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If you were a one developer startup, which service would you pick and why? If the goal is to get to market really fast.

Would you go with GAE and build everything from scratch on Python, and one click deploy? or pick AWS, setup the server and db, use Rails, and do some admin work?

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4 Answers

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Hi Johnny, and welcome to this site! :-)

I'm sorry to be a little pushy on your first question here, but your question is better served elsewhere. As it's mostly about software development technology stack, I think you should try Stackoverflow.com -- here we're more talking about startups, i.e. the company building.

That said, you should be prepared for your question to get a mixed reception. It is hard to discuss technology platforms in the abstract, one needs to know the constraints of your specific situation. The fact that you're a one man show is not enough -- for a proper answer we would also need to know what your application does, what your expected growth looks like, and how experienced you are with Ruby, Python, Java etc. Right now you question is a little like "which is better, space shuttles or supertankers?", to which the only reasonable answer is "well, it depends on what you need.".

My personal pet peeve with regards to development platform is the developers level of prior experience with the platform in question has by far the greatest impact. In other words, given a choice between AppEngine and AWS, my first question would be how familiar are the developers with Ruby|Python and with MySQL|"NoSQL type" datastores?

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Neither!!! Amazon and AppEngine, and Azure all fail. They are usually more expensive than traditional hosting.

The word cloud has been overly exploited. If you build a SAS (software as a service), it is now considered software in the cloud. This is a good thing, but just catchy wording such as WEB 2.0.

The problem with Amazon, Azure, and Appengine is that they are all very expensive. They pricing gets a little hard to decifer with compute cycles, storage, and bandwith.

Your best bet is to build a decent server or buy one and colocate it.
In the long run you will save BIG money.
I use CalPop.com and have had nothing but a great experience with them. You can tell the pricing is great by their outdated web site.

To speed up my site, (a benefit the cloud hosting usually provides) i use a CDN for images, javascripts, and css. The best service i have found for this (best value and great service) is maxCDN. I literally called these guys at 2am in the morning and got support.

If you are not up to running your own server, look at Rackspace hosting in the cloud. They offer virtual hosting, but their infrastructure allows your server to scale multiple machines. Its more expensive than standard colocation, but they take care of all the management.

Chances are once you have a sver, you wont touch it much. We only do health checks on our servers, adding hardwawre, and more power. We sometimes throw another disk in the storage array, and backup (we use drobo) but that is it.

We save a ton of $$ which is better spent on: development, marketing, beer or strippers.

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Completely disagree. Amazon, and to an extent the other two, are very important. On Amazon you can set up a load balanced, auto scaled system in next to no time. The amount of time involved to implement and maintain this yourself has to be considered. Even more important, whilst you have less traffic, you pay less. That said, I've never seen the Rackspace load balancing features, I don't see that offered on the web site. Would be interested in a link. You save big money only if your time is worth nothing... – David Feb 17 '11 at 18:24
The bottom line is that most small apps dont require Load Balancing, and for big apps the cost of running them on the Amazon cloud is extremely expensive. I can colo ca server with 15 mpbs for $100 month. Or 150mpbs unlimited for $1000 per month. The server might cost another few k. Now if you were to setup your own "private cloud" with that fixed bandwith cost, using either vmware, or hyper-v you could save a ton of money in the long run. I have done the calculations many times over in excel, and even for mid size apps the savings is significant. – Frank Feb 17 '11 at 18:30
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You hit the nail on the head here frank. A client of ours quickly learnt the hard way just how expensive an EC2 hosting set up is, VERY expensive. Cloud hosting is heavily overrated. – DigitalSea Feb 22 '11 at 23:26
+1 for agreeing with me! =). There is a very valid case for existing cloud systems such as Amazon, Rackspace cloud, and Azure, but the problem is with any real success you are going to pay out the ass in bandwidth costs. These costs quickly trump the costs of running your own infrastructure with a full time sysop. Hopefully, in the long run the cloud will be much cheaper. I actually think its a big risk to invest in proprietary systems such as Amazon EC2. A safer approach is to virtualize at the machine level using Zen, Vmware or Hyper-v. Gives you a broader scope of options to scale. – Frank Feb 24 '11 at 0:14
"You can tell the pricing is great by their outdated web site." Can't tell if Frank is serious or not haha – whamsicore Jun 8 '11 at 8:52
up vote 0 down vote

In general, I have to agree with everything Jesper said.

I would also point out that Rails hosting options are becoming easier all the time. Heroku offers a service on top of Amazon EC2 that abstracts away the server administration and makes it the easiest way I have found to get going quickly.

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What's your expertise in your language? Python or Rails? If you are familiar with Python, then go with Python (Django, Pylons, etc...). If Rails, then go with Ruby on Rails. Because if you want to market fast, it is best that you stick with the language that you familiar with.

My 2 cents though

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