Ask HN: How/Where do you host your webapp?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418136

by schtog • 18 years ago

1 2 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What is the best way to host a webapplication?

What are pros cons of hosting in the cloud vs hosting on your own servers.

Is it a lot of work to host on your own?

What services do you recommend for hosting your application elsewhere? Google Appengine is the most famous option I guess, what do you think about that?

I also looked at slicehost: https://manage.slicehost.com/customers/new?referrer=40156bada03f0adc4fae89abdce4693c

256 slice $20.00 10GB 100GB Exactly how much is that? Seems cheap but how far does 100GB go?

Other tips? It seems an obvious choice for me with no real knowledge of hosting my own server to choose to host in the cloud.

noodle• 18 years ago

slicehost is a wonderful place to stage your app and grow it until you need to break out, imo.

i host around 10 apps and sites on a 256 slice. its plenty if you're not getting too much traffic and optimize correctly so that you don't see thrashing.

if you don't like that, though, you can boot up a server on EC2.

jws• 18 years ago

"Exactly how much is that?" Good question, no answer. I recommend you get some sort of a network byte counter, then go to a few sites that feel similar in size/scope to what you plan. Use their "bytes per visit" as a ballpark figure.

For instance, I'm using Safari and turned on the "Show Network Timeline" then reloaded hacker news. 34kB. Then I went to slashdot.org: 643KB for a first visit, probably more like 74KB for subsequent front-page load (scripts are the bulk but they cache).

If you use a VPS solution, you will be managing your machine which is nice, but if you aren't already skilled at that it will be a distraction from your webapplication that you might be better without.

The big question with VPS solutions is "how fast is my machine today?" I have a tiny slice at VPSlink that used to be nicely snappy, but now is painfully slow. Something outside my visibility has changed on my server and there is nothing I can do. My slightly cheaper server at RapidXen is much faster.

Slicehost guarantees CPU share based on your slice size, but I don't see the denominator, I assume since a nearly 16GB slice is available that is the denominator which would give you 1/64th of the machine, worst case. Disk IO is another thing entirely, 1/16th of a modern CPU is ok, 1/64th of a disk drive spindle is painful. I suspect that is why my VPSlink machine has become slow.

Money can mitigate some of this, just buy a bigger slice. Mine are tiny because I am interested in how much I can do in a ~$7/mo server.

Ask HN: How/Where do you host your webapp?

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