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Comment on Heroku Isn't for Idiots: developer time and comparative advantageparent

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Yeah, but for that price your storage is backed by 7200RPM SATA disks...

If you need speed it will cost you more for 15K SAS disks w/ a sizable battery backed RAID controller, but it will be worth every cent.

You don't want to put too many VMs on them or you'll quickly go through your IO bandwidth.

This is the problem so many devs don't understand. You run out of IOPS for your DB and your app is going nowhere. Managing storage in a reliable, fast and cost effective manner isn't easy.

Consumer SSDs are starting to change that, but you will be still struggling to find many dedicated server offerings backed with SSD storage, and there are still questions about long term reliability (4 years or so) which is typically the period your leaving hardware provisioned for to pay it off.

I haven't been with my host long enough to give them a reliable review, but they offer SSDs and are definitely budget.

You'll have to know precisely what you want/how to configure the machines, but otherwise its perfect. Exactly what oyu'd expect for unmanaged hosting.

Incero.com

Consumer SSDs have the problem of not guaranteeing any write durability on power failure, and not providing many write cycles. Never run a database at them. Consumer magnetic disk are very slow but can be made safe with proper care.

I'm pretty sure that's why he mentioned RAM. Performance and cost. Flushing is cheap if it's done once in a while.

RAM buffers work well for large readonly workloads, but write heavy workloads will perform pretty poorly with that kind of configuration.

Mind you its all a compromise, if you know that disk IO isn't a factor for your application then servers like that are ideal. I just won't run a large database on it without something like MySQL Cluster using a Memory table. It would require 2 servers, but REALLY good performance, good reliability (just get 2 dual PSU servers in different cabinets).

You can get SAS disks, raid controller and SSDs for an additional fee but it's still a bargain.

Oh, I agree.. If I didn't live the longest possible latency (.au >= 300ms) from them I would have had my cluster on them a long time ago.

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