Thanks for this post. I currently own/run a niche social networking site with a little over 60,500 registered users and see several thousand users on the site at a time. I bought my own servers co-locate them in a large hosting facility in northern Virginia. The initial costs were the hardware, of course you can lease it if you want which can be cheaper if you intend to upgrade existing servers on a yearly basis. We do not need to do that quite that often, so buying them outright has been economical for us.
The ability to customize our boxes has been a big advantage for us and given the hosting facility has all the redundant power sources and bandwidth pipes we never see any problems. I will mention that most of our traffic is east coast based and given our servers are on the east coast we have not seen any problems. If we see traffic expand we would look to put some boxes on the west coast or midwest.
At one point I looked into us switching into the Cloud with AWS and and Rackspace, the costs were much more then we pay now.
In regards to bandwidth, most of the clouds pricing I have seen are based on total usage, our bandwidth is based on the 95 percentile usage. And it's not capped, so if we have a spike of 20mg/sec the pipe is open to fulfill it. The 95% pricing model as worked very well for us. We average a few mgs/sec and our bandwidth costs are under $50/month. I'd add to author when he talks about negotiating, do it, you can get a great deal (s).
I looked into AWS for another start up I am doing in the communications space and we tried it, for not a lot of users on the cloud it was very expensive. We moved to Rackspace and have limited our alpha users to $100, it's still expensive and as we move to launch over the next year we will go with dedicated servers.
I run a service that constantly pushes over 90mbps over the wire (about 30TB a month) and I pay just over $100 a month for two servers. The same bandwidth usage on EC2 (or any other 'cloud' provider for that matter) would cost me thousands.
The ability to customize our boxes has been a big advantage for us and given the hosting facility has all the redundant power sources and bandwidth pipes we never see any problems. I will mention that most of our traffic is east coast based and given our servers are on the east coast we have not seen any problems. If we see traffic expand we would look to put some boxes on the west coast or midwest.
At one point I looked into us switching into the Cloud with AWS and and Rackspace, the costs were much more then we pay now.
In regards to bandwidth, most of the clouds pricing I have seen are based on total usage, our bandwidth is based on the 95 percentile usage. And it's not capped, so if we have a spike of 20mg/sec the pipe is open to fulfill it. The 95% pricing model as worked very well for us. We average a few mgs/sec and our bandwidth costs are under $50/month. I'd add to author when he talks about negotiating, do it, you can get a great deal (s).
I looked into AWS for another start up I am doing in the communications space and we tried it, for not a lot of users on the cloud it was very expensive. We moved to Rackspace and have limited our alpha users to $100, it's still expensive and as we move to launch over the next year we will go with dedicated servers.
Thanks for the post. Brandon