On-demand host goes up against Amazon S3

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1. N.Cauldwell
   

   October 3rd, 2007 at 4:30 am

   Didn’t Jeff Bezos hint at a SLA being in the works? If so, startups in scalable hosting are going to struggle to prove themselves as reliable, long-term alternatives to a company that survived the dotcom boom. Are many startups running on Windows these days?

2. Tod Pedler
   

   October 3rd, 2007 at 4:38 am

   Interesting. But wouldn’t one argue that the Web 2.0 startup space is dominated predominantely by keen PHP developers looking for LAMP environments, and not drawn to Win2K boxes that won’t cater for Apache? Points given to providing a scalable ‘pay as you go’ .NET environment. This is rare. Good luck with it guys.

3. Tony Lucas
   

   October 3rd, 2007 at 4:56 am

   Just to clarify a couple of points, our platform fully supports both Linux and Windows.

   We are also not really a startup (albeit this is a major new development for us), we’ve been running 10 years providing hosting services, so we also survived (and grew strongly in fact!) through the dot com crash.

   Tony.

4. David
   

   October 3rd, 2007 at 5:11 am

   Amazon has had TONS of reliability issues lately. I and many others have lost machine instances (see this forum post http://developer.amazonwebserv.....;tstart=15). I run a startup, and over the past week have been searching for a replacement. If the costs are similar, and they offer an SLA then I would move away from Amazon.

   My only concern about this company being in Europe would be the speed of the data delivery.

5. Sean
   

   October 3rd, 2007 at 6:46 am

   I use Windows XP daily as my desktop but I’d rather die than run a Windows server environment. Ick.

6. Azeem
   

   October 3rd, 2007 at 7:02 am

   wow… interesting..maybe that can get head to head competition in the near future..Developers have to be sharp..all the best!

7. Sean
   

   October 3rd, 2007 at 7:05 am

   To actually contribute to this conversation, I’d read what David has to say. The pricing is just too good to be true for these services, especially as with Amazon you get no SLA, if they go down, well tough beans for you, they make no promises. That sucks big time.

   My service (Clicky - click my name) has had a few issues as we’ve grown over the past 9 months, and we’ve had at least 5 different people suggest, why don’t we move to Amazon services to avoid downtime? Well, I laugh at this suggestion. From everything I’ve read, it sounds like we’d have had 10 times more problems than we’ve had in the past. And there’s just something really nice about owning your own servers and having complete control over them.

   The concept of these services is good. But I would never in a million years use any of them.

8. gilltots
   

   October 3rd, 2007 at 7:35 am

   amazon’s EC2 service is still in beta, and there have been lots of success stories with it. whatever the reason for erroneously terminating your instances, it’s been fixed. and whatever else comes up along the way will be fixed promptly too, i bet.

   if you architect your setup right, it doesn’t matter if you lose a machine every once in a while - just start a new one to replace it. and aside from the amazon-specific details (where some stuff lives in your image, and interacting with the command-line tools and/or instance metadata) it shouldn’t be that hard to switch from Ec2 to your own servers or somebody else’s.

   i think one of the the biggest benefits to amazon or flexiscale is that they force you to design for scalability right off the bat, instead of as an afterthought. that’s a good thing.

   another thing, media temple has a grid hosting product but i haven’t heard much about it…they’d probably be an alternative for you people looking to jump ship.

9. Darren Stuart
   

   October 3rd, 2007 at 7:43 am

   as a .net developer this looks awesome. I am looking forward to signing up. Just wish they get a site wide sql server license…

   #5 Sean, The windows server stuff is no where near as bad as the desktop.

10. Rich Miller
    

    October 3rd, 2007 at 8:07 am

    Here’s more on the Amazon EC2 issues this week:

    http://www.datacenterknowledge....._data.html

    Also new is SaaS Grid from a company called Apprenda:

    http://www.apprenda.com/saasgrid

    While it’s not specifically storage-focused (a la S3 and Nirvanix), it looks like a competitor for FlexiScale and the existing grid hosters.

11. ANurag Phadke
    

    October 3rd, 2007 at 8:21 am

    MediaTemple (http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/dv/pricing.htm): 1GB RAM + 60GB Storage + 2TB Network Transfer = $150/month
    FlexiScale (http://www.flexiscale.com/pricing.html) : 1GB RAM + 60GB Storage + 2TB Network Transfer = £260/month ~$368/month

    Is Flexiscale ~2x expensive than MediaTemple or I am missing something obvious out here?

    -ANurag

12. crazy
    

    October 3rd, 2007 at 9:04 am

    I really like the idea of utility computing model. I would call CDNs the ancestor of these services. So I am surprised Akamai has not jumped into this. They are pricey, but they saved our ass in my last gig when we had a video featured on Howard Stern show. I won’t tell you how much the bill was, but we were able to take the hit. Amazon s3 for it’s slowness is a great service. It would be great to see more players in this space.

    As for the mentioned company, unfortunately with dollar going down the drain in valuation, the pricing of this service model is not that attractive.

    Just go to the pricing section, configure something and then price it and convert to dollar.

13. phenom
    

    October 3rd, 2007 at 9:36 am

    well web 2.0 is dominated by PHP…appreciate their idea though
    http://vidsonly.blogspot.com

14. marcT
    

    October 3rd, 2007 at 10:05 am

    Reliability is one thing, but they are in UK. I am more concerned about the bandwidth.

    hope they have data center in the states.

15. Alex
    

    October 3rd, 2007 at 10:51 am

    If they offered processor speeds greater than those offered by EC2 that would be significant.

16. Chip
    

    October 3rd, 2007 at 12:07 pm

    The genius of Amazon’s webservices are that they are developed primarily for in-house customers. Because the development cost of these projects is justified by the internal customers, any profit made from public customers is essentially pure profit.

    The flip side of this is that they are second in the queue for service.

17. Peter
    

    October 3rd, 2007 at 2:29 pm

    I checked out Flexiscale, and just to be clear:
    - they *do* offer LAMP stack servers.
    - you can’t choose CPU (they’re working on that but it’s not simple), but you *can* choose how much RAM your instance has, which is something Amazon doesn’t have.

    So you can choose a 2 Gig LAMP instance, or a 0.5 Gig Windows instance. Not bad.

18. Steve Ballmer
    

    October 3rd, 2007 at 4:52 pm

    Maybe they need a little “investment capital” to help them get started.

19. Jon Henshaw
    

    October 4th, 2007 at 4:37 am

    We did a comparison of all 3. Guess who is cheaper?

    Flexiscale, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Nirvanix Comparison

20. Rob Lazzurs
    

    October 5th, 2007 at 3:47 pm

    Hello,

    First of all, big disclaimer, I am the Chief Architect for the Flexiscale platform.

    Now to address some of the questions,

    19. Jon Henshaw,

    Yes we are more expensive however there are a few reasons for this. First of all the ‘local disk’ you are presented with in your instance is hosted on a highly redundant SAN, which means when you switch your server off your data is still there. This also means if there is any issues with the hardware you are hosted on you will not lose your data. This will also facilitate future features such as point-in-time snapshots backups and restores. Secondly, we are in the UK and doing business here is simply more expensive, however that may not always be the case We also offer an SLA, with other features you would expect from a typical dedicated hosting provider like managed services, load balancing and so forth coming soon. We also have telephone tech support

    14. marcT,

    When it comes to the question of bandwidth, this really is not an issue for us as we are connected directly into datacentres in the London Docklands area which is one of the largest focal points for the internet in Europe.

    13 phenom ,

    As others here have said, we also support Linux.

    To answer some of the more general queries about price, one thing to remember when having a look at the calculator is that we only bill for the storage you use, not what you allocate and as mentioned before this is hosted on a highly redundant SAN and will provide much greater speeds than local disk access.

    I hope Tony and I have answered all of your queries however if not please feel free to contact either of us through the web site, our forums or just give us a call and we will be happy to answer your queries

    Kind regards.

21. free image host
    

    October 19th, 2007 at 6:07 am

    Thanks a lot for this article