I run admin + staging stuff and my own email on the dedicated servers. The Hetzner box has some offsite backups, too. I want something that won't die at the same time as the website.
I use two colos for redundancy. One is in Sacramento, and it mitigates the earthquake risk of the one in Fremont.
The AWS costs consists of stuff I'm too lazy to go find and delete. Everyone has an unused EC2 instance or S3 bucket somewhere; that's what keeps Amazon in the black.
Interesting. Are colo prices generally that high in the US? May I ask what's included at 600$ for 2(-3?)U of rack-real estate there?
* What level of support do you have (can you call someone at the
DC at 4am and have him hot-swap a failed HD for you)?
* How many shared or own gigabit or 100mbit uplinks are included?
(if >1: can do bonding on your interfaces?)
* With how many other servers do you share the same circuit-breaker?
* I guess you have at least 1 UPS + 1 non-UPS power supplies?
* exceptionally good peering?
* network/power SLA?
* 24/7 access to your server?
I worked for a DC in europe some years ago and i'm genuinely intrigued how the price in your spreadsheet for colo-hosting is so much more than what i was used to (~100-150$/U).
There are a lot of niche opportunities in larger segments. The hard part is always getting attention / traction, getting those first thousand customers to pay, getting enough money to afford some marketing and support (if necessary).
Just a simple example: HomeAway's huge vacation rentals business. Within the larger super category ('for rent by owner'), there are long term rentals, and that's a niche compared to the much larger vacation rental market. Several years ago, you could have created a modest business around that smaller niche, charging $30 or $50 per year for a listing. 10,000 listings at $50 per year becomes a nice, likely quite profitable, small business.
Real estate listing concepts are great if you can get traction and listings, the costs of hosting and serving up the data and images might as well be zero.
Maybe my memory is poor but I seem to recall SmugMug being somewhat similar in its early days for photo hosting. Svbtle could have done similarly in the blogging space if they'd charged early on.
In terms of single/small group companies running profitable Internet services though, there are tons, not least the well known ones around here involving people like patio11 and Amy Hoy. I'd say the sky's the limit. Indeed, it might be more fun to think of what services could never suit the model..
Seems high to me too (I use DNSMadeEasy). But I'm too lazy to shop around for alternatives right now. The current setup Just Works™ and is not a big proportion of my costs.
That doesn't sound right. On Business Account with Add on pack it should only cost about $360 / Year. Which is $30 /m.
And you cant compare DNSimple / Route53 as suggested on twitter with DNSMadeEasy. Both in features and more importantly SPEED!.
DNSMadeEasy is already one of the best out there. Most of the others that offer similar features and speed are multiple times more expensive.
As far as i know there are only two other alternatives / recommendation. Cloudflare, which is free. Their DNS are quite fast, but i think there are limitation with what you could do with it.
And if you grow larger, EdgeCast recently offers DNS services as well. Although it start at $50, its price on per million queries are one of the cheapest in terms of paid DNS services. And like its CDN network it is very fast.
Agree, he should switch to Amazon route53. Should only cost a few bucks a month for anycast DNS distributed all around the world. Route53 also has some really cool failover and HA solutions like health checks, and failover to s3 buckets.
20M req/month seems like a trivial amount that can be handled by a bunch of geographically-distributed VPSes (for failover and better query times) running any sane (resources-wise) DNS server software.
For comparison, we have a bare-metal E3113@3GHz machine that at the time happens to run only a full-fledged PowerDNS server (sqlite + pipe backends, query cache disabled due to split-horizon requirements, and passes queries to a pdns_recursor if can't answer directly). The server easily handles about 500M reqs/month, with negligibly low load average. Judging from top(1) output — pdns_server-instance has about 2-4% CPU consumption, most of which is probably due to disabled caches.
But there are probably cheaper options with specialized services.
Pinboard is one of a few services I happily pay for. Honestly, I'd probably pay a subscription price for it. I've got 1041 bookmarks, it's fast, searches and tags flawlessly, the unread functionality is super useful, and I've got some (unofficial?) android app that makes it a snap to use with my phone. Keep up the great work.
Does Hetzner has any proper competitor somewhere, with similar power/price ratio? Especially interested in some on the US side of the pond. They seem to be a go-to company for everyone that wants to host stuff on his/her own.
There aren't very many trust-worthy hosts that come close to Hetzner in the US market.
