Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions

http://jpf.github.com/domain-profiler/ycombinator.html

by jf • 17 years ago

171 99 17 years ago

jpf.github.com

charliepark• 17 years ago

It's surprising how many cells of that table say "GoDaddy."

jf9• 17 years ago

Yes, that surprised me too, considering GoDaddy's lackluster reputation.

Which reminds me, you can click on the table header to sort the columns.

kevindication2• 17 years ago

I've had no problems with GoDaddy as registrar, and they're priced right (and that seems to be where they win most in that chart). I can't speak to their quality as a hosting provider though.

Have they been screwing up as registrar for others?

vaksel• 17 years ago

Not that surprising, Godaddy is pretty much the amazon of domain registrations. I'm surprised however, that there are 2 companies that are using them for webhosting.

oscardelben• 17 years ago

Actually amazon try to make my life easier when I want to by something. Godaddy instead is trying to sell me tons of stuff I don't want.

bradgessler2• 17 years ago

Their UI is horrendously busy for YC founders, but as everybody else is saying, "the price is right."

tdavis• 17 years ago

Everybody complains about the UI -- but it's domain registration! How often do you really use the UI? A couple times a year, maybe?

GoDaddy is super cheap and reliable (for domains). Until somebody makes something better (and equally cheap), I'm staying.

sant0sk12• 17 years ago

s/surprising/depressing/

GoDaddy's "used car lot" salesmanship makes me loathe the company. I'm in process of transferring all my domains elsewhere.

potatolicious2• 17 years ago

Likewise. Have a fairly budget-price but not-so-shady registrar in mind?

[edit] WTF guys, why am I being modded up? I asked a question without providing additional insight - this doesn't deserve +points.

mattmaroon2• 17 years ago

Man that is so brutal though. I got the domain privacy through GoDaddy which makes the transfer process so much work that I just gave up.

Someone here recommended Dynadot to me and I'm much happier with that.

kogir• 17 years ago

For a while at Loopt we considered becoming a Tucows reseller and only holding our domains, but it wasn't worth the effort.

Whoever bought our first domain used GoDaddy we just stuck with it. We've seen no pressing reason to switch.

staunch3• 17 years ago

Tucows is more of a pain. You can become an eNom reseller in a day or two very easily. As I recall, there's a little faxing involved, but no biggie. It's convenient if you need to register or modify domains programmatically.

jganetsk• 17 years ago

It's not surprising how many cells say Google.

zhyder• 17 years ago

Cool! Looks like most folks using GoDaddy as registrar switch to some other service (typically web host?) for the DNS. How come?

Are any of the companies with Softlayer using their Cloudlayer offering? If yes, how do you find it?

aq• 17 years ago

Umm, what about multiple CN SSL certificates?

jf9• 17 years ago

I didn't think to check for those. Great idea, thanks!

juliusdavies• 17 years ago

I think multi-CN is pretty rare. It's Subject Alt Names to look out for!

https://owa.central1.com/ for example.

pg2• 17 years ago

Interesting, but in the first two there are slices labeled both "other/self hosted" and "self hosted."

jf9• 17 years ago

"self hosted" means that the IP or Whois lookup matched the second level domain - a high degree of confidence that the service is self hosted.

"other/self hosted" is basically a catch all. Originally just labeled "other", I added "self hosted" later since that is often (but not always) the case.

donw3• 17 years ago

I'm surprised that Linode isn't on there at all, although it's good to see BitPusher get mentioned for their work on Wufoo (good bunch of guys over there).

borism2• 17 years ago

oh noes, you made a pie chart - the most useless chart type of all!

jf9• 17 years ago

http://laughingsquid.com/accurate-pie-chart/

borism2• 17 years ago

thank you! morons who down-voted my comment don't seem to be able to understand...

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

Email should include outgoing. Tipjoy uses http://authsmtp.com

Google hosted email for outbound kinda stinks

akamaka• 17 years ago

I'm just about to switch to Google for mail hosting, and your comment worries me a little.

