undefined | Better HN

0 pointsdangrossman12y ago0 comments

They don't have to make any purchasing decisions. They can rent servers from companies like Softlayer and Rackspace (#3 and #4 behind AWS for YC startups), or spin up much cheaper VPS's (Linode's #2). We're talking $120/month commitments, not buying hardware and driving to a data center to install it. Deploying to a freshly imaged physical server is the same as deploying to EC2, and they can be provisioned for you in an hour or two. Each of those servers gets you many times the performance of an EC2 instance in the same price class, which means much more time to figure out your capacity needs as you grow.

0 comments

AaronBBrown12y ago

As someone who has worked w/ AWS (and Rackspace) for several years with multiple startups...

Unless they have dramatically improved their offering in the last couple years, an hour or two from "I need a new server" to delivery is 1) not an accurate timeframe for physical servers from Rackspace and 2) even if it was realistic, that's an eternity when you are trying to iterate quickly. I can have a new server in 30 seconds with AWS and in the course of an hour could have tested my automation tools half a dozen times or more vs reimaging a server over and over again.

I'm not saying it's always the right choice or that it's cheaper, but that flexibility combined with some of the pre-canned tools (ELB, RDS, CloudWatch, SQS, SNS) has tremendous value even when you aren't autoscaling.

dangrossmanOP12y ago

You've completely moved the goalposts; "testing automation tools" where your servers live for a few minutes then get destroyed is not the same as "a 24/7 environment". I didn't suggest renting servers to do ephemeral testing.

I only have experience renting physical hardware from Softlayer. They have built and imaged new servers for me in under 2 hours a dozen times, day and night. They also have a "xpress servers" line with guaranteed <2hr delivery. They also let you reimage your servers through their control panel or API; you don't need to have a new one built just to get a fresh disk image.

banachtarski12y ago

You speak as though ops and automation is too mysterious for a startup to handle. There are so many tools and frameworks that do what AWS does that it's easy to acquire that expertise. And who says you always need a new server to iterate quickly?

I moved my last company completely off AWS and it was proven to be a great decision across a number of dimensions.

AaronBBrown12y ago

Can you list some of those tools and provide an estimate of how long they take to configure and how much day-to-day support they require?

1 more reply

TillE12y ago

So use AWS or Linode for that specific use case. Great, that's its strength.

Once it's clear that the new server will be needed long-term, transition to dedicated hardware to save money and get better performance.

bearbin12y ago

DigitalOcean - Same or better speed, 1/6 or less of the price of ECC.

AaronBBrown12y ago

DO has a very limited API, no ability to add additional storage without resizing your droplets, and has no firewall protection without iptables being enabled. DO has its uses (I'm migrating my personal server there presently), but it's not even close to being in the same market/caliber as EC2.

For some businesses, the huge AWS feature set (RDS, EBS, ELB, security groups, VPC, ELB, EIPs, etc, etc, etc) is more valuable than the bottom $$ line. For others, those features aren't worth the added cost, but hand-wavey "just use DO" or "Just rent physical servers from SoftLayer/Rackspace" is disingenous.

TL;DR AWS has value above and beyond simply hour-to-hour elasticity.

1 more reply

joevandyk12y ago

AWS is PCI compliant. http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/pci-dss-level-1-faqs/

DigitalOcean and most others are not.

AWS's security and API is lightyears ahead of everyone else.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse