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What are the advantages of using Akamai vs. CloudFront? From what I've read, Akamai seems to be more expensive but they seem to have a larger network for their CDN. CloudFront on the other end is newer and Amazon even used Akamai for their e-commerce site when CloudFront was launched in 2008. This might have changed since then which will not surprise me.
I like CloudFront because my application will be hosted on AWS so there might be significant benefits from using CloudFront rather than Akamai. CloudFront seems to be better documented too and their API is easily accessible whereas Akamai isn't. I'm hoping to get pros and cons between choosing Akamai vs. CloudFront. Thanks in advance!
Each service is performing differently in different regions. Amazon CloudFront can be better in the APAC region, while Akamai might be better in South of Europe and the Middle east.
Since this is a physical service that depends on the actual location of their PoP (Point of Presence) servers, you need to measure where most of your users are, and choose the better service for that region.
You can see such a comparison about the CDN performance in different regions here: http://media.amazonwebservices.com/FS_WP_AWS_CDN_CloudFront.pdf
The main difference between CloudFront and Akamai is the number of PoP servers. CloudFront is using Super PoP approach, which means much fewer (edge) locations (54 as of January 2016 - see complete list here), compared to the thousands that Akamai has around the world. This is why CloudFront costs less than Akamai.
Having more PoP was crucial in the early days of the Internet. But as the Internet is developing around the world the difference in performance is shrinking.
There are even benefits for "Super PoP" in terms of cache, as there is a better chance of finding an element in the cache if you have fewer cache servers.
If you are hosting your web servers in EC2, you will probably get better performance and surely better pricing from CloudFront. If not, you should check the performance and pricing between the various providers.
Note that you don't have to be exclusive, as many big content providers are using several CDN and not a single one.
Akamai is a more expensive solution, but not for nothing. It's more targeted towards enterprise customers, whereas CloudFront is like EC2 - easy to setup and pay as you go. So you probably won't find much publicly available data on Akamai as compared to CloudFront.
Here is a (not so useful) comparison - http://www.cdnplanet.com/compare/cloudfront/akamai/
For more about Akamai's network size, you can read this and this.
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I run a small SAAS website with a (hopefully) growing number of customers. Right now, I have three Amazon EC2 instances. A micro instance runs the web frontend (Rails), a small instance runs the API layer (Rails), and a micro instance runs the data layer (Postgres). Please don't judge; this is more than adequate for my needs at this time.
As I add additional customers, I know that eventually I am going to have to a) increase the horsepower of the existing servers and/or b) load-balance the web/API servers and cluster the database servers.
My question is - how do you decide from a cost/benefit standpoint when to upgrade servers (i.e. micro-->small-->medium-->large) vs. adding additional servers of the same type? I understand that there are benefits to load balancing (such as keeping you online in the event of a server crash or an issue with an availability zone).
Obviously, Amazon charges more for servers with more memory and processing power, but they also charge for ELB and services like that. If I were to increase to two servers in each layer today, that would double my costs + the costs for ELB (not including data transfer costs). It seems like a bottleneck this early on would be best suited by upgrading to medium or better servers.
What are some good rules of thumb for when to build up as opposed to out? Please keep in mind that my choice of software (cough Rails) is very memory intensive when processing large amounts of data.
You mentioned some pros to scaling out(redundancy), but forgot the cons specifically more complex deployments, and increased overhead(more operating system resources being used).
It isn't just up vs out, it is up vs out for each layer. The db tier generally wants to scale up since it avoids clustering/replication headaches. The application tier can go either way. Web servers scale out nicely since they are handling requests and the requests are separate.
Specific to amazon and their specific pricing right now(https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/), it seems like scaling up vs out is about equivalent, with scaling up to about large being slightly ahead.
Scaling up has the benefit of faster CPU + more RAM, so your app's performance may increase as a result. Yes, there's a time when out vs. up will win, but from my perspective, we have chosen to scale up whenever possible (we're on AWS as well), as we notice a performance boost to our app each time we do, in addition to allowing for additional capacity as our user base grows.
