Picking a cloud provider (AWS, Azure, Goole Cloud etc.)

[Kerwin]

I'm building a project now and have reached the stage where I need to determine which hosting provider to use. The website is primarily for audio streaming (similar to Sound Cloud). Still, each of the different providers uses utterly different pricing models, and they are pretty complex, so comparing them comes down to a spreadsheet. But I also need to factor in each platform's difficulty and reliability.

Which cloud provider would you use? If so, why and what made you pick that one in particular?

 

[codefather]

Hello
Of course all of the cloud provider are good and reliable, so the choice should be made on the cost for the services you're going to use.
I suggest you to develop in a platform independent way, not to be locked in the specific provider's platform and to be free to move to another platform.
That won't be super easy though.
So make your choice cafefully.
You're going to move out lot of data, so you're going to do a lot of egress traffic, so keep this in mind for your calculations.
All said, there's no easy answer to your question as the details for your project, as it has to be analyzed in details to understand when, how, and how much data is transferred and what are the best solution to deal with it.
Take your time, do your calculations, and ensure to have a very viable solution for egress traffic (both cloud pricing and solution in your software) not to have cloud bills that would kill your business.
Cheers
Gianluca

 

[Kerwin]

Hello
Of course all of the cloud provider are good and reliable, so the choice should be made on the cost for the services you're going to use.
I suggest you to develop in a platform independent way, not to be locked in the specific provider's platform and to be free to move to another platform.
That won't be super easy though.
So make your choice cafefully.
You're going to move out lot of data, so you're going to do a lot of egress traffic, so keep this in mind for your calculations.
All said, there's no easy answer to your question as the details for your project, as it has to be analyzed in details to understand when, how, and how much data is transferred and what are the best solution to deal with it.
Take your time, do your calculations, and ensure to have a very viable solution for egress traffic (both cloud pricing and solution in your software) not to have cloud bills that would kill your business.
Cheers
Gianluca

Thank you very much for your reply!

I think you are right. I will need to go through all of them to see which one is best for me. I currently use Linode for a couple of blogs I run and am pretty impressed but I felt like I might like a platform where everything is already supported.

 

[codefather]

Hello
Linode has good reputation.
They sell only shared virtual machines, which may not be the best, or not allowed in some cases, but that's not your case.
However, you see they bind the network traffic to the node computing size, and the amount is large but not infinite, in order of terabytes.
And you need more servers to add redundancy, or the single server failure will mean downtime.
If you have an app for streaming, you may cache it in the app to use less traffic, but then building an app is an extra cost, and then maintaining, and keeping it safe, and so the backend itself.
So, if you need to build a proof-of-concept, then anything goes, really.
But for anything more than a POC, you need to work on a different side, the business model, to see how you can sustain your platform with subscriptions, or adds, or other stream of revenues.
If you need consultants to help in choosing the best fitting provider, or to build this platform, I'm available for a talk.
Thank you
Cheers
Gianluca

 

[Datastore365]

I'm building a project now and have reached the stage where I need to determine which hosting provider to use. The website is primarily for audio streaming (similar to Sound Cloud). Still, each of the different providers uses utterly different pricing models, and they are pretty complex, so comparing them comes down to a spreadsheet. But I also need to factor in each platform's difficulty and reliability.

Which cloud provider would you use? If so, why and what made you pick that one in particular?

Morning Kerwin, Datastore365 have solely been in the cloud industry for over 18 years. Would love to discuss some options and your company. Regards Brian

 

[gpietersz]

Linode has good reputation.
They sell only shared virtual machines, which may not be the best, or not allowed in some cases, but that's not your case.

They are very good - my favourite VPS provider at the moment. I have several clients using them. They do offer virtual machines with dedicated CPUs and lots of RAM which is a very powerful setup, and they an object store (like S3, and with the same API). Definitely the easiest to work with, and they actually have reasonable customer service!

That said, the prices for those make a dedicated server a cheaper option (although Linode are still a lot cheaper than AWS and the other big providers) but you are paying a premium for the scalability.

 

[Kerwin]

They are very good - my favourite VPS provider at the moment. I have several clients using them. They do offer virtual machines with dedicated CPUs and lots of RAM which is a very powerful setup, and they an object store (like S3, and with the same API). Definitely the easiest to work with, and they actually have reasonable customer service!

That said, the prices for those make a dedicated server a cheaper option (although Linode are still a lot cheaper than AWS and the other big providers) but you are paying a premium for the scalability.

I would be pretty happy to use Linode for my project as I have used them for over ten years. The problem is that my website uses a lot of media, so I have to transcode between several audio and video codecs, which, as you know, requires a lot of CPU power. AWS, for instance, has a service you can use straight out of the box where as with Linode I'd need to build it all myself.

I'll have to do some research into it and see how feasible a custom solution is going to be.

 

[gpietersz]

There are transcoding libraries. Calling them should be no more difficult than call the AWS service.

I had a client some years ago who required heavily seasonal video transcoding (only for two months a year or thereabouts). It was still much cheaper to pay for a dedicated server from OVH all year round and develop new code than to continue using the AWS service.

 

[Kerwin]

There are transcoding libraries. Calling them should be no more difficult than call the AWS service.

