Ask HN: Where do you host your startup web services?

8 points by dxjones 16 years ago | 6 comments

Where do you host your startup?

I am looking for a solution that is cost-effective. I want to keep costs very low to start, but I can pay-as-I-grow for increased resources.

Imagine a URL shortening/redirecting service (e.g., bit.ly) That's not what my startup is about, but I will have that kind of traffic. I need to handle lots of hits to my web site, but each requires minimal processing and bandwidth. Top requirements are 99.9% uptime and low latency (< 20 ms).

A typical cheap/shared hosting service is not acceptable, even when just getting started, because they all suffer from downtime or "brownouts", where response latencies get slow if there's a traffic spike, of is some random user on the shared service is doing lots of database queries.

My application is currently built using Apache, MySQL, PHP, and C. I also need SSH access.

To process each "hit" to my web site, I have rather minimal requirements for CPU time, memory, database size, and data-transfer per hit.

What really seems to be the challenge (when just starting) is getting a guaranteed 99.9% uptime and low latency without paying a lot per month for dedicated hosting.

(I confess that I don't have any experience with Amazon EC2, so I don't know if that would be appropriate. If you have any practical experience with the time/cost to get up and running on "the cloud", I'd love to hear from you.)

Any recommendations, suggestions, comments, or advice would be much appreciated.

You can reply here, or by email.

Thanks in advance,

David Jones, PhD, Pairwise Affinity

dxjones@gmail.com, http://dxjones.com

djones@pairwiseaffinity.com, http://pairwiseaffinity.com

j_lagof 16 years ago |

I will recommend Linode, for me it has been working great, no downtimes, good support ,etc.

I also having a good experience with GoDaddy, but it seems that I am an exception and not the rule, since everyone complains about it.

Good luck!

JayNeely 16 years ago | |

There's an excellent comparison of all the big virtual server services, with Linode recommended as a clear winner on almost all of the benchmarks (as always, YMMV).

http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

The one thing I really dislike about Linode is they don't offer automated backups.

I don't have any experience with them as a customer.

sucuri2 16 years ago | | |

Good link, thanks! I am researching a VPS for a change...

tlack 16 years ago |

You'll probably still get periods when your service is slower than other times, because you're sharing the network either way.

Anyway, I recommend Softlayer. A bit more expensive than Linode but at least you aren't sharing the server with other virtualized users. And besides, if your business isn't worth $200/mo in fixed costs for this important part of your infrastructure, why bother investing your valuable time anyway?

dxjones 16 years ago | |

Has anyone had experience to be able to comment on the pros and cons of: Slicehost or Rackspace?

ektimo 16 years ago |

I have the same question, but what if the uptime requirement is only something like 97%? Backups is a requirement though.