My understanding of a CDN (like Akamai or Limelight) is that they are heavy-duty caching services.
I also understand that they are very expensive. So I'm wondering why I can't just create my own cluster of replicated caching servers (using, say, EhCache or Memcached) for all my web app's caching needs (images, URL hits/responses, Javascripts, etc) and basically get the same thing?
In essence, from a developer's perspective, what are the benefits (technical or otherwise) of paying a CDN vs. just using your own caching solution? Or, if I have completely misunderstood what CDNs are, please correct my understanding! Thanks in advance!
The key to this is the N in CDN, Content Delivery Network.
The advantage of a CDN (a good one, at least) is that it's geographically distributed. What the big CDN providers do (the ones you mentioned along with others) is have hundreds or thousands of servers in facilities all over the world. This lets what ever resource the CDN is serving sit as geographically close as possible to the end user no matter where they are in the world.
You can certainly replicate the functionality. At a very basic level most CDN's are simply an object/value store which plenty of software can do - what you can't do, at the scale these guys do it at any rate, is have servers all over the world to serve and replicate these objects.
If all you're interested in is an efficient way to store and serve static files then an object store coupled with something like nginx would do just fine. A CDN is used to make sites load as fast as they possibly can, but they come at a price.
For the record, Amazon's Cloud Front, while not as distributed as Limelight or Akamai is a lot cheaper and a good middle ground compromise on cost vs service.
The advantage of big CDNs is that they own distributed resources all over the world, allowing them to serve the users from a servers near them. Besides caching, this is the major point that makes them fast.
To build your own CDN, you would have to install servers on multiple continents, arrange good Internet connectivity for them, setup caching and make sure you have the servers all synchronized. It's not impossible to do that, but it will be very cost-intensive and might not be profitable.
With all due respect, I disagree with the other two answers given thus far to this question. Just to be clear, I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm just offering a different perspective.
While it is certainly true that the key to CDN performance is the "N," as Bulk eloquently explained, that doesn't mean you can't build your own CDN. The question is whether or not it's worth the time (and by definition, the money).
We live in a world of cheap servers and even cheaper virtual machines. Sure the big CDN networks have thousands/millions of servers all over the world, but that's because they have thousands/millions of sites to serve. Depending on the size of your site/app, all you really need in terms of resources is as much as your site(s) need. If you're small, the minimum might be a VPS on each US coasts, one in Europe, maybe two in Asia, and one in Australia. Sure, the hardware costs are too high for your typical homepage, but they are certainly not extreme, and if you're looking at CDNs in the first place, they are probably within your budget.
To me, commercial CDN services just provide PaaS convenience, but there is nothing preventing you from getting IaaS and building up your own platform.
One more thing on this topic:
I once read a comment either by David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Ruby on Rails) or by someone referring to him that went something along the lines of: The owner(s) of 37 Signals were concerned DHH was using Ruby to build their application. At that point Ruby was still very obscure. Almost all web hosts were offering PHP, Perl, and Microsoft technologies. When asked about the fact that there were only a handful of Ruby hosts in the world, DHH asked, "well how many do you need?"
To me the point is you need to look at what's best for your needs and the needs of your application, and not necessarily what the guys with millions of servers think.
Is cloud hosting the way to go? Or is there something better that delivers fast page loads?
The reason I ask is because I run a buddypress site on a bluehost dedicated server, but it seems to run slow at most times of the day. This scares me because at the moment the sites not live and I'm afraid when it gets traffic it'll become worse and my visitors will lose interest. I use Amazon Cloud to handle all my media, JS, and CSS files along with a catching plugin, but it still loads slow at times.
I feel like the problem is Bluehost, because I visit other sites running buddypress and their sites seem to load instantly. Im not web hosting savvy so can someone please point me in the right direction here?
The hosting choice depends on many factors such as technical requirements, growth rates, burst rates, budgets and more.
