[NCLUG] [Poll] VPS and web mangement hosting

[Bob Proulx]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> On 02/19/2012 04:28 PM, Bob Proulx wrote:
> > either.  I personally know one business that was spending $650/month
> > for a 512M virtual server out on the net.  Wow!  I know that we all
> 
> The thing to consider there is: apparently the person with the checkbook
> felt they were getting good value at that price-point.

Except that they weren't.  They felt that they were getting ripped
off.  And I think they were too.

> It's all about providing what the customer perceives as good value to meet
> their needs.

Agreed.

> As an example, one of our guys did some testing last year and found that
> his latency was often lower if he passed traffic through our VPN server at
> the facility, going Comcast to our facility and then our facility to the
> destination, rather than using Comcast to go directly to the destination.
> Adding the extra set of hops was more than covered by our network
> optimizing the path to the destination.

That's pretty cool.

> Indeed, and that really doesn't help deal with situations where you show up
> on /. or the like...  Once a year events.

Very few are prepared for being slashdotted.  And if they are then
have they bought too much during the rest of the year?

> Those are places where deploying to something like Google App Engine can
> really help, because it just automatically scales.  However, you have to
> develop specifically for GAE.  Amazon promises similar scalability, and you
> can use a more general stack for that, but you have to spend a lot of
> effort in making sure that you have made your entire infrastructure
> scalable.  You have to be very careful about understanding the full Amazon
> infrastructure before deploying services there, unless you can afford to
> lose everything...  They are not a VPS provider, they are an infrastructure
> provider.

Yep.  A whole lot of preparation and tie-in to your chosen vendor.
The worst part isn't the preparation but that then you are then pretty
well locked in to that vendor.

Bob