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Ask HN:Use the cloud?

3 points by springcoil1 ↗ HN
I'm working for a company, developing a social network/ marketing / etc website. I'm wondering if a distributed computing solution would be worthwhile. We're expecting to have a fair amount of images and video on the website. I wanted to originally program everything in Lisp. But time is of the essence. We have Php programmers, I personally have experience with Python.What do you recommend? Real server or Cloud?

4 comments

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jhancock
It probably comes down to how much money you have to buy servers (or rent ones) up front versus smaller cost increments for "utility" computing (can we stop calling this "cloud"? isn't everything in the cloud?).
lsc
it also depends on how much hardware and co-lo knowledge you have. Usually it makes sense to go virtual until you need more than 8 or 16 gigs of ram/ 4 cores. after that, it usually makes sense to buy hardware.

If you need a 32GiB ram/8 core box, and you rent, you usually end up paying 1/3rd to 1/5th the hardware cost every month, depending on how much you pay for hardware, which is something else that varies wildly.

What you pay to co-lo a server, and what you pay for bandwidth also varies quite a lot.

The important thing is to make sure you aren't locked in to one vendor. There is a lot of room for price competition in the server-outsourcing market, and you don't get any benefit from that if you let yourself become locked in to one vendor.

gizmo
1. Don't do everything in Lisp. Go for Python. It's a decent language, and easy to pick up for your PHP colleagues.

2. If you know your way around Linux, a few dedicated servers will be very powerful. Use Cloud as dumb storage for pictures and movies.

3. Really, forget about Lisp.

patkai
1. Language / Framework * your php programmers should use php: python is a great language but it takes time to learn it, plus a new framework, and to get efficient and stable takes even more. also, php is not a bad language and zend is not a bad framework. it's neither pretty nor cool or exciting but it works, is fairly efficient and will give you results the fastest with your team. * you should use python: for many other tasks (automation, backup, integration, sysadmin, boto for AWS if you use it) you already know one of the best and fun languages.

2. Cloud or own servers * you can delay this decision (most likely), and try not to start buying stuff :) * this is actually two questions: (i) how much does cloud vs own cost - this is easier, e.g. the AWS calculator can help http://bit.ly/RU8T (ii) what kind of usage patterns will your site have - this is very important, as in case of wildly fluctuating demand or unpredictable scaling requirements you may have to go with the cloud.