HN Explorer

Ask HN: Would you use a service like MongoHQ, if so why?

5 points by startupcto ↗ HN
I've been playing around with MongoDB and really liked using it and we're considering moving all our datastore over to Mongo. The question I have is startups like MongoHQ. Why would anyone use them?

First question that came to mind is the latency issue. Unless you are using EC2 and deploying your application servers "close" to theirs, there is no way to reduce the latency between your app servers and their db servers.

2. Why would you give control of the single most important piece of your livelihood over to someone else who in fact is just another startup.

My questions are really more geared towards using MongoHQ for production. I feel 100% comfortable in using MongoHQ for staging and development but just not production.

8 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 32.9 ms ] thread
benologist
We're using MongoHQ and have been for around a year.

1) We're outside of the AWS infrastructure, the latency is bearable esp. with caching. If you can cache it then the latency straight away only matters a small % of the time.

2) Local mirroring is coming I believe, at which point you can have a constant failsafe although their uptime & reliability has been great in our time with them.

startupcto
Why are you even using MongoHQ and have to live with bearable latency? I mean if you don't even use AWS, why not just deploy your own db server?
benologist
Good question. Originally I did do it all myself, I installed it and I had replication and all that set up, but it fell over and until you have a bunch of experience that means you're a noob who has to dick around in Google and IRC looking for answers for every simple problem, while part or all of your platform is broken.

Our servers are already in multiple datacenters which means we can either maintain our own multi-dc MongoDB cluster (not really an option w/ me at the wheel) or we have to eat some latency anyway.

In my opinion it's cheaper + easier to let MongoHQ handle it all, and latency .. as long as it's measured in milliseconds it's acceptable compared to doing it all myself.

MPiccinato
I am using MongoHQ to get up and running.

The recommended setup for deploying MongoDB on EC2 is a little too much overhead right now and I am not a sysadmin. If everything is going well and I start to notice performance issues on MongoHQ, I will move off to managing MongoDB myself.

benologist
Not having to learn it all is the best part of using MongoHQ - you can focus on using the platform instead of learning how to administrate it which on top of the million other things we all have to do is a PITA, especially if your startup goes down with every mistake you make.
jasonmccay
Hey there...I am one of the founders of MongoHQ. We get this question often. I think that the issue is less about getting up and going with a technology (generally, that is the easy part), but the reality that it is something that you still have to manage as you get increasingly busy. So:

1) How are you going to handle monitoring?

2) Do you feel comfortable making the right moves when you are faced with growth?

3) Do you feel comfortable optimizing your database as things change?

4) Do you have time to stay up on all the updates to MongoDB and how they can affect you, what improvements are right for you, etc.? The space is very busy.

As part of both of our shared and dedicated offerings, we offer this to our customers and can assist them as they grow and their needs change. Hosting the data is the easy part...mastering the domain is what takes effort. We do our best to help our users in this way.

One final note...we do offer consulting, installation and monitoring of in-house MongoDB setups. That way, if you did want to run MongoDB on your own platform, we could assist you. I'd love to talk to you more about it if you would like. My email is jason@mongohq.com.

latch
No, I wouldn't. Mongo is easy to setup, configure and monitor.
rawsyntax
I'm using it for my sideprojects. Heroku has an addon for mongohq. If it goes down, no biggie, it's just a side project.