I use WebNX, and love them. They have a particular west coast focus (first major location out of LA). Their prices are a bit higher than Hetzner, but they provide an amazing service, have a solid network, and the prices are great; plus they'll do any custom setup you need. They frequently have deals on WebhostingTalk.
You can get a E5-1650v2 with 32gb of ram and 50tb of bandwidth for $139 (no setup). They're a quality host, and their network is very fast.
Reliable Servers / Constant.com have some great prices and deals from time to time. Their network is great. They're comparable with Servermania mentioned by another post (Servermania is out of Buffalo; Constant is out of New Jersey, the DuPont Fabros datacenter).
I do not have a server with them, have never used them, am not associated with them, etc, but one I keep seeing coming up in the US is http://www.servermania.com/ - it's still not quite as a cheap as Hetzner though (of who I'm a happy user).
Readit News
That said, by the standards of physically extant businesses, it is ridiculous how far you can get on $1k or $2k a month.
Edit: And was barely worth commenting at all, let alone this comment only drawing attention to the information-free nature of my opinions.
Oh dear ...
But the OP has shamed me into realising I do need to upgrade my financial controls - "worrying" does not seem to count as a system!
For a relatively small site, why do they need so many different hosting providers?
I use two colos for redundancy. One is in Sacramento, and it mitigates the earthquake risk of the one in Fremont.
The AWS costs consists of stuff I'm too lazy to go find and delete. Everyone has an unused EC2 instance or S3 bucket somewhere; that's what keeps Amazon in the black.
(*)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8069474
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/...
https://blog.pinboard.in/2012/05/a_cloud_of_my_own/
I'm sure there's a HN discussion from back then also.
Edit: Lots more on the topic...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ablog.pinboard.in+server
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There's some RSS readers and email providers. Photo hosting and blogging are too "bulk" and high-profile for this business model, probably.
I suspect the abuse/takedown request workload is tiny, which helps a lot in keeping the cost down.
Just a simple example: HomeAway's huge vacation rentals business. Within the larger super category ('for rent by owner'), there are long term rentals, and that's a niche compared to the much larger vacation rental market. Several years ago, you could have created a modest business around that smaller niche, charging $30 or $50 per year for a listing. 10,000 listings at $50 per year becomes a nice, likely quite profitable, small business.
Real estate listing concepts are great if you can get traction and listings, the costs of hosting and serving up the data and images might as well be zero.
In terms of single/small group companies running profitable Internet services though, there are tons, not least the well known ones around here involving people like patio11 and Amy Hoy. I'd say the sky's the limit. Indeed, it might be more fun to think of what services could never suit the model..
https://www.cloudflare.com/dns
And you cant compare DNSimple / Route53 as suggested on twitter with DNSMadeEasy. Both in features and more importantly SPEED!.
DNSMadeEasy is already one of the best out there. Most of the others that offer similar features and speed are multiple times more expensive.
As far as i know there are only two other alternatives / recommendation. Cloudflare, which is free. Their DNS are quite fast, but i think there are limitation with what you could do with it.
And if you grow larger, EdgeCast recently offers DNS services as well. Although it start at $50, its price on per million queries are one of the cheapest in terms of paid DNS services. And like its CDN network it is very fast.
For comparison, we have a bare-metal E3113@3GHz machine that at the time happens to run only a full-fledged PowerDNS server (sqlite + pipe backends, query cache disabled due to split-horizon requirements, and passes queries to a pdns_recursor if can't answer directly). The server easily handles about 500M reqs/month, with negligibly low load average. Judging from top(1) output — pdns_server-instance has about 2-4% CPU consumption, most of which is probably due to disabled caches.
But there are probably cheaper options with specialized services.
I use WebNX, and love them. They have a particular west coast focus (first major location out of LA). Their prices are a bit higher than Hetzner, but they provide an amazing service, have a solid network, and the prices are great; plus they'll do any custom setup you need. They frequently have deals on WebhostingTalk.
Check out Versaweb: http://versaweb.com/dedicated.php
You can get a E5-1650v2 with 32gb of ram and 50tb of bandwidth for $139 (no setup). They're a quality host, and their network is very fast.
Reliable Servers / Constant.com have some great prices and deals from time to time. Their network is great. They're comparable with Servermania mentioned by another post (Servermania is out of Buffalo; Constant is out of New Jersey, the DuPont Fabros datacenter).
ReliableSite.net is pretty great: http://www.reliablesite.net/
They're out of the same datacenter as Constant.com mentioned previously. Fast network, good prices.
The only one of these that comes close to Hetzner pricing is Versaweb however.
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