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Here’s a short story of my last 10 years in a startup that we built from the ground up on bare metal. tl;dr: Hetzner is good, amazing value. Online,net is a mixed bag and their network is quite unreliable. Nuanced explanation further down. Some background: We were one of the first companies ever to run Kubernetes in production, and our architecture was built around microservices from day 1. I won’t name the company, but it got acquired twice, now being owned by a company with hundreds of billions in revenue. We were EBITDA-profitable after about 2-3 years since launching in production. My role: a little bit of everything guy, developer, architect, DBA, SRE, devops, security engineer, CI/CD etc. I was responsible for a lot of monitoring and incident response and post-mortem. Most of our production hardware was running on Online,net which is now fully rebranded as Scaleway, but I’ll keep referring to them as Online. (Back then, “Scaleway” was just their sub-brand for small cheap VMs.) The smallest machines we were renting were something like Xeon E3 1230 with 64+GB RAM and some SSDs/NVMes when that became a thing (Believe it or not, M.2 port didn’t always exist.) In total, we had several dozen servers rented over the years. Forgot exactly, but over 60. I don’t want to trivialize the whole 10 years and make it sound like Online gave us constant nightmares, but I can’t pretend they really cared either. Occasional hardware faults were treated with “looks good to me” and you had to actually teach them how to test the faulty disk or w/e. But those were rare. The most common problem was with their network. Our ops staff chose Online because they had generally good reputation, provided “Real Private Network” and were slightly cheaper than OVH (and didn’t know about Hetzner back then, or it didn’t exist). However, the more servers we rented, the more it was clear that the network hardware was saturated. The folk story explanation was “kids rent Online hardware to download torrents” and the network quality generally reflects that. At some point I wrote a custom utility that tried to connect each node to each node, simple HTTP requests, large packet HTTP requests, and long-lived connections. First thing was very obvious how the lowest latencies were between machines on the same rack – not surprising, of course – but because sometimes we had two machines that couldn’t see each other on the network, but other machines could access both of them – we quickly realized we have to reverse engineer their IP addresses to allocate servers that needed quorum (Kafka, etcd) on the same rack. Especially Kafka with HDDs (back when it still used ZooKeeper) was extremely sensitive to higher latencies. There were regular packet loss + latency spikes. We could clearly see it from Grafana, both results from my custom tool and from a simpler ping everything-to-everything monitoring, just 2-5 minutes of 70% packet loss sometimes, sometimes just latency went up from ~10ms to like 800ms for a few minutes. We gave up on reporting those because the support just gave us “idk seems fine to me now”. The only time when we had several hours of downtime for a few servers they, after many emails, apologized and said that we’re eligible for a partial refund and gave us literally 20 euro because we had 20 hours of downtime. Amazing. Yolo swag we can buy our Ferrari now. Eventually we rented OVH for some off-site backups, but only a few machines and they were low-use so we didn’t have any issues with them IIRC. One nice thing about Online was their cold storage – literally cold, IIRC they were hosting servers in literal crypts or nuclear bunkers or something bonkers like that. Data on those wasn’t online, and took a day to restore, but it was good for storing older elasticsearch logs. Back then Backblaze B2 didn’t exist, so it was the cheapest option, something like 10-20x cheaper than average big tech cloud storage. — We introduced Hetzner only around 2021 and only for dev environment – i.e. we never ran production on it, and didn’t have a private network, although it would be doable with wireshark, Online had the hypothetical benefit of their supposed Real Private Network. (Side note: quickly we ran into issues with Online when we needed to download something to Hetzner machines from Online machines, which ran at like 100kB/s, but when we downloaded it from OVH or from 3rd party american servers, it downloaded at 2-20MB/s so clearly Hetzner wasn’t the problem. And no, we didn’t have any throttling set up on our side, nor had any bandwidth limits set up or imposed on us by Online or CDN). Overall my experience with Hetzner was positive, and they gave us volume discounts after we got like 30+ machines (total was 60+), but again, none of those had 24/7 monitoring on them. We rented exclusively the cheapest AMD machines with 64GB RAM and 2x500GB SSDs. We had a few hardware problems, once I think the hard drives or RAM were faulty, which they replaced without much hassle, several times (more than 10) some machines were frozen during reboot and sometimes you had to hard-reboot them via the admin interface, but often it didn’t work and we needed to contact the support to physically cold-reboot them. Sometimes they responded in minutes, sometimes in a few hours, but it was always straightforward, just one sentence email from us and then “done” email from them. — As a bonus story, we used a CDN called Incapsula, which they mysteriously renamed to Imperva after they suffered a hack which leaked all of business customer data. Oops! Honestly they left a bittersweet taste, some features worked very nicely (WAF was functional and caught all traditional SQL injects, not that we ever had those exposed ha ha awkward smile) but they also injected a mysterious javascript into our index.html and it worked quite poorly with, you know, super modern web 2.0 websites that use this cool technology called “AJAX”. If you’re not a web developer, I’m being sarcastic, literally 99.9% of websites now load dynamically and it’s insane that they didn’t somehow catch this. What it means in practical terms is that their spam/bot protection would decided halfway through a customer opening our website that we need to show captcha to this customer, but the captcha wouldn’t be served instead of index.html, but instead of some /foo/bar/users/data_about_me json request. 0/10 no notes Again, it wasn’t all bad, but it was always some bullshit. As is the custom with CDNs, at some point they decided that we’re profitable enough so they should jack up our prices 2x and upsell us something we didn’t need. Classic mafia behavior, but I’ve heard Cloudflare does the same. AMA I’ll answer as honestly as I can submitted by /u/catheap_games [link] [comments]