Bigger Hardware
To scale up hosting operation, your first choice is often just using a more powerful server, VPS, or cloud instance. The point is not so much cloud vs. dedicated but that you simply bring more compute power to the problem. Cloud can make scaling up easier - often with a few clicks.
Division of Labor
The next step often is division of labor. You offload database, static content, caching or other items to specific servers or services. For example, you could offload static content to a CDN. You could a dedicated database.
Once again, cloud vs non-cloud is not the issue. The point is to bring more resources to your hosting problems.
Pick the Right Application Stack
I cannot stress enough picking the right underlying technology for your needs. For example, I've recently helped a client switch from a Apache/PHP stack to a Varnish/Nginx/PHP-FPM stack for a very business Wordpress operation (>100 million page views/mo). This change boosted capacity by nearly 5X with modest hardware changes.
Same App. Different Story
Also just because you are using a specific application, it does not mean the same hosting setup will work for you. I don't know about the specific app you are using but with Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Vbulletin and others, the plugins, site design, themes and other items are critical to overall performance.
To complicate matter, user behavior is something to consider as well. Consider a discussion form that has a 95:1 read:post ratio. What if you do something in the design to encourage more posts and that ratio moves to 75:1. That means more database writes, less caching, etc.
In short, details matter, so get a good understanding of your application before you start to scale out hosting.
A hosting service is part of the solution. Another part is proper server configuration.
For instance this guy has optimized his setup to serve 10 million requests in a day off a micro-instance on AWS.
I think you should look at your server config first, then shop for other hosts. If you can't control server configuration, try AWS, Rackspace or other cloud services.
just an FYI: You can sign up for AWS and use a micro instance free for one year. The link I posted - he just optimized on the same server. You might have to upgrade to a small server because Amazon has stated that micro is only to handle spikes and sustained traffic.
Good luck.
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At my company we are looking at hosting a blog and a CMS . We are still in the process of building the product and havent made it live yet. We are looking at some hosting options. We need to have complete root shell access to the system .So, i have the following two questions.
1.) Should we go for Amazon EC2 or VPS, considering our present requirements which i stated above and also considering that we may need to scale in the future ?
2.) If VPS is the way to go for us,could you please recommend some good service.Also which plan should we go for and also how much would it cost ?
Thank You.
Disclosure: I used to work for Linode.
Speaking objectively, I've heard from several customers that have migrated both from EC2 (as well as to EC2) that say Amazon EC2 is a bit difficult to work with for hosting Web services. From the cost per resource to the various quirks of their service -- last I heard, EC2 is designed more for utility computing than running a Web site and its associated services. I would recommend EC2 more for these kinds of applications:
Processing videos and other multimedia.
Throwaway computing, where nodes are added and removed as demand goes up and down.
Any service where CPU is the bottleneck.
A VPS is a much better choice for you, as you get root and -- if a company does its VPS service right -- scaling is ridiculous easy. If you plan for scalability from the get go with a load balancing solution, you can add a node with Linode in under a few minutes.
The two front runners in the VPS market are Slicehost and Linode. Each have their advantages and disadvantages. Again speaking objectively, Linode's cost per resource is better than Slicehost's, and Linode offers a few services Slicehost does not. Both have fairly active and helpful communities, and both are reliable services. Here's a comparison of both where Linode was ultimately chosen, and a discussion on Slicehost's forums with customers taking both sides.
I'm happy to answer any questions you have, on StackExchange or off.
Go with Linode. You won't regret it. I was a customer long before I was hired.
Another thought I just had is that it's unwise to put all your eggs in one basket; I recently completed full support for the wonderful libcloud project, and Slicehost is fully supported as well, as is EC2. Regardless of what platform you choose, management tools are catching up with cloud ideals.
EC2 is only reasonable if you plan on taking advantage of the scaling. With your dev server, I'm sure you're going to want it up at all times, and with that I think the cheapest instance is like $70 a month at amazon.
Just got for Linode. Great community and all that for only $20/mo.
While I agree with other answers that EC2 is more for data processing than web hosting, I found that now EC2 offers free micro-instances for one year and you may sign up for one and play with it yourself and see which is the best option for you.
