I've asked a prominent Aussie hosting company to consider helping out here. Stand by for more.
From: silicon-beach-australia@googlegroups.com [mailto:silicon-beach-austra...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Shaon Diwakar Sent: Tuesday, 20 January 2009 6:00 PM To: silicon-beach-australia@googlegroups.com Subject: [SiliconBeach] Re: Looking for $0 server/desktop hardware for a good home WOW, thanks for the detailed explanation Mike! We will definitely be considering EC2 and have already looked at Google's AppEngine (our only concern is being locked into Google's offering). As for the loan of old servers and equipment for the Silicon Beach community - that's an excellent idea, especially for a hackspace or file share server for events like BarCamp. The difficulties would include making sure all the boxes are patched + administered appropriately + making sure that everyone can't see each others proprietary source code. Getting them located + power + internet would need to be thought out too. A model like the CompSci coop at uni could work? We're still keen on having our own boxes purely for accessibility & security reasons and ease of splitting the power + Internet bill b/w the 3 of us. So if anyone knows of a corporate that chucks them in the tip - please let us know :-) On 20/01/2009, at 5:24 PM, Mike Nicholls wrote: Hi Shaon I had this approach when I started out, I purchased two dedicated servers thinking I would put them into a data centre here in AU. It was way too expensive just to get rack space, took too long and the 1 & 2 year contracts made you think twice. I ended up getting a dedicated hosted server from the US, however it took two weeks to get provisioned and it was a pain. It used to max out all the time and to get another required signing more contracts and a whole bunch of network sys admin I really wasnt ready for. As a start up I believe its a false economy to run your own servers with the Cloud Computing Options available, These include * Amazon EC2 using Scalr.net (cheap but support is good for a startup but not enterprise ready) or Rightscale (expensive) * Google AppEng they are giving away enough computing power to handle 5 mill page views a month (you need to code using their DB which is built to scale) * Jaxster now has a scaling/cloud solution which is integrated with Aptana. This is the Server side of Aptana which came out of Eclipse. * Microsoft is about to launch a solution * There are others out there as well. Re: Developing the App, do your Dev work on your PC/Mac with WAMP or Aptana/Jaxster loaded and then deploy to a hosted solution once tested. When we deployed Enikos Video Platform we used EC2, we could scale up or down from a small instance (think virtual server) size to a Extra Large Instance, but couldnt easily split into multiple instances but we managed to test the platform to the equivilent of 25 million widget serves in a day. It was good and a lot better than ordering a dedicated server but still took a lot of sys admin work to get deployed properly and to scale up and down and was not automated, you needed to hold its hand We have deployed http://www.jobfeedr.com using Scalr.net to manage our Amazon EC2 cloud, approx $200USD per month for two EC2 Instances(but you could start with one) one as an App server and the other MYSQL and Scalr Management service. Small EC2 Instances are like an entry level dedicated server ~2ghz Cel power, 1.7 GB memory 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit) 160 GB instance storage (150 GB plus 10 GB root partition) 32-bit platform I/O Performance: Moderate Price: $0.10 per instance hour (USD) see http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ for all the types available. Scalr.net will let you deploy scripts on boot of an instance which will load your production code from SVN, it will also allow you to tell it how many application instances you want it to launch when it gets loaded up, it will launch new MySQL instances and automatically Master Slave them and tell the App servers where they are. It takes a few days of reading to get your head around it, but once done it is so easy to run. Initially I would not worry about getting dedicated boxes, just use the cloud options Also check out http://highscalability.com/ this gives real life descriptions of what the big guys have had to do to scale their systems. If you get to the point where you have massive requirements and you have your own sys admin/scaling engineers than you would almost certainly go down the path of taking out a bunch of racks and installing your own, but until you get that sort of traffic its pretty hard to beat the flexibility and cost effectiveness of Scalr.net and EC2. Having said all that, I am willing to loan the two Compaq Rack servers I purchased a few years ago to the Silicon Beach/Startup Camp group. The only provisio is that they are available to any of the startup groups that want to use them, so I guess this means they would need to be in some sort of hackspace. They are a little old now, ML320 I think not massively powerful now and very noisy (think Jet test cell at QANTAS) but I am willing to loan them indefinitely to whoever needs them as long as other startups can have access to them. They are located in McMahons Point (near Nth Syd). Any suggestions on where we could put a hack space and how that could work would be great. Actually I also have a spare linux PC and probably a basic ADSL router under the same conditions. I can find the specs for this stuff if anyone needs it Mike Nicholls --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Silicon Beach Australia" group. 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