I am in the process of launching a niche web hosting service. I already have a group of committed clients lined up who specifically need shared hosting to create and manage a high volume of email accounts. The Use Case & Challenges: Heavy Load: The clients will be connecting their emails to third-party email campaign platforms. This means I’m expecting incredibly high server loads due to massive, concurrent IMAP and SMTP connections. Deliverability: The main goal is high inbox deliverability. To achieve this, I need a setup that allows me to assign different, clean IP addresses to different users/camps. Where I need your help: I am trying to figure out the right infrastructure before I buy anything. VPS vs. Dedicated Server: Given the heavy IMAP syncing, should I start with a high-end VPS or jump straight to a Dedicated Server? Which providers are friendly to email traffic (e.g., OVH, Hetzner, Leaseweb) and won’t block Port 25 instantly? IP Management: What is the best way to handle multi-IP outbound mail routing so one user’s spam doesn’t tank the IP of another? Software Stack: Which control panel (cPanel, DirectAdmin, CyberPanel) handles this kind of scale and IP rotation best? Estimated Costs: What should I realistically budget for monthly operational costs to get this running smoothly? If you have experience building high-volume mail servers, managing IP reputations, or if you already have this setup and are open to a technical partnership/collaboration to help me get this off the ground, please drop a comment submitted by /u/WhatsMueenUpto [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/tejas_bhalerao [link] [comments]

Hostinger VPS vs AWS EC2 for a Production ERP I’m building a production ERP and trying to decide between a Hostinger VPS and AWS EC2. The VPS configuration I’m considering is: 4 vCPU 8 GB RAM 100 GB NVMe SSD I’ll be running around 8–10 Docker containers, and PostgreSQL will either be on the same VM initially or on a separate VM. My main concern is reliability. Hostinger is significantly cheaper than AWS EC2 for similar specs, which almost feels too good to be true. For those who’ve used Hostinger VPS in production: Is the performance consistent? How’s the uptime? Have you experienced CPU throttling or noisy neighbors? Would you trust it for a business-critical application? If you’ve used both Hostinger VPS and AWS EC2, why would you choose one over the other? I’m looking for real production experiences, not benchmark numbers. submitted by /u/CuddleMeAggressively [link] [comments]

Honestly, I am only using 17GB of storage, and only pulling 10GB of bandwidth monthly, but I am tired of hosting companies changing the rules on me, and setting arbitrary limits. I signed up for HostGator back when they were good. Haven’t touched my account much in the last 7 years, but I always paid them (recurring billing) Instead of grandfathering me in to the plan I signed up for, they limited my domains, so I can’t add any more as I am over now already. They limited MySQL to 40 when there was none. And somehow, they have me paying $30 a month for a baby account that was under $10, and right now I could signup for the limited account I’ve been forced into and even the “after the discount rate price increase” is half of what I am paying. I guess being a customer for over a decade means I get to pay more and more until I eventually leave. I look around and see webhosting treating email like it’s an addon on. I use AWeber if I want to mail a list. I just have some emails on my domain names for contact. I’m not paying a separate monthly fee for an occasional email. (Proton is my personal email provider these days) So yeah, I own a lot of domains. 50 to be precise. Over half of them are not in use, but it would be nice to have one place for them all to land. The 4 important sites I have running are WordPress, they’ll need to be moved. The rest are static HTML pages that I can easily upload myself. I’m thinking for room to grow, 2 cores and 4GB of ram should be plenty. Budget: Like to stay around or under $40 a month. Thoughts? Recommendations? I would prefer managed, but if I have to I can do updates once a month. I’m not technology ignorant, but I’m no security expert either. That said, HostGator is certainly behind on updates for the server I am on. Completely open to using a cPanel alternative to save money. submitted by /u/anonymous_user5150 [link] [comments]