If you're not planning on scaling up and down on a regular basis I would recommend a VPS. Jed Smith mentioned two options for that and another choice for a VPS is http://prgmr.com/xen/ which I've used and am happy with. They don't offer as many options as Slicehost or Linode, but they offer more RAM per dollar than most other providers I've seen. They also don't offer any wizards or ajax console access or other high level features. However, if you're ok with setting everything up via a command line console they are an option you should consider.
I have been using https://www.atum.com for years. I was with Amazon, it just didn't cut it for my needs. We have a lot of ram and disk requirements, I found the IO/RAM to be quite bad.
I used Linode for a while, they were quite good as well. I went to Atum mainly because of a friend who was with them, had good things to say about the performance. I have a lot of customers in Canada and that is where there datacenter is because of the patriot act, it had to be in Canada so. Atum VPS has been great so far to me =)
We have been using vps.net for a while and quite satisified with it.
I love linode's offerings as well though I haven't used it yet.
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I have a cheap shared hosting plan with Reliablesite.net ($5/month).
I've been making a small site I want to start promoting in a few weeks and I was going to roadtest it by hosting it with the shared plan I already have.
My issue is that I don't know at what point I should move onto clustered hosting / dedicated hosting.
Questions
What pageviews / day can a
shared hosting plan be expected to
handle?
What can standard
shared database servers take without
choking up or me getting rude emails
from my hosting provider?
In my experience, shared hosting environment like Reliablesite.com can take around 10-20 000 unique users per day, or 100-200 000 pageviews/day. That number can vary, depending on your site. For optimization, It is important to reduce number of db queries (i keep it max 6-7 per page render), and be careful when programming. Using ASP.NET MVC gave nice perf improvement for me, but good written webforms app can perform well also. If you are using some other tech stack, like PHP/MySQL, i don't know the numbers.
When you exceed those numbers, you will have enough money from google adsense to go with VPS or dedicated plan.
Just to add something regarding page render / db queries performance: using multiple resultset sproc or query is great way to reduce number of db requests!
Traffic usually is not a problem on shared hosting. The only problem you may encounter is RAM and CPU restrictions. But if your application written correctly it could operate well with these limitations.
Hints:
user memory profiler to debug and optimize your web application
use CDN for storing media files
If you need some numbers, a properly written web application which use CDN for storing media files could handle at least 10k unique visitors per day on a shared hosting.
It would be best if you ask your provider these questions. Every provider is going to be different.
Generally what happens is that the provider can handle the requests, but they'll simply shut down your site once it reaches a certain threshold.
It also depends on the amount of bandwidth you have opted for. How much traffic are you expecting. My blog is in a shared hosting and and once 4k was my maximum in a day and I dint feel any difference in the performance. Dont worry unless your site appears in front page of digg or some high traffic websites link to you site.
I have been using mysql on shared hosting for a while mainly on informational websites that have gotten at most 300 visits per day. What I have found is that the hosting was barely sufficient to support more than 3 or 4 people on the website at one time without it almost crashing.
Theoretically i think shared hosting with most services could support about about 60 users per hour max efficiently if your users all came one or two at a time. This would equal out to about about 1500 users in one day. This is highly unlikely however because alot of users tend to be online at certain times of the day and you also have to throw in the fact that shared servers get sloppy alot due to abuse from others on the server.
I have heard from reliable sources that some vps hosting thats 40-50 dollars per month have supported 500,000 hits per month. I'm not sure what the websites configurations were though, i doubt the sites ran many dynamic db queries or possibly were simply static.
One other thing that is common on shared hosting is breaking up the file managers with the database hosting. Sometimes your files will do well appearing online but the database that runs your actual website will be lagging extremely due to abuse from your neighbors.
I suggest ensuring that your application is ready for large amounts of traffic, even if you are on a super duper webserver, but your app is badly written, you will loose potential clients. Some of the easiest optimizations that can be done to an existing web app is to reduce the number of DB connections, so read up on caching and partial caching.