How should you plan for hardware while launching ?

Say you bootstrap your Internet startup and are on the verge of either making a public announcement or pitch media-bloggers about the impending launch of your startup.

My question is - how do you anticipate the traffic load and how do you plan accordingly for any contingency? Assuming that the pitch was successful and you get a moderate to sizeable amount of traffic, if you are on a shared hosting plan, chances are that the site may cripple under the load.That would be a nightmare for any Internet entrepreneur - getting all the coveted user traffic, but hardware resources fail to keep up.

On the flip side,  you might be faced with the scenario that you opted for a dedicated hosting plan and the traffic just never came. And now the 100-300$ + monthly costs for the dedicated server are a strain on your pocket - at least till the traffic to the site builds up.

Probably, this isnt as big an issue –and more so, I’m just curious to find out what others think about the same. If you’ve already been through such a scenario, what decision did you finally opt for ? Did it work out to be the better decision ?

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This entry was written by pranav and posted on May 12, 2008 at 10:39 am and filed under Entrepreneurship, Tech tidbit. Post a comment

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14 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

  1. Well the safer side seems to be a cheaper hosting plan . It has got two advantages .
    1st it lets you put more money on the site development .
    2nd you are testing the response of the market , it is less likely that you hit a close to million a day in the early days.
    As on when when you see a consistent rise on the traffic so that you are losing some business/popularity move on to a dedicated hosting .

    1. Abhinav on May 12th, 2008 at 10:58 am

  2. abhinav

    it doesnt take a million hits a day to bring a site to a screeching halt..

    depending on the application memory allowed on your shared hosting plan, you might hit the threshold even if - say 30 users are trying to sign up at the same time…or upload photos etc..

    2. pranav on May 12th, 2008 at 11:54 am

  3. I will opt for deploy -> monitor -> upgrade.

    3. Shabbir Husain on May 13th, 2008 at 12:58 am

  4. The middle path between shared hosing and dedicated hosting is Managed VPS. Most of the VPS offer sufficient enough disk space and bandwidhth and cost in the range of $40 - $70.

    4. sunil on May 13th, 2008 at 3:45 am

  5. This is where private betas help. Start off on shared, then upgrade to VPS and then Dedicated.

    On dedicated, storage was our first bottleneck, so we made the switch to AWS.

    Most decent dedicated plans I have looked at require at least a 3-month commitment, so is better to do a soft launch in private beta, test the market, and then do the big splash.

    5. Vikas on May 13th, 2008 at 11:49 am

  6. @sunil - managed VPS isnt offered everywhere. if i remember correctly, webfaction didnt offer managed vps

    @vikas - thanks for sharing your experience. 1st hand advice always helps :-)

    6. pranav on May 13th, 2008 at 2:00 pm

  7. Yeah .. very well said .. We had been running a site .. with 10,00 Page views per day on a shared hosting server…soon

    We ran out of space
    we ran out of email quota
    we ran out of database size limit
    we ran out of almost everything ..

    finally we decided to move to a dedicated server…

    I have got some tips

    1. Dont straightway pull out your Credit Card and go for a dedicate server . Coz the cost and the maintaince is always an issue with it . So it better to start with a shared hosting always.

    2. Ask your developer to code in such a way that u wont face any difficulty in moving to a newer place. For example if you site / blog creates a static page then u wud need create the same again in your dedicated server too .. so be prepared it ..

    3. Plan your day for migration carefully .. may be during night time .. altough it may vary depending on type of your site . Do a trial run on the newer server with some other domain or ip .. so that u get used to the environmet ..

    4. carefully choose a dedicated server. don’t always look our for offers… Uptime and Support shud be the main criteria … http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ is a good site which can help you in takeing decision

    5. Server location is thing of concern .. but not for us.. coz we didn’t mind speed difference of micro sec .. And also the rates quoted by indian biggies were too high compared US based dedicated servers thus just out of question .

    6. If ur new to dedicated server environment .. i would always suggest to go for a Fully managed server coz here all the updation , maintainence and patching for the server are done by the hosting company ..

