Cloud cloud cloud, what a load of crap. Most of these benefits are benefits to the cloud providers. The expense of a usable linode is more than a dedicated server in colocation, and that colocation server will be 4-8x more powerful. And these guys are multiples more expensive? The cloud is a sham. Creating one's own "cloud" is easy. Don't be duped into paying for "cloud servers" when that same money gets you a physical server in colocation multiple times more powerful. Oh, you can't spin up more servers? Do you need to when your server is 4-8x times more powerful? Plus, you can run your own virtual machines if want to be able to brag about spinning up servers.
This is a fluff piece, probably written for SEO juice. At least the submitter of the story is open in his profile that he works for the company in question (anchor) and is the author of the piece
A better article would have quantified all the measurable metrics like "virtual machines are 'fast'" and talked about some of the negatives - like privacy/security concerns etc.
What I want to know is - why are they so much more expensive than linode(for example). These guys are offering a 512Mb VPS @80$/m compared to 19.95@linode. They also charge 100$ for setup - (doing everything manually?)
Hosting is a lot more expensive in Australia.. To give you some idea, for wholesale bandwidth alone we pay in the order of 20times what it costs in the US or Europe.
The reality is we're a long way from everywhere. When we connect into the US we need to run the cables 15,000kms and we get to pick up the vast majority of the costs to do so. Then when you try split that cost over 22 million people versus the 300million++ in the US, you end up with economies of scale which are way out of whack with what your familiar with. :)
To give you some idea, the vast majority of residential DSL connections cost in the order of $100/month .. and only come with 150GB data allowance. :)
According to my bosses who have done the research when setting up their web hosting, the Australian hosts are 1) uniformly VERY expensive and 2) not as reliable as hosting providers elsewhere.
As someone else said, bandwidth is expensive and travels great distances. But that's not the only reason either imho. Things are simply more expensive here. :(
Your first point is relatively correct. Prices in Australia are hugely more expensive because of a combination of high wages and sheer distance from everything else.
The second point however is a stereotypical blanket statement. It's important to note that Anchor as a company designed and maintained the infrastructure of Github.com and now does the same thing for testflightapp.com; Both of which are high profile startups each of whom have traffic numbers orders of magnitude higher than most Australian hosting providers see across their entire network.
In the end, quality hosting isn't just about the hardware (linode, rackspace), but highly skilled engineers who can architect and provide solutions that don't 'just work' now, but scale into the future.
I read with great interest the write up on Anchor's work for the new Github architecture, so I meant no disparagement to the employee's skill.
The problems I was referring to were simply the ability to keep from falling over at random times for varied reasons. Many providers they tried couldn't even handle this basic task. Sure, we could have paid for the expertise with a company like Anchor but it was more cost effective to look outside Australia.
You shouldn't be a happy Linode customer. They still haven't owned up to what happened during that Bitcoin incident and what they've done to stop it happening again. Major security incidents DEMAND transparency e.g. look how professional Cloudflare was.
So for all you know your VPS could still be hacked in seconds despite whatever security measures you have in place.
The bitcoin incident was a xen exploit that they couldn't talk about until Xen provided a fix and disclosed themselves. They talk about it, without referencing the bitcoin incident specifically, here http://blog.linode.com/2012/06/13/xen-security-advisories-an...
And I agree, it is sometimes difficult to get that message across (especially, on a single blog post). Probably the biggest offering is seriously talented sysadmins, there's plenty of articles which hopefully get some of that across. For example, the 10 year old MySQL bug which we recently fixed. Could be wrong, but I am not sure that your $20/month hosting providers would be doing that for a client.
I edit and compile code all day long on a Linode 512. It's always responsive. I actually think most other people at this tier level aren't using their CPUs (or, probably, servers) at all.
http://www.anchor.com.au/servers/