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Ask Slashdot: Service-Heavy FOSS Hosting?
An anonymous reader writes "For many of us our hosting providers are a way to hone our skills as well as run a business. Which provider out there gives the best bang for the buck for a FOSS developer? Virtually everybody provides Perl, PHP, Ruby, MySQL / MariaDB etc. but where can one get easy and cheap access to a stuff like NodeJS and Big Data? Companies such as Pair Networks are great but not quite on the mark with any of their service offerings for somebody looking to test out real world scenarios with these technologies from a hosted stance. Obviously hosting from home is always an option but that has the penalty of administration, backup, DR planning, bigger security footprint etc. and for those of us whose time is balanced between making money and friends / family time that's not very appealing."
virtually any vps will allow you to compile node.js (sometimes by installing extra repositories, depending on the distribution)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
These days I solely recommend Amazon Web Services, with a combine of EC2, RDS, and any of the other services you would want. If you can't administer it yourself, contract someone who can deliver a managed hosting environment. You may also be able to use their Elastic Bean Stalk to cut down on administration. Don't like Amazon? Try Google Compute Engine.
amazon does pretty much all of them.
of course, if you got shell access, you can run anything. it's not like it's superduper hard to setup node.js for example. if you want to try something that you just put node stuff into with git and it magically makes it run, try amazon.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I use hub.org and have been quite happy with them. they have a number of different plans, and you can get root access through a shell account. They use FreeBSD, so you have to get over the fact that it is dead, but once you deal with that it is all good.
Try out Red Hat's Openshift, it has node.js and a bunch of other applications. Best part is it's free, so if you don't like it no reason to scale it up and pay.
http://www.openshift.com/
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
Going to be flamed for it, but Windows Azure is probably your best bet. Supports all of that, and a ton more, and is cheap.
You can do it all with AWS, too, but in my experience Azure tends to take less time to manage, and leave more time for developing. YMMV.
My go-to for hosting is Hetzner.de, where you get a decent (quad i7, 16GB ram, 2x 3TB disks) dedicated server for 49 euro a month. That really craps on most VPS deals I've come across. I do everything myself, but they do also have (more expensive) managed hosting options.
How about a true VPS like linode.com offers (anyone else offer similar? Amazon Cloud maybe?) where you can pick the distribution, you install/configure the software, etc ?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
VPSs have gotten so cheap and full-featured, I don't know why anyone who has IT knowledge would host any more.
I am legacy hosting on Dreamhost for $10 a month. My MySQL instance has become so slow, I have removed it from my Nagios check. Their old in-house mail web interface is slow as anything (new accounts go to Google Mail, they may have a migration option). Server load can exceed 100, server load is usually many multiples of the number of processors. Dreamhost was considered one of the good web service providers.
Meanwhile for $16 plus bandwidth I get my own VPS on Rackspace, 20 gigs disk space, 512MB RAM, I can install whatever I want. Linode - 1024MB RAM, first 2 TB of bandwidth free, 24 gig hard drive. I put my own Apache in, my own MySQL. I even run BIND 8 on them. Right now I'm using Perl on the server, but I'm free to use whatever I want. And if $16 is too rich for you a month, you can find even cheaper VPSs. Linode and Rackspace have had a decent QoS, and my business is profitable, so I pay a little more.
N/T
I would point you to Joyent. NodeJS, Hadoop etc at cheaper prices and better performance than AWS. I don't work for them but I do work with them in my day job and I can vouch for the price/performance difference. You will also find that you architecture is simple than with people like AWS. My personal experience. Your's may vary.
Yes. I am willing to sign a long-term contract immediately under those terms.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Seriously just use Joyent, their performance and support is far better than other providers.
LowEndBox.com has some great deals on virtualized servers. Last month, I got a VPS with 1 GB of RAM for $2/month, 6 months pre-paid.
Seriously - if you're buying anything more complicated than a VPS with an OS installed (which will support ANY service), you're basically paying your provider to hold your dick while you pee. Learn how to deploy your own stuff...
Last Spring we migrated from trying to manage a high-traffic WordPress site ourselves on AWS to VMStorm (http://www.vmstormvps.com/), a VPS host with reasonable per-month support & management, and they've been great. We just couldn't find people to really help us out on AWS to set things up The Right Way, and with traffic increasing, page load time increasing, and sales dropping, we didn't really have too much time to learn as we went. GoGrid and Rackspace purportedly have service and management partners that they can connect you with, but after a couple weeks of being bounced from rep to rep, neither one had actually put me in contact with _any_ partners. Anyways, with VMStorm, I've got root logins to all my servers, but their techs are always there to analyze performance, change things around (moving us to a more capable database server), installing and configuring packages, and suggesting what scalability upgrade would yield the biggest bang for the buck (backed up by stress-test results). They're really knowledgeable, and it just feels like they're our server techs, and not just drones behind a ticket system.
Most VPS services must be fully managed by the customer. Improperly managed servers can lead to instability and/or security vulnerabilities. The hidden costs in time and effort can be a hindrance. I was spending more time patching and tweaking my rather pricey Linode instance than I was developing. Managed VPS services are great if you can afford them; I couldn't, and I knew I didn't want to go back to crappy shared hosting, so I started looking for an alternative.