I had a client some years ago who required heavily seasonal video transcoding (only for two months a year or thereabouts). It was still much cheaper to pay for a dedicated server from OVH all year round and develop new code than to continue using the AWS service.

One thing I could do is use the Linode GPU instances as video transcoding is GPU accelerated if you use FFmpeg, which you build to support Nvidia GPUs. I might explore that to see if that is a decent solution.

 

[Kerwin]

There are transcoding libraries. Calling them should be no more difficult than call the AWS service.

I had a client some years ago who required heavily seasonal video transcoding (only for two months a year or thereabouts). It was still much cheaper to pay for a dedicated server from OVH all year round and develop new code than to continue using the AWS service.

I'm not sure if you can recommend something here. OK, as I said, my website deals with lots of music and video, so I need to change between formats of all different codecs. I could use something like FFmpeg, but I've never rented a dedicated server and have no idea what the best deals and companies are worth working with.

I'll also want to do live video streaming, so I'll need a lot of bandwidth and a fast connection to my dedicated server. Since I've never looked into this before, I'm not sure which dedicated server companies are worth looking into. I do not need management as I can deal with Linux sys admin.

If you need any more information, then please let me know.

 

[gpietersz]

OVH is pretty good. They also have two cheaper brands - so SoYouStart and Kimisufi - although I think those are going to become cheap ranges within the OVH brand. I would stick to the OVH ones for production, but you could get somethng from one of the cheaper ranges for testing, and you can just get them on a monthly contract.

 

[Kerwin]

OVH is pretty good. They also have two cheaper brands - so SoYouStart and Kimisufi - although I think those are going to become cheap ranges within the OVH brand. I would stick to the OVH ones for production, but you could get somethng from one of the cheaper ranges for testing, and you can just get them on a monthly contract.

Sounds good. Thank you. I'll explore it a bit more.

 

[Uwe (Invoiceberry)]

OVH is pretty good. They also have two cheaper brands - so SoYouStart and Kimisufi - although I think those are going to become cheap ranges within the OVH brand. I would stick to the OVH ones for production, but you could get somethng from one of the cheaper ranges for testing, and you can just get them on a monthly contract.

I just read that the other day – https://www.searchenginejournal.com/cloudflare-names-ovh-hetzner-origins-of-ddos-attack/447991/

Cloudflare named OVH and Hetzner (German hosting company) as the number 1 origins of DDOS attacks. Some webmasters started blocking the entire data centres of those companies to avoid being attacked. Just one more thing to consider.

I think nobody mentioned Digital Ocean yet. That's also an excellent provider.

 

[Kerwin]

I just read that the other day – https://www.searchenginejournal.com/cloudflare-names-ovh-hetzner-origins-of-ddos-attack/447991/

Cloudflare named OVH and Hetzner (German hosting company) as the number 1 origins of DDOS attacks. Some webmasters started blocking the entire data centres of those companies to avoid being attacked. Just one more thing to consider.

I think nobody mentioned Digital Ocean yet. That's also an excellent provider.

That is concerning. I've decided to go with Vultr since they officially support FreeBSD, but I'll still need at least one (if not more) dedicated server, and I'm lost regarding the wide range of service providers.

 

[Uwe (Invoiceberry)]

That is concerning. I've decided to go with Vultr since they officially support FreeBSD, but I'll still need at least one (if not more) dedicated server, and I'm lost regarding the wide range of service providers.

I actually tried out VULTR a few weeks ago for a test and like them so far. Seems very similar to Digital Ocean. can't speak about the quality of the customer support or hardware, though. Not enough testing done yet.

Digital Ocean is definitely one of my favourite hosting providers. Seems to me like AWS but without the complexity.

 

[Datastore365]

I'm building a project now and have reached the stage where I need to determine which hosting provider to use. The website is primarily for audio streaming (similar to Sound Cloud). Still, each of the different providers uses utterly different pricing models, and they are pretty complex, so comparing them comes down to a spreadsheet. But I also need to factor in each platform's difficulty and reliability.

Which cloud provider would you use? If so, why and what made you pick that one in particular?

Morning Kerwin, Datatore365 have been in the cloud industry for over 18 years. Happy to arrange a call to see if we can help. Regards Brian

 

[gpietersz]

That is concerning. I've decided to go with Vultr since they officially support FreeBSD, but I'll still need at least one (if not more) dedicated server, and I'm lost regarding the wide range of service providers.

Its not a problem for you, necessarily. They are not doing what they should to avoid being a source of a DDOS, rather than being a target - in fact OVH include DDOS protection.

It is something that fluctuates as well: https://cleantalk.org/blacklists/as16276

It may also be a simple function of size and location - they are the two largest EUropean dedicated server and VPS providers (at least to non-enterprise markets) AFAIK.

While I like the author of that article his expertise is really SEO (one of the few SEO people I would confidently recommend, if you want good rather than cheap).

 

[gpietersz]

Digital Ocean is definitely one of my favourite hosting providers. Seems to me like AWS but without the complexity.

AWS is designed for a use case that is different from a VPS provider. It offers a huge range of services and a large number of locations,

They offer compute separate from storage, object stