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A comment on High RAM servers - why so expensive?. Parent comment

Re:High RAM servers - why so expensive? by catch23 on Sunday January 11, 2009 @05:10PM (#429698)
Why not just buy a machine and just colo it Softlayer? That way when you do need an additional 8GB, you can pay whatever the current price of 8GB is. These days you can build a 4 to 8 core machine with 16GB ecc memory for around $1500. Hardware is cheap these days... you should be putting most of the money into electricity & bandwidth.
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Re:High RAM servers - why so expensive? by anotherjesse on Sunday January 11, 2009 @06:07PM (#429785)
For me it is worth it not to have to deal with it.

For $529/mo I got:

  2x Intel Xeon-Clovertown 5320L-QuadCore [1.86GHz]
  4x Seagate Cheetah ST373455SS (10K SCSI drives)
  Hardware RAID controller
  16GB RAM
  2TB transfer per month.
  100Mbps uplink
  Peace of mind
Sure I could get everything but that last item for less. There is an inflection point where it is more economical to run my own hardware again but I'm not there. For a few hundred more than cost when issues occur a competent support person is helping me within minutes.

When (not if) there are issues with my servers, driving to a colo would eat my savings. When you have a hardware issue at softlayer they fix it. They don't have to wait for new hardware as they have a stock.

I'd rather be spending my time coding and working on features. Having your own non-mission colo-ed box is awesome, but the cases where dedicated leasing or AWS doesn't make sense are fewer and fewer for bootstrapers.

Note: userscripts.org is 3 years old. It ran on a colo-ed box for a year. Then a $200 serverbeach box. But it just outgrew that ( http://userscripts.org/articles/22-2008-overview for 2008 review with stats )

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Re:High RAM servers - why so expensive? by catch23 on Monday January 12, 2009 @04:56AM (#430340)
If you really want something that is peace-of-mind, you should just use something like rightscale.com. We have a giant ad server on there load balanced across 40 ec2 instances running perl code, seems to work well so far. Sometimes an instance will get fussy and we'll just create a new one from scratch by running scripts that essentially fetch everything needed from CPAN and installs, configures, and boots in one step. It's definitely a more expensive solution, but if you want peace of mind, that's probably the way to go.
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