“Just wondering how many startups are still on dedicated servers and how many have made the switch to the 'cloud' of Amazon, Google, etc. We're looking at some cost cutting in the next few weeks and trying to price out different options to keep things alive (cheaper) as the going gets a bit rougher.”
October 9 at 12:49 pm
- Link
Amund Tveit, Justin Long, Arthur Welf and 12 other people liked this
FWIW, we have several dedicated boxes with an added bandwidth package from our hosting company that runs us between $4,000-$5,000 a month. We're probably going to drop at least one or two boxes, and possibly move some of our heavy storage requirements to the Amazon cloud to save on bandwidth costs. But I've definitely been tasked to look at all options. - Andrew Leyden
We are about to release a widget for Wordpress that we'll quickly move to other platforms. We costed it out a while ago and decided (quite easily) that moving to VMs on the cloud was the best solution. It's cheap initially and can scale fairly quickly. - mike
We're on the verge of going cloud. We'd probably go cloud before going dedicated. The way the balance of our needs work out, we can probably keep our site on a beefed up VPS for the time being, and move the service API workload out into the cloud. - Andrew Badera
Talk to Oren Michels or Scott Rafer at Mashery...entirely cloud based from get go... - Alan Edgett
Unfortunately we are a dedicated hosting environment. Both managed and the cheaper unmanaged. We still see growth in both areas, but the cloud makes sense for certain areas. - Chris
@ andrew leyden You might want to check out BlueLock www.bluelock.com I think their monthly packages start significantly lower then $4,000 a month - Lorraine Ball
I'm hearing a lot more people switching to the cloud. - Steve Spalding
I'm still on a dedicated server for each site. i think until you really (need to) scale up the cloud isn't a huge issue.I'm more interested in scaling 3rd party services (e.g. entry level consumer of 3rd party data) - weblivz
Those of us whose models depend on scale, or anyone whose app takes off suddenly, anyone who has predictable troughs in demand, are perfect candidates for the benefits of cloud computing. And, it's better, IMO, to already be in the cloud, if there's no additional cost associated, rather than trying to go cloud WHEN or AFTER demand hits. - Andrew Badera
I see the latest Twitter blog post - Ev admits, like every startup, they started without scale. I agree the cloud is *easier* to be part of than it used to be (Twitter used s3 for it's images since the start i think), but exclusively? - weblivz
via twhirl
Can someone explain how switching to the cloud works? We are a not-yet-started startup. We have a VPS and 12-hour backups to S3. Before we go 'live' we will have a failover to another VPS as well. I understand the concept of backing up to S3, etc. but I don't understand how switching would work unless I am reading too much into the word and it means using the cloud as an extra backup location? - david
Depends on the nature of your needs. Some places, like EC2 or Rackspace, offer fullblown IaaS. Others like Google App Engine lock you in with PaaS, which restricts you to writing Python apps to serve your needs. Hadoop offers a data cloud. Nirvanix offers CDN/SDN cloud-like facilities. - Andrew Badera
If you need Google's BigTable, Amazon's SimpleDB, or Microsoft's SSDS (in beta), then you also need to recognize, and understand how to employ, access, iterate, Entity-Attribute-Value, or "horizontal" data structures. These are all graph or graph-like databases. - Andrew Badera
In my case I have a website that's relatively low traffic, but a web service API that needs to scale. So, I part my service calls out to a cloud service, let the cloud handle the demand, then pump the data down to a data warehouse for conventional OLTP and reporting. - Andrew Badera
david, amazon web services are much more than a storage facility (S3), you can have EC2 (elastic compute cloud) instances running and fire them up as/when needed. They are basically images of a OS of choice running off with the calc power and memory you chose. If a small EC2 becomes unresponsive (for example too much load on that one) you can fire a bigger one up and smoothly (and instantly) migrate to that one. you may want to give a look at the AWS developers doc, there are a lot of very nice examples - Andre
much better and more useful than the ones I can make on friendfeed... you'll find them here: http://aws.amazon.com/resource... - Andre
We have been moving clients (and our own services) to the Mosso cloud system. Capacity scales automatically, the environment is straight PHP and / or .NET from our point of view and we have non of the crazy hoops to jump through to configure for EC2. - Soulhuntre
There are team members in our group actively learning the tricks and traps of EC2 with the goal of moving off a hugely expensive dedicated rack of servers. - Capn' One-Eye ☠
Care to share some of those tricks and traps? Your team keeping a blog by any chance? I'd love to share in their insights. - Andrew Badera