Hot answers tagged hosting
13
Performance matters... wow. I know I'm going to be surprised by the variety of responses here. A regular eCommerce site benefits hugely from rapid page loads and response times, with visitors exiting the site much more readily when the site is slow. For an SaaS provider, I would have thought that performance is even more of an issue. When I select SaaS ...
9
Have you considered that EC2 is not the right platform for you?
EC2 prices are public - if you do know exactly how much disk space you need, how much bandwidth you'll use, which EC2 instance you need and for how long, you can calculate to a cent how much that will cost you.
If you don't know that, then we don't know that either so we can't provide any ...
8
We lease some of our servers through The Planet (formerly EV1 Servers and before that Rackshack) -- I think The Planet is one of the largest providers of dedicated servers in the U.S. -- perhaps the largest in the world?
I've been a client of theirs for about seven years and am very happy with the service I get. If you watch the sales, they often offer very ...
7
Yeah, Amazon's pricing is pretty complicated, but that's the tradeoff you have to make to really have usage based pricing.
Take a look at their calculator's "Free Usage Tier" estimates:
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html?key=my-free-website
If you've never been an AWS customer before, they will give you, for free, 12 months of a single Micro ...
6
For 10+ years we owned the hardware and had to maintain it. Our systems became very large and complicated. In the end, the primary cost (and risk) wasn't the hardware, but the systems administrators to maintain it.
I've since outsourced all hardware to so called "cloud providers" such as Rackspace, GoGrid, Amazon's AWS, etc. Smartest thing I ever did. While ...
6
Scaling- What do all of these bloggers
mean when they say you need to prepare
for when TechCrunch writes about you
and your site goes down?
http://www.webhostingpad.com/ says
that for $2.00 a month I get unlimited
bandwidth?
"Unlimited bandwidth" pretty much never means "unlimited" bandwidth, especially for $2 a month. I couldn't find the ...
6
"Cheap", "fully managed", and "scalable". Sorry, you'll have to pick just two.
Windows Azure gets you Microsoft SQL Server storage, and a fully managed service, and the price is quite good. To fully utilize Azure you'll have to program against Azure's APIs, so there is longer development time and vendor lock in. But Azure probably comes closest to what you ...
5
Well for a year, it's free within limits: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
However, once that's up, you're looking at a MINIMUM of ~$60 a month to keep the lights on on a small instance ($0.0825/hr * 24 hours * 30 days = $61.20/month). Then you have to pay for traffic and storage.
Now you can get a hell of a VPS for that.
5
Do you know Microsoft BizSpark? You can get all the software you want during three years for a one time 100$ fee + free hours on Windows Azure.
Registration is very easy. If I remember well, all you need is to be a young company with less than $1M revenue and have a corporate email.
Even if you do no want to use Azure, it is still worth it for the ...
4
For some reason, I'm a bit of a DNS geek, and have followed this area for years.
DNS hosting is basically a solved problem, i.e. it is not that hard to build a good DNS infrastructure and get perfectly good speed and reliability. There are quite many good providers out there.
In addition to the good answers already given, I'd like to mention Gandi. Their ...
4
I would never put anything more than a small brochure site on shared hosting. Even if shared hosting would work for your initial load, it does NOT scale well. In non-geek-speak: end up on the front page of Digg, watch site fall off the internet and customers see that you are GONE, lose hours if not days while you migrate to a more robust solution.
What ...
4
Cloud hosting services really aren't appropriate for testing new sites out. The whole point in using a cloud hosting service is so that you can quickly meet surges in traffic without having to invest in a bunch of hardware and system administrators up front. If you are just running a normal site or a test site you are going to be paying a premium for the ...
4
@aklin81: Your question is, I'm sorry to say, not possible to answer. You're basically asking "how long is piece of string", to which there is no answer only another question. This will be completely dependent on:
How much CPU, RAM, disk I/O etc your application typically consumes per connected user.
How many users are online / using the service ...
