AWS & Google Cloud for Shared Hosting

ivansalloum

elcapitanph A waste of money.

8Dweb

We were early to hosting (coming online in December of 1995). We used to use a few of the early server or virtualized rental systems, but quickly moved to our own hardware. Data center space was not easy to find for a decent price back then, so we built our own... until 2001. Since that time we have built out our own infrastructure in larger, well-known data centers in our region (full rack or cage rentals).

If you have the up-front capital to do it yourself, and keep it running until profitable, choose that path.

If not, utilize the top-tier vm or bare metal server rental companies in your region.

pratik_asabe

Bandwidth costing alone can be skyhigh very quickly if you think of deploying infra to these hyperscalers.. its not wise to use them for shared hosting no matter how attractive things may look with them.. from a scalable business pov only think them for 'managed aws/gcp services' offerings like you're certified aws professional or gcp or you just have load sh*t of experience with them and you can plan/architect client infra on them, etc.

If you plan to offer like 'those' providers you mentioned who charges way more and using aws/gcp then you have your answer in your question, of course you have to charge load ton of money to end user and you have to offer bandwidth from as low as 2gb included and you have to build your own billing module to track extra bandwidth or use modules from providers like modulesgarden or whatever..

in short, just don't, it's not worth it!

twest

Zoinkies that's what always shocked me. Like 10 years ago I thought about setting up a service on aws/gcp, you know the marketing pretty much writes itself "the speed of google for your website"... What a kick to the balls it was to see how horribly slow everything "big cloud" is. It's like bottleneck upon bottleneck upon bottleneck, and they charge out the ass for the privilege. So bonkers.

JohnB

twest yeah I was excited to try Google's higher end VPS and it was horribly slow in both CPU and disk. If you go to the highest tier in Google or aws it's very fast... And more expensive than a dedicated server with double the specs.

I'm convinced stupid project managers are their target market.

AdamM

elcapitanph If you want to pay 4x and have lower performance this is a good choice... Better to use bare metal from a trusted supplier or use colo.

elcapitanph

Thank you, everyone, for all your answers! 😊 I'll stick with Hivelocity for now.

cosmoshosting

Beware of the data egress costs to the internet.
$0.09 PER GB (worse in other zones)!!!
One good DDoS or scrapping (looking at you Facebook), you will lose your house!

You also play games on many packages with cpu, such as burst credits.

The only reason to use AWS is if an enterprise is paying for it or you need hosting is a very specific place.
Consider Vultr if you need servers in other places.

JohnB

cosmoshosting there was a post on Reddit where someone got a 300k bill. Iirc their normal monthly bill was under 1k lol.

Everyone mocked him for not having spending caps but honestly these services should warn when a months normal spend is spent in a day...

JohnB

A huge problem if you use cloud infrastructure features offered by AWS, azure, vercel etc is also vendor lock in. Suddenly your site/service only works on that specific platform.

What happens if they have a failure, decide to ban you, raise prices?

I'm a huge believer in being able to move your entire service to new servers with x minutes of downtime + dns. It should be completely automated and tested monthly.

Eventually when a big player has a really bad failure or hack etc, a lot more people will be believers too. Too many people think google, azure, aws can't be hacked or ransomwared. Just hasn't happened...yet.

pratik_asabe

JohnB This is where enhance shines, we can rapidly change infra without disturbing our clients, we had incident last month where support staff of dc fukd up and our prod server had serious downtime if we weren't on enhance it would be a much worse of a disaster, because of enhance's flexibility we quickly spinup a new server in another dc and migrated everyone within 2 hrs (which takes 6 or 7+ hrs on traditional systems give or take)..

JohnB

pratik_asabe Yup this is the exact scenario I've mentioned many times here. Never rely on a provider or your beautiful colocated dedicated servers. Things happen.

Enhance makes disaster recovery 10 x easier and much faster. I especially like not having all my eggs in one basket too. As a tiny (in comparison) hosting provider I use multiple VPS providers across multiple locations. On most panels the only profitable approach would be a single dedicated server (ie all eggs in one basket).