What kind of trouble have people had with Google's outgoing mail servers?

rufo• 17 years ago

I think they might just be talking about using it for mass-outbound messages from an app, not for actual human-to human messages. (Never had a problem with Gmail for my personal/work e-mail, anyway.)

fuzzmeister• 17 years ago

Does anyone else have any thoughts on the best outbound email provider to use for automatically-generated emails?

gcheong• 17 years ago

Wow, nothing on Google App Engine or Azure?

tybris3• 17 years ago

Well, Google App Engine isn't exactly suitable for innovative applications since you're locked to what their environment offers you (e.g. no background processes!?). Azure I don't know, is that generally available yet?

stevejalim2• 17 years ago

App Engine does offer you cron jobs now, at least.

run4yourlives• 17 years ago

Could somebody please explain why you would use a DNS provider that is not your web host?

I've always just used the host's DNS servers for my domains, but I'm curious as to the decision making of others... are there real concerns that would lead you to separate these services?

jf9• 17 years ago

Among other reasons, using a 3rd party DNS provider allows you to deal with reliability issues that your web host might have. (For example, if your web host goes down and you have low TTLs, you could put your site on a different provider or show visitors a "down for maintenance" page.)

zach• 17 years ago

Many places you lease a server from do not typically provide DNS servers. Also, you get the advantage of always-speedy, geographically diverse name lookup.

When I leased my own server, I had a painful experiment with hosting my own DNS on the same box. After I gave up on that, I admit I snooped on the provider YC used and have never had a problem.

tybris3• 17 years ago

I'd argue that you should never use your web host as a DNS provider. Eventually you will get sick of your webhost and moving your site is a lot easier if they don't lay claim to your domain.

utku_karatas2• 17 years ago

Nice! I'd also be interested in the techology decisions (languages, frameworks..).

manpreets7• 17 years ago

I wonder why Google App Engine doesn't show up even once. I thought it was a pretty viable and flexible option.

gregking• 17 years ago

I noticed a bunch of people are using enom for email. I assume this is because of their hosted exchange. Does anyone have any experience with enom's standard hosted exchange and using it using mobile devices such as BB/iphone

codyrobbins2• 17 years ago

This is pretty much the exact breakdown of information I have had in the back of my mind to find for quite a while. It's very helpful — perhaps the most useful thing I've seen posted on HN since I started reading. (At least, most useful for me!) Of course, I wouldn't want to jump off a bridge just because everyone else was doing it, but researching all the available providers for all these hosting requirements is a potentially endless job. It's nice to see the decisions other companies have made, to crowdsource it a bit and narrow down the options.

jf9• 17 years ago

Thanks Cody! I wrote the code that generated that report for the same reason: I wanted to be able to research what decisions other domain owners have made. I'm happy to hear that you found this information useful too!

Did you see the code I put on GitHub? http://github.com/jpf/domain-profiler

tybris3• 17 years ago

Great work. I immediately stored it to help my future hosting decisions. Small feature suggestions: include percentages in the pie charts to make them more readable. (Especially for colour blind)

Keyframe• 17 years ago

does anyone have experience with http://www.fdcservers.net/ ? I was looking around for unmetered 100MBps and what I am looking at looks really good and cheap. I have a dedicated server at local ISP and one at theplanet.com - I am not really satisfied with theplanet.com one and prices for local ISP (though superb ping, of course) are a riot.

steamboiler• 17 years ago

Does choice of hosting provider figure in selection of startups? Will one startup get preference over another otherwise equal startup if the former is (not) using a particular hosting provider/mail/registrar?

jhancock2• 17 years ago

HN has had several slicehost vs. linode threads. Comments seems they were an even match (different but even). So why are there no linode users in this list?

I'm asking as a new startup eyeing both as potential host.

worldhello• 17 years ago

also, bumptechnologies.com is using linode as DNS. Doesn't linode only offer DNS to domains hosted there?

jmintz• 17 years ago

Correct, both our website and our matching infrastructure is hosted at Linode.

hypermatt• 17 years ago

Slicehost is backed by a fairly large hosting company now, they always seemed more professional then linode. I used them back in the day and it always seemed like it was just one dude and he didn't have his processed automated well enough.

galactus• 17 years ago

Pie charts considered harmful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart#Discussion_on_use

jf9• 17 years ago

The code is on github. Send me a patch ;-)

dmillar• 17 years ago

I'm curious. Does hosting with Amazon imply EC2? Or S3 static files? Or some other form of hosting I am unaware of?

jf9• 17 years ago

It (in almost every case) implies hosting on EC2. I haven't added detection of image host to my script yet.

Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions

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