A Rackspace Success Story
Two weeks away from our official Beta launch at MindCamp 6, L33tsauce has landed on Rackspace Cloud Sites. So far, we’ve seen a dramatic improvement in performance, and the whole hosting experience has been totally different from anything I’ve worked with in the past.
We’re a self-funded startup, and at least until the money starts coming in (that’s how it works right? in canvas sacks with dollar signs on them?), we have to be extremely careful about how we spend our dough. But frankly, at this point, I do wish we’d just started out on Cloud Sites, because we’ve spent a good 20+ hours troubleshooting and, ultimately, discontinuing other similarly priced server options.
So for those of you looking to copy l33tsauce start your own web-based venture, here’s a rundown of the low-end server options we tried, and where they took us:
GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated ($26/mo)
Where to start. To be honest, we never really planned to ride the GoDaddy server through any sort of Beta process. It’s ugly, cheap, and totally un-scalable. What we had planned on was being able to use it as a cheap development server for the early phases of the project.
That worked, to a point. Because GoDaddy’s hosting is so cheap (I assume), they put a set of constraints on their systems that you wouldn’t expect to encounter in a dedicated environment, in order to keep spammers from living on GoDaddy servers. The bottom line is we had parts of Drupal acting weirdly, link formats not working, and so on, which meant that we had to hop to a “real” environment sooner than our pocketbook had hoped.
MediaTemple Dedicated Virtual ($50/mo)
This is where we started to encounter real, worrisome problems. My engineer wanted to load us onto a Rackspace account. But, armed with the sales statistics presented by both companies, I argued: Why spend $100/month for half the bandwidth and half the storage space, when we could start out on a twice-generous Media Temple DV server at half the price?
He didn’t know the answer to that question at the time, but we both do now. It turns out that there are other statistics - far more important statistics - that aren’t ever part of the sale. The reason MT can happily offer twice the bandwidth as Rackspace is because their customers will never be able to use the bandwidth.
In our particular case, we were experiences server slowdowns and then crashes with three of us editing CSS, PHP, and creating Dojos. Some of it is our code, very much not optimized, but come on: three people?
I spent some quality time with the MT support team, who to their credit, is very accommodating. But in the end, their answer was: there’s nothing wrong, and there’s no reason your server is crashing.
Clearly that’s not a good enough answer. So I asked a friend of mine, who has forgotten more about server technology than I’ll ever know, to poke around and see what could be discovered. And as far as we were able to tell, our choke point was with the Hard Drive.
Of course!
L33tsauce is a database-intensive site. We knew that going in, and we’ve got plans to smooth out the operation as we grow, but what didn’t occur to us is that in any virtual (or “shared hardware”) environment, we’re going to be sharing hard drive read-write operations with other customers. So we were absolutely clubbing our Virtual Dedicated HDD access.
Go beyond shared hardware at MediaTemple, and you’re talking real money. So off we went to…
Rackspace Cloud Sites ($100/mo)
So far, the experience with Rackspace has been fantastic. Unlike Amazon, Rackspace offers a service called “cloud sites,” which basically means that they do the server management stuff that my team doesn’t know how to do — maintain the LAMP stack, basic security, crap like that. This means that we can, with a few notable exceptions (no SSH / root access), treat this scalable solution as if it were a nice, easy-to-use hosting package from any of our other services.
But the similarity stops there - Rackspace charges over and above the basic plan amount by “compute cycles” rather than (or really, in addition to) bundles of bandwidth and email accounts. As I understand it, this means that I get the same computing power that Posterous does, just in smaller amounts. Awesome.
Three notes about Rackspace:
1. Seven months ago, when I went around asking my friends who currently RUN database intensive, high-traffic sites about what server option to go with, they all told me Rackspace, and I ignored them because I wanted to pay less for hosting. It turns out you get what you pay for.
2. I called support the other night when I was setting up the account, since the interface really is totally different than any other hosting environment I’ve worked with, and a well-spoken human being (name: Daniel) answered the phone. No machine involved. This gives me endless confidence in their ability to support l33tsauce as we grow.
3. I have no idea how quickly we will outgrow our allowance of compute cycles. It’s a brand-new metric of server use for me, and the good thing about it is that it keeps the pressure on us to make sure our code is as tight and efficient as possible.
