This weekend I finished moving Pinboard to our new web home with LeaseWeb in the Netherlands. In the course of looking for a hosting company I made up a spreadsheet of high-memory servers and their relative pricing. I focused on places that offered dedicated servers with over 32GB of RAM, since that is the kind of server Pinboard runs on. I've shared the information here because assembling it was such an enormous hassle (see rant below). Please email me (support@pinboard.in) if you have updates or know of hosting companies that I missed.
While I was looking for hosting, I heard a couple of recurring questions from users and potential hosting companies:
Why not go with Linode/AWS/[other virtualized hosting]?
My own experience with virtualized hosting is that I/O performance can be very poor, and that it can be impossible to diagnose underlying I/O problems from within the virtual machine. For example, in early days of Pinboard we found ourselves hosted on a machine that needed to recover a RAID volume. This so crippled I/O that it forced the site onto a backup server for three days, and yet from the perspective of the virtual machine everything looked the same. The 'physical' device was still mostly idle, just a hundred times slower than it used to be. That and similar adventures cured me of any desire to host on a non-dedicated server.
It's very possible that I'm doing this wrong and that VMs are a terrific way to host an online service. Lots of people love Linode and AWS. Like everyone else I'm a slave to my own particular experience and limitations.
Can you email our sales rep with your needs and your budget?
No. It's 2011 and this stuff is a fungible commodity. If I give you a specific server configuration, you can give me a price. If you're offering dedicated servers for rent but force me talk to a sales agent to find out the price, then I know you've just padded my rent with the cost of that person's salary. And if you ask me again what my budget is I swear I will smack you.
Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time.
You can always find a lower price, but only we offer the Triple Titanium Serenity Rabid Gold SLA with our industry-shattering quadruple uptime guarantee!
If your server enclosures are made of elemental silver and polished daily with static-free cloths by computer science PhDs who are related by blood to Edgar Dijkstra, then I definitely want to know about that. Put a paragraph about it right under your price chart.
Realistically speaking, datacenters are complex systems. I doubt there's a more professional ops staff than at AWS, and yet even they have had outages and downtime due to unexpected events. I want to see that you have some kind of track record and clients that I've heard of, I want to know that you take sane precautions (multiple paths to the internet, not building data centers where an earthquake is certain to hit, backup generators, a happy and professional ops staff, a Twitter account for status updates), and I want to know that I can contact support and get a prompt reply from someone techical. But beyond that, there's no way I can really evaluate how awesome you are. So sell that hosting like the commodity it is!
—maciej on August 25, 2011
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