birmingham.io

AWS - is it just me, or is it confusing as hell?

#3

Comparing AWS and DigitalOcean is a bit of a mistake I think. AWS is a set of tools for creating various web services. DigitalOcean is only servers, i.e., only EC2 from AWS. AWS includes tools for storage, computing, data analysis, auto scaling, video transcoding and databases.

AWS is confusing but very powerful. Think of it as Photoshop where DigitalOcean is Paint.

That said, there’s not enough resources for AWS! This may be useful? http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/awsgsg-intro/gsg-aws-intro.html

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#4

If Digitalocean and AWS are different things (which, until this thread, I didn’t really know), then I’m guessing a fairer comparison would be between Digitalocean and Linode?

I very nearly got myself a Linode VM back in 2010, but got a dedicated server with Hetzner instead (they were cheap, and I liked the idea of having my own physical server, rather than just a VM), and pretty much totally forgot that Linode existed.

This is slightly off topic, but what I need to learn is how to continue a server to run multiple sites. I know there is something to do with nginx directing requests to different things based on the address (maybe to rails there, or to node here, etc…) but I’ve never looked into how to do that…

/me add to his list of things to learn

#5

Yeah, that’s right. DigitalOcean and Linode are a much closer match in terms of what you can do with them. :smile:
The idea of running multiple sites on one server is something that (imo) it’s best to avoid when dealing with cloud infrastructure. It makes for higher levels of redundancy if when a server goes down, it takes down one site and not all of them!
At a production level, you should treat your servers ‘like cattle, not pets.’ i.e., lots of servers tuned for performance rather than one monolithic box powering everything that you pour your love and attention in to. AWS is well designed for this approach with things like load balancers and auto-scaling groups.

#6

Insert my standard thing here that if you’re looking at hosts such as DO and Linode then you should consider Bytemark, because they’re here in the UK rather than sending money to US firms, they’re enthusiastic supporters of community projects, and they’re really smart.

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#7

I use Cloudways as my VPS provider. Very user friendly and they sit on top of Digital Ocean (or AWS or Google Compute Engine) and allow to easily and quickly deploy and scale most of the well known and well used web software. Very handy if you’re looking to host a number of websites on your VPS.

#8

I agree with this idea, and it is exactly why I’ve set-up a second, $5 a month, VM to run Formatted Transput (rather than just bunging it on the same VM running the forum)

But I’m talking about for hosting all my experiments and toys. Things which, I guess, are either just small things of low importance, or simply exist for me to play with. It’s for things like this that I’m interested in learning how to set-up multiple sites on a single server.

I have spent a little bit of time playing Dokku (and a Dokku fork, which extends it’s abilities using common plugins etc, but which I’ve forgotten the name of) and should probably take a proper look at Flynn.

Just signed up, lets give them a go.

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#9

OK, so time for some honest criticism of BigV (Bytemark’s cloud SSD hosting service).

First off, I want to say that I like the fact they’re willing to give £30 in credit to anyone that adds their debit card, this is a very good start (I think the £30 thing is temporary, but it looks like they’ll give you at least a tenner).

Alas, this goodwill is short-lived as soon as I realise how expensive they are in comparison to DO. Specifically their lowest tier is £10 a month, which at today’s exchange rate is just under $15. With this in mind I would expect their offering to be somewhere between the $10 and $20 offerings from DO, but instead find that they actually offer less than the $10 plan, with less storage space and data transfer.

This also appears to be a fixed price per month, rather than the more flexible offering from DO, who charge by the hour, allowing me to spin-up an instance, toy about with it for a few hours, then delete it when I’m not using it.

Now it’s important to remember that the above is based on not actually having used their service yet, this is simply looking at the numbers. As @sil has mentioned, it sounds like you’re paying for the support more so than anything else, and having a company in the UK to talk with does sound like a bonus.

I (might) report back with further findings as and when I’ve dived a bit deeper.

Bytemark are sponsoring Birmingham.IO
#10

Thanks for trying it out, Daniel! The billing resolution is daily but charges always happen up to the next month. So if you start a machine and stop it again the next day, you’ll get charged for £10 but credited for about £9.77 when it shuts down.

I’ll keep this tab open for a few days in case you had anymore questions :slight_smile:

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Bytemark are sponsoring Birmingham.IO
#11

It saddens me a little when I see people worried about running multiple applications on a single operating system image, because that’s kind of The Point of an OS.