3
and welcome to this site! :-)
cloud ... is indistinguishable from what a hosting provider provides (at least from a functional point of view)
Not quite. A cloud provider sells you virtual machines to install you code on, just like a conventional hosting provider does. Beyond that, a cloud provider IMHO delivers:
Assurances that you can instantiate ...
3
can I rely on AWS to host the site from A-t-Z? [...] What are the parts that AWS cannot help me with?
As you present your case, AWS can host all that you need. There are no parts pertaining to running your site that AWS can't help you with. However, you need to install operating systems, install web servers, SQL database servers et cetera; and you need ...
3
My suggestion - take a close look at the chatter on http://webhostingtalk.com and review the latest offers there. They have a specific forum for latest offers.
Given the phrase "my current needs are not that great" you may want to consider virtual private servers - a good unmanaged xen vps solution will bring you pretty far. review vps vs dedicated? for ...
3
If I were you I would contact some MS folks (maybe an evangelist like Patrick Foley who co-hosts a startup podcast) and ask them what the schedule is for availability - or make other legal arrangements or just pick another technology.
I would imagine there has to be an acceptable way to front a business in another country that is supported and do it ...
3
There are many hosting companies that offer full-managed Windows servers with MS SQL, .NET and MVC. Some of the ones I know are Rackspace and Peer1. I am currently using cloud servers from Rackspace with SQL Express, it is cheap but you do have to install all of the software besides the server OS.
However, I would like to know of other less expensive ...
3
To be honest some figures are needed; for me at least, or some idea of if the machine time is really a fixed cost or if it will vary based on the number and size of the user accounts.
I think more pertinent is what do your competitors charge and how can you be competitive (ie rapid deployment for RoR like Heroku)
But…
Mathematically [from scratch for ...
3
We've just brought up a site using Amazon Web Service, specifically the auto scaling and load balancing.
The advantage is that is you have few users the cost is low, but if there's a spike it easy to configure to bring up resources to copy with the spike. The time it took to bring the system up was trivial, compared to trying to do it ourselves, we balanced ...
3
S3 is probably the best bet for you because you'll want customers to upload directly to your storage service, i.e., not to your servers within your bandwidth cap and then onto a CDN. And, you can run S3 with a CDN, theirs or any other with customer origin support. Just using a CDN would be problematic since it would require you to upload your content ...
3
What you will be looking for is a dedicated server for hosting, where you have root access. Then you can install whatever applications you will need. You could also look into a colocation arrangement where they host servers that you provide. It seems like from the questions you have asked that you have been looking for what you need in a VPS or perhaps ...
3
If the alternative is chargebacks, I would say absolutely. That's pain that you don't want to have to deal with.
Alternatively, if you wanted to try to get them active or find out specifically why they're not (or switched), you should check out what Patrick MacKenzie (patio11) is doing with Lifecycle Emails: https://training.kalzumeus.com/lifecycle-emails
...
3
These (soon not to be) customers are gold - you should attempt to do whatever possible to contact them and learn the following:
why they signed up for your service
why they are not using their service
what service did they move to
what made them select the alternative service
did the service meet their expectations.
From there, you gain valuable insight ...
2
I am very happy with Slicehost. Their support is top-notch, backups are a breeze to recover, you get root access etc.
The best part though is their help site: http://articles.slicehost.com - the PickledOnion articles are made of awesome, he makes even the driest topics accessible and fun. Makes you feel smart! :)
2
DynDns has a good paid offering with a SLA: http://www.dyndns.com/services/pricing/#dns. At $300/year it does not seem very expensive, and does offer a SLA, so it's better than self-hosted.
My knowledge about this is limited though, there might be other hosts out there who can beat this deal.
You could ask in http://ServerFault.com, they for sure can give ...
2
Google cares a lot about how close your keyword is to the domain name. All else being equal, gmat-skill-guru.com is better than skill-guru.com/gmat which is better than skill-guru.com/blog/gmat. Google treats sub-domains as if they appear just after the slash, so gmat.skill-guru.com is equivalent to skill-guru.com/gmat.
So the question is really whether or ...
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