Reddittings in that garage. It was only for SXSW and the simultaneous TechCrunching, RRW'ing, LifeHackering, and Mainstream Pressing that followed that forced our hand in moving it someplace a bit more professional.
You run the same risks hosting at home as you do in a datacenter. Things can go down and it's your job to put them back up. There's no greater chance of the ISP cutting off a Business DSL line that happens to point to a residence than to a business downtown.
When you're starting out, your service can, quite frankly, be down for an entire day and it won't kill you. Once you've got enough traction that downtime could be a money-losing issue, you can step up.
But let's be realistic. Plenty of real businesses host their public site from their own office. At least, several of the startups I've worked for have their own server closet. Many of them don't have redundant internet connection nor redundant power.
It's OK to be a little bit flaky. Look at the poster-child for flakiness (some microblogging service that seems to be popular among, well, everybody), and you'll notice it's still pretty successful even with it's weekly tech-blog-worth downtime. Your average little startup probably doesn't need five nines from the word go. What it does need, though, is a backend setup that only costs $50/month. Hosting from your home-office will give you that.
Depends on the business. I wouldn't outsource, say, my bookkeeping to a startup web company whose servers I notice to be unreachable for a longer amount of time.
>Depends on where you live, but your house doesn't have redundant connections and service contracts to fix them ASAP.
Might not be a problem if you can pick up the server and relocate it to another DSL terminal (and re-point your DNS). Indeed a home based server might be more robust, line goes down or electric is off then move the server. YMMV a lot.
I have seen this comment before, but I believe it is only valid for free accounts which get swapped out after a short period of no incoming requests. I think that for any paid plan, your app is always loaded so there is no loading request delay. You might want to give it another try with the lowest cost plan and see if your results are different.
Yes I'm referring to the free plan. I don't get it, why let trial users try with a subpar offering, it really is bad for "showing off" what Heroku is. I would put free trials at 30 or 60 days limit and give trial users something to talk about.
You can avoid that lag if you host your own stealth master and configure the Linode DNS servers as slaves. Having your domain distributed is just a NOTIFY and an AXFR away.
Use wildcard cnames, and have your application handle them internally.
You can even do this for MX records with Linode, thanks to their excellent support staff adding the functionality to their DNS interface when I asked for it. :)
If you really need that level of DNS control, you should probably be running DNS yourself. Linode lets you slave their nameservers to your master. So you get all the benefits of geographically distributed nameservers, but all the custom control of your own setup.
I've got dedicated servers from the french companies OVH and Online.net (previously known as Dedibox) since four years. The price is cheap including unlimited free reinstalls and a rescue mode. The service is great IMHO. I've also had one server from LeaseWeb but they are more expensive and comes with less services.
I'm interested in cloud hosting like Amazon EC2 or VPS like SliceHost, especially because I want to have my servers in more than only one country but so far all the solutions I found were not as great and/or cheap than the ones I use.
Here are some links for specific low cost servers:
http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/rps_offers.xml - OVH, great too but no disks, they use iSCSI which is better because it removes hard drive failure risks but with bad disk performance costs.
BTW until now most of my servers were hosted at my home but I'm moving to another country, this will not be possible anymore, too bad! Independence is one of my top priority so I don't want to be stuck with any hosting company if I find better somewhere else, like in my next basement!
They have 24/7 english and german language telephone support http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/kontakt/telefon-support/ (all the root servers are in DC 10/11/12). In over a year I didn't have to call them once, therefore I can't tell you about my personal experience. They answer emails very quickly.
The competition in this market is quite strong in germany, there are 5 major companys offering basically the identical dedicated server service. The servers are not virtualized, therefor you usually have to commit to longer running contracts or higher setup fees.
I used to use Slicehost, but moved to Linode once they launched their backup service. The admin UI isn't as pretty, but IMO the service is better (and they have VPS hosts in London, which shaves a few milliseconds off for me).
At Fantastic, we recently moved from Slicehost to The Rackspace Cloud. We're pretty impressed with them so far.
Slicehost for my personal box. AWS for gazehawk.com (crazy architecture, looking forward to blogging about it)
Used to be on VPSLink (was one of their first customers) but they sold recently and everything quickly went to shit. Don't think I'd recommend them anymore.
They are very expensive compared to most other services. I was going to host with them, since I live in Lansing and am acquainted with the owner, but Linode is much cheaper (for VPS) and I found the support to be nearly as good. If you're hosting on Linux you may want to consider taking a look at Linode.
Twitterfall.com is mostly run off a dedicated server from Rapidswitch (one of their base specs I think), though we also have a couple of VPSes from before we had the dedi. One from xeneurope.co.uk and one from Gandi. Both are reasonable. Rapidswitch is awesome.