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#12

I’ll go a bit further: I once designed a resilient network for some high availability systems, only to discover that to reduce network costs they’d been moved to virtual channels running over the same fibre and the network guys didn’t know which network cabinets the virtual circuits ran through any more, so we had a whole lot of complexity in the system that was now actually more likely to create a failure than if it wasn’t there and no-one even understood it.

If we can build reliable VMs that run unreliable OSs that run apps while consuming half the compute power, maybe it’s time to run those apps right on top of a simplified OS kernel. I think that might be what container systems like Docker are. It also sounds a lot like what Richard Stallman was trying to do with GNU HURD before Linux happened.

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#13

Hey @Limeblast - I’m Tim - I’m Bytemark’s community manager and Disclaimer: I vaguely sort of know @sil (along with most of the internet!)…

This is super useful feedback, and I’m very grateful you’ve explained so carefully and candidly some of the issues and feeling you’ve had about signing up. We’re currently thinking about improving the UX of our signup process, and this sort of feedback from someone early in the signup process is super valuable to us. I’ve dropped an extra £30 credit onto your account as a thank you. :smile:

You’re right - we’re not the cheapest - especially when compared to the many others out there (not just DO, Amazon etc - also all these entertaining sound hosts).

As @matthewbloch mentions - we do offer daily billing - and I’d agree that’s not obvious enough but one of the the differences that we perhaps could do more to point out is that we pay UK tax, and our accounts are open to review - so you work out how many student nurses or teachers we’re helping to pay for.

Some of the other things I think perhaps we could mention more prominently is how we support the Debian Linux project, the Open Rights Group, XBMC, mySociety, CodeClub and a whole bunch of others (and always interested to hear about cool things we may be able to help make the world/internet a better place!).

I’d love to hear more feedback about how we can make things better, more obvious, things that’d improve your experience and make your lives easier - either publicly, or hello at bytemark.co.uk mentioning my name somewhere. At the end of the day, we know that having the best experience is the most important thing so taking onboard your thoughts and feedback is the only way we’ll get there.

Thanks again for taking a look @LimeBlast - really appreciated! :smile:

-Tim

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#14

@tdobson and @matthewbloch - thank you both very much for coming and talking with us.

Let me tell you where I’m at with all of this.

I run this Discourse forum on one of DO’s $20 VMs. I’m doing this for a couple of reasons, but one of the initial reasons was that the official support for Discourse is only provided for the docker install on DO. I was very new to the whole concept of running an application of this nature (prior to Birmingham.IO, the biggest thing I’d run was a vBulletin forum on shared PHP hosting - which involved nothing more than uploading some files and editing a configuration file to point at a database), so it was important that I not rock the boat or go against the grain.

Now that I’ve got a bit more experience, I understand that there is nothing special about DO in this instance, and that as Docker does most of the work, there is nothing stopping from moving to another provider if I wanted to.

The important detail to note in all of this, however, is that I’m funding this community out of my own pocket. That is $20 (approx £13.50) a month that I could be spending on video games, movie tickets, or pretty much anything else, but I’m choosing to spend on this community instead.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge spending that money. I view it as giving back to the connected tech community that makes living and working in Birmingham as awesome as it is.

But I’m also not going to spend that money willy-nilly - so (getting to the point) if I was going to move to ByteMark, I would need a really good reason to justify increasing that monthly spend to £20-40.

So this is my question to you - what killer feature or benefit do you have which would make it worth the increased spend?

Thank you :smile:

(PS, thank you very much for the extra credit, I’ll put that to good use)

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#15

Wow, bit of a complaint and Bytemark are here and talking about it… like real people.

@tdobson, @matthewbloch bravo. I doff my hat to you.

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#16

Hi [quote=“LimeBlast, post:14, topic:1114”]
But I’m also not going to spend that money willy-nilly - so (getting to the point) if I was going to move to ByteMark, I would need a really good reason to justify increasing that monthly spend to £20-40.
[/quote]

That’s a great question, and I really appreciate being given the opportunity to answer it.

Ultimately, we’re not always in the right price range for every application and every customer. I’m not sure how important you’d say it was for this Discourse instance to stay online, or for you to be able to get through to someone on the phone if this site went down - with community things like this, honestly, the value is hard to judge til it’s not there, or you’re stuck in a call waiting queue.