I've been very pleased with WebFaction. It is shared hosting done right. All accounts have guaranteed RAM (shared processes like nginx instances don't count against the soft limit) and Linux cgroups to protect each account from other accounts' CPU and disk IO usage. They don't overload their servers either. You get most of the performance and maintenance benefits of a managed VPS, at the cost of traditional hosting ($9.50/month). Their documentation is good, support is responsive, and software is always up-to-date, so you can stay on the cutting edge. Whatever they don't have, you could always compile/install in your home folder.
A full list of features with links to details can be found at https://www.webfaction.com/features
The best way to see if a host is right for you is to try them. If you are so inclined, please use this referral link: https://www.webfaction.com/?affiliate=seanw
I'd be happy to answer any questions that I can.
Joyent is a bait & switch company - http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120817/11083120083/bait-switch-buy-lifetime-account-as-long-as-we-exist-until-we-get-tired-you.shtml
Azure has also got really good iOS support as well. They are doing a really good job trying to make it useful across whatever platforms you like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
AWS has many options. You can deploy a single micro server for free for 1 year and stacks of technology and server resources that scale horizontally or vertically very easily. The really were the first successful "Cloud" (IaaS, PaaS) service provider and are probably the cheapest, especially if you want to get your feet wet.
that has the penalty of administration, backup, DR planning, bigger security footprint etc. I thought those were things you never stopped doing. Are these places really doing that for you or is it just pie in the sky? Tell me more of these magical places where hardware never fails, content never needs to be backed up, and security is so good you don't need to bother yourself with it any longer.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I highly recommend Bytemark. They donate a *LOT* to open source, most recently servers to Debian and about $2,500 into kickstarting the new open source Geary e-mail client.
Bytemark has launched a new service called BigV which will let you deploy a linux installation in a virtual machine yourself in about 5 mintutes. It's pretty darn impressive and lets you pick from a list of OSs to deploy to your VM instance and maintain it yourself. Pay a couple bucks more per month and you can purchase upgrades to your VM instance (more ram, more CPU, more disk space, etc.) as you need them. Check it out at bigv.io.
http://www.joyent.com
A. They are the company behind node.js. It's their bread and butter.
B. You mention "big data". If you're looking to run hadoop, they have you covered for that as well: http://joyent.com/products/joyent-cloud/features/hadoop
You could run Linux VMs if that's what you're comfortable with, but if your application is generic/portable enough to run in a zone, you'll get performance benefits, the ability to scale up instances without a reboot, dtrace and more.
In addition, since they use local storage, I/O performance in the Joyent cloud will definitely be better than EBS, and quite possibly better than other hosting providers.
We use Joyent - very happy with their service. http://joyent.com/
Disclaimer: I've never used their services and the one group I know that's producing a production-grade application in Node is deploying on AWS.
That said, if you need more hand holding than AWS gives you, I've heard good things about Nodejitsu. I met a few of their team at Nodeconf last year and they seemed knowledgeable passionate about the Node platform.
There is a fresh cloud provider with quite interesting offer, including ready to run development environment for node.js, fast storage and lots of other features - Oktawave. Servers are horizontally and vertically scalable and prices start at ~ $15/month. Also worth mentioning is that they have great support :).
just get a VPS from somewhere and go on your own.
"$16 plus bandwidth I get my own VPS on Rackspace, 20 gigs disk space, 512MB RAM"
Do you have a deep link for that particular product at Rackspace?
They have so many different product offerings that my casual browsing of their website didn't turn up anything like that.
Thanks!
Definitely if you want to develop anything that is more than trivial, you need to understand the hosting anyway. So roll your own VPS. I just was forced to change providers (the old one closed shop) and settled on http://serveraxis.com/ - Cheap SSD based VPS (2GB RAM, 16 GB disk, 2 TB bandwith - $28/mo no contract) and reasonable VPS with large disks, like +1 TB. Although for the large disk the default bandwidth is not adequate I think. I just can't think of any system that would need that much data but only have a monthly bandwidth allocation equal the disk size.
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
Pantheon offers a Drupal platform at an affordable price that rivals the more expensive Acquia platform for Enterprise Drupal https://www.getpantheon.com/
Get a VPS and you can run whatever specialized services you need.
I pay $15 a month for 2 quad cores, 2GB RAM 100GB disk space and 5TB of bandwidth and I have yet to see a slowdown at any time. nosupportvps.com kicks ass.
Of course, you have to not be an idiot.
It would have taken me about a week [or maybe a month?] to have figured out that "Cloud Server" was MBA-speak for "Virtual Machine".
Thanks so much!
What about exploring the whole PaaS space? As apposed to traditional hosting providers?
Have a look at PaaS providers like Heroku (Heroku.com), Amazon Elastic Bean Stalk (aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk), AppFog (www.appfog.com) and Uhuru (www.uhurucloud.com)?
That might not give you the fine grained control, but if all you're after is automation, self healing and team application development. That might be the solution!?
For what it's worth, AWS's Beanstalk offering now supports deployments to node.js. It's dead easy.
I've never tried Azure, so I can't compare, but anyway, I thought I'd point it out.
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Are those 1,655,085 children more important than those 2,487,992 non-children? Do people stop mattering when they turn 18?
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."