    Shifting sites can be a military exercise … so everything has to be planned and executed well.. make it sure that thier no loss of any data as it may hamper yur goodwill ..

    have a nice time

    7. Suraj Jain on May 13th, 2008 at 2:25 pm

  8. For people who don’t mind some network latency, getting VPS hosting from US is a good option. With plans starting from $10/month (eApps.com) you wont be digging a hole in your balance sheet. Moreover using a VPS lets you experiment a lot with your configuration, you can increase the ram or may be add more processor or more network cards just by asking your host on nominal charge. Once you pass that initial steep growth phase, move to Colocation at a datacenter and have your own infrastructure. By that time you will know your exact needs in terms of CPU, RAM, disks etc.

    I know a lot of Indian sites which cosume 4 times the resources they would actually need if coded properly. Spend some time on server optimization and you might save a lot on hosting.

    PS: If anybody has a price estimate for managed hosting in India (Tata Communications formerly VSNL) please share

    8. Anshul on May 13th, 2008 at 4:15 pm

  9. Anshul,
    Is network latency a function of geography (usa) or of the nature of server (vps/shared)? In other words, are you saying VPS in USA will have network latency and VPS from other countries wont?

    I’m in process of finalizing VPS to host my site and thought it would be faster & better in all respects over shared hosting (can’t afford dedicated at this point)

    Can someone share some good gyan on VPS hosting please? Also, if someone could recommend good hosting providers in the range of $40 - $60 would be helpful.

    9. sunil on May 14th, 2008 at 3:14 am

  10. In the case of cafestocks.com, we did experiment with a VPS hosting from RapidVPS. However being programmers ourselves (coding on laptops with more than 2GB of RAM), we were very uncomfortable hosting on anything less than this. The VPS plans at rapidvps were not scalable. So we finally moved to dedicated server with them just before beta.
    I would never have started with a shred hosting plan because they usually do not provide any failover support and stuff like this. Agreed, a startup with just a beta does not need 5 servers to load balance, but it does need mirroring of the disk, lest something fails. Also, complete control never hurts.

    Whether is works out well will depend on the traffic that we can attract. We are keeping our fingers crossed.

    10. Shishir Jain on May 14th, 2008 at 11:30 am

  11. Better to go with some hosting provider who can add servers when need arises without halting the domain for few days.

    Initially I think its better to go with a VPS and then migrate to Dedicated servers if traffic increases.

    I think, Google’s AppEngine will be the best way to deploy the applications combined with Amazon EC2 for image hosting. Unfortunately Appengine now supports only Python. When we get PHP support in AppEngine that should end the troubles of scaling, performance and a hell lot of other hardware/software issues for Internet startups. At least those startups with less budget!

    11. Chandra on May 14th, 2008 at 2:24 pm

  12. this is turning out to be a fantastic dicussion. thanks all for providing your input — i’m pretty sure something will come of this that will be of help to the rest of the community as well..

    @sunil..check webhostingtalk (url posted by suraj above). it should explain vps to you..some good providers (media temple, theplanet, serverbeach etc.)
    always check for rating / reviews before getting locked into an year of hosting..

    @chandra - appengine still doesnt work as smoothly as expected.. i’ve tried it out…and before going live on appengine, i’d prefer to wait till it gets polished some more

    @suraj, you’ve posted some really useful tips…can you share any additional info you may think might be of help to the readers ?

    12. pranav on May 14th, 2008 at 3:00 pm

  13. If you are hosting any multimedia content, its better to move it on to a CDN like amazon S3 from the beginning itself. It will save you a lot of effort if your site becomes a successful in a day or two.

    13. Kenney on May 19th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

  14. @suraj: I meant network latency. With my tests, sites hosted in US had sround 355ms RTT (including server delay) whereas for sites hosted in India had only around 50ms RTT (again including server delay)

    @Kenney: I don’t think you can call Amazon S3 a CDN. They don’t have whole lot of flexibility. Moreover their servers are located only in US and Europe which again defeats the purpose for Indian user as being CDN

    14. Anshul on May 24th, 2008 at 12:13 pm

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