Since I’m new here - I’m really fascinated by this community - it’s one thing to install Discourse - it’s another thing to have a community of people contributing and posting things as you have - I’m somewhat in awe!

My feeling is… if you spoke nicely to us, we might be interested in sponsoring you a server for this site… if that’d appeal?

I mean, it doesn’t answer your original question very well - at the end of the day, how much you pay depends somewhat on how much peace of mind you want, and what level of hands on support you need - I think we’ve got to think about whether we fit into that toy-level price point that clearly was a big deciding point for you.

Anyway - thanks for creating this community and giving us an opportunity to respond - I’ll watch with baited breath to see what you do with the credit, and if ever I can help do feel free to drop us an email (hello @ our domain) or something.

-Tim

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Bytemark are sponsoring Birmingham.IO
#17

This is a refreshingly honest answer, and one that I’m happy to hear. It acknowledges that you (the general you, that is, not Bytemark specifically) cannot be all thing to all people, and recognises that sometimes it just isn’t a good fit.

If things were different, and I was running a server with commercial interests, where it was important for it to be up all the time, then I could very much see the benefit of having that level of technical support and someone to talk with on the phone - but within the context of this community - yes it would suck if it went down (and has done a few of times in the last 9 months), it’s not the end of the world, as I know the members will simply return once I’d fixed it, no harm no foul.

I can’t take any credit for that, all I did was install Discourse - it’s everyone else here that makes the site what it is. I mean, I don’t want to sound all patriotic for Birmingham or anything (I’ve only been here for a year and a half, so I don’t think I have the right), but now is a good time to be in tech in Birmingham. Watch this space, good things are coming.

Wow, that that would very much appeal - I would be very happy to speak with you nicely - thank you :blush:

I can send you an email if you’d like? Or maybe we can have a telephone call? Whatever works for you. Thank you.

#18

Honesty and clear, straightforward communication is something we could do with more of. If someone isn’t the best match for us - eg, they want a WordPress installation and lots of handholding, but they don’t want to pay us £££, then if we recommend they check out WordPress.com - we’ve not lost anything. The customer will appreciate that we’ve not pushed them onto an expensive an imperfect package, and that we’ve introduced them to something that works well for their requirements.

It’s never easy to say “you’re probably not the best fit for us”, and sometimes people don’t enjoy hearing it - but it’s the right thing to do, and every time one does it, you’re making everyone happier - you’re not taking on a customer who isn’t going to be happy, and you’re pointing the customer towards something that will make them happy.

With regards to the server - I’m on holiday for the whole of next week - why do you see how you find BigV - play about with it - and then perhaps drop an email to us (hello at bytemark dot co dot uk) if you feel comfortable with it - the offer isn’t going away and I just want to give you time to play with the service before jumping into anything! Does that work for you? :slight_smile:

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#19

@LimeBlast I run about a dozen sites on my server via nginx, it’s pretty straight forward with vhosts - I can help you with it, if you like (though not till next month, when I’m back from holiday). There is also LXC to consider to keep things separate on a VPS, though I haven’t yet tried it on DO.

The advantages of running lots of sites on one VPS, is that’s is free to spin up a new project and you don’t feel the need to shut each thing down when you want to save monthly outgoings. For instance the incremental cost to me of running the planet site and the upcoming calendar site, is nothing, since I’d be running the VPS anyway.

Since my VPS is $5/month there is no reason to ever shut it down. If you had a dozen sites costing $60/month, after a while you’d want to go through and start closing them down. Running multiple VPSes for every client or part of a service is great for a business, but if you are funding it out of your own pocket, you can’t beat the cost advantage of running on a single VPS.

There are of course downsides - if you make changes to something system-wide for one site (e.g. update PHP/Ruby/Python etc.), you might break another site. You probably can’t give people root access, because they’d have access to all the other stuff.

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#20

It sure does :smile:

I took the opportunity to have a play with the system last night, and even went as far as to both install Discourse on it, and to port all of the data from this site into it - and the whole thing went without a hitch. I’ll admit that I didn’t fully test it, and that there would be issues such as getting the SSL cert and various oAuth things up and running, but I’m confident that a site transfer would be mostly painless.

I’ll continue to play, and send you an email next week, Thank you :smile:

PS, I’m hosting an anniversary party for the community, and you’re both invited.

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#21

I can see that there are pros and cons to all approaches, it all depends on the context.

Yes please :smile:

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#22

+1 for accounts, not like those Amazon punks!

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