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Ask HN: Server Hosting Headaches

2 points by chrislomax ↗ HN
Hi all, I am looking for our new hosting provider to take us into the next few years. Our current provider has made some basic mistakes over the past year or so which they have corrected but has in the process managed to lose us a client on our servers who had 12 sites with us.

I won't name the company as they have been pretty good to us but I think I can get a better service elsewhere.

I don't rush into things, I have been researching a new host for 5 months now, trying different services like Amazon and Azure. At the height of me about to make the decision for Amazon they had their mega outage. Azure is very good but it has some obvious flaws for hosting multiple websites.

I'm interested in this "cloud" setup with scaling etc but I just don't know where to put my eggs, I'm afraid to commit.

As a bit of background, we run .net with MSSQL so server supporting this are mandatory.

My question is, who does everyone recommend? I know they all have their pros and cons but as unbiased a review as possible? I don't want to start any flames so I don't really want mega negatives about a service unless you really feel the need to steer me away from something!

I really appreciate any suggestions

Chris

9 comments

[ 74.0 ms ] story [ 646 ms ] thread
saiko-chriskun
linode seems to be a pretty standard recommendation
chrislomax
Is Linode not just for Linux though?
saiko-chriskun
ah yeah, sorry didn't catch you were looking for a windows server.
html5
Chris,

Are there cost considerations? Are you looking for a SLA (Service Level Agreement) to come with the hosting?

chrislomax
There are always cost considerations! We are on the brink of bringing on a very large UK retailer though, they receive around a million visits a day in sale time so we are prepared to put some good money into our setup but I am always making sure we are running a tight ship.

Uptime is the most important part of this consideration

PythonDeveloper
I would suggest running your own half rack or full rack at a local colo facility, and integrate amazon or azure into your external scaling strategy using APIs to spin up instances on an as-needed basis.

You should always be in control of your core databases, and never allow an external vendor to be your fallback position or failsafe.

The odds of both Azure and Amazon having an outage at the same time are very very very small, especially if you span your instances across multiple zones.

Allow your local servers to be a fallback to the cloud, so that when (not if) there IS an outage, you have a controlled set of servers to rely upon.

chrislomax
It's really hard to make the decision. We priced up co-lo at our local data centre and the costs are good and would save us money, it's just a massive headache. Network switches, redundant lines, internal vlans. They are all a pain in the ass, the only person at current who would manage that is me and I need to be developing really.

Obviously you don't know our company structure so I'm not having a go there! We have gone through this process and pricing already and it's ideally an area I want to stay clear of. I would prefer the responsibility to be somewhere else.

It's really hard making any decision, I just want a reliable solution where everything just works. Whenever I seem to settle on something then something happens at one of the companies and I'm deterred.

I do appreciate the comment though and if I do ever get the day when there is someone dedicated to sorting this then I'll be dogging them to get this solution in place, the mythical 100% is the end goal

ohashi
Do you have any contact info I could reach you at? I am working on a startup in the review space and would love to chat with you. My info is in my profile.