I've used both prgmr.com and linode.com and my experience with both has been excellent. I currently use prgmr.com to host all my projects (which are only hobby projects) because they are very cheap. There is no fancy admin system, but I don't need one. Their SLA isn't any worse than linode. I have had no issues with downtime. My one experience with support resulted in a very good outcome.
Rackspace Cloud -- Is it true that it's overpriced? I'm really happy with it and I don't use many resources ($11/month right now, maybe) people have been telling me that it's actually really expensive when you're running something real though. Hrm, I'm considering a linode since everyone's seems so satisfied with them
Same here. Only complaint is a significant spike in attacks. Which may or may not have anything to do with them, but started right after we switched from ServerBeach.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadI've heard that their customer support can be less than cordial.
For their smallest plan (512MB/$19.95 a month), there are an average of 40 Linodes per box. So, on paper, you are "guaranteed" 1/20 of 4 cores. In reality (according to Linode staff), most host boxes are for all intents and purposes idle most of the time, so if you need to, you can max out those 4 cores.
Found their machines to be faster than Slicehost, the service to be superb, they have datacenters around the world that you can select to be your location (I chose London, UK as my users are here), and recently they upgraded the RAM for free in all VMs they run.
Hosting with them has been a delight. Slicehost are a very close 2nd in my opinion, but Linode are #1 currently.
I've no problem with questions like "What's the best..?" being asked again and again. If the answer never changed then fair enough, but thankfully the answer does change and we benefit from discovering what others are doing now.
I like the Slicehost admin system more than Linode's, but Linode got servers in Europe which is a big plus - and Linode have better specs than Slicehost as well.
For more control, I have a VPS on linode. But usually I just publish on webfaction.
Before that, everything was running off a fast desktop machine sitting behind a Business DSL line at Sam's house. I'd highly recommend that option, since it's so cheap compared to VPS and you get to use as big a box as you like (and as many too). You only really outgrow it when your bandwidth starts to max out the line, which is a lot later than you'd expect.
Twiddla survived it's first few Reddittings in that garage. It was only for SXSW and the simultaneous TechCrunching, RRW'ing, LifeHackering, and Mainstream Pressing that followed that forced our hand in moving it someplace a bit more professional.
http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/08/redundant-is-never...
You run the same risks hosting at home as you do in a datacenter. Things can go down and it's your job to put them back up. There's no greater chance of the ISP cutting off a Business DSL line that happens to point to a residence than to a business downtown.
Your home net connection may be reliable, now, but if something bad happens it could be down for days, not hours.
But let's be realistic. Plenty of real businesses host their public site from their own office. At least, several of the startups I've worked for have their own server closet. Many of them don't have redundant internet connection nor redundant power.
It's OK to be a little bit flaky. Look at the poster-child for flakiness (some microblogging service that seems to be popular among, well, everybody), and you'll notice it's still pretty successful even with it's weekly tech-blog-worth downtime. Your average little startup probably doesn't need five nines from the word go. What it does need, though, is a backend setup that only costs $50/month. Hosting from your home-office will give you that.
Might not be a problem if you can pick up the server and relocate it to another DSL terminal (and re-point your DNS). Indeed a home based server might be more robust, line goes down or electric is off then move the server. YMMV a lot.
If it's Python: App Engine
Anything else: Linode
- Heroku (Node.js beta)
- Joyent Smart Platform
- JGate on AppJet
You can even do this for MX records with Linode, thanks to their excellent support staff adding the functionality to their DNS interface when I asked for it. :)
I'm interested in cloud hosting like Amazon EC2 or VPS like SliceHost, especially because I want to have my servers in more than only one country but so far all the solutions I found were not as great and/or cheap than the ones I use.
Here are some links for specific low cost servers:
http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ks/ - OVH, great and cheap little servers!
http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/rps_offers.xml - OVH, great too but no disks, they use iSCSI which is better because it removes hard drive failure risks but with bad disk performance costs.
http://www.online.net/serveur-dedie/comparatif-des-offres-de... - Online.net, the other good french hosting company for dedicated server.
BTW until now most of my servers were hosted at my home but I'm moving to another country, this will not be possible anymore, too bad! Independence is one of my top priority so I don't want to be stuck with any hosting company if I find better somewhere else, like in my next basement!
* Intel Core i7-920 Quad-Core with Hyper-Threading
* 8 GB DDR3 RAM
* 2 x 750 GB SATA-II HDD (Software-RAID 1)
* 5 TB transfer; €6,90 for an additional TB
* 100 GB backup space for free, nice control interface (incl. reboot), NS control, good support
http://www.hetzner.de/ http://www.server4you.de/ http://www.strato.de/ http://www.hosteurope.de/ http://1und1.de/
At Fantastic, we recently moved from Slicehost to The Rackspace Cloud. We're pretty impressed with them so far.
Used to be on VPSLink (was one of their first customers) but they sold recently and everything quickly went to shit. Don't think I'd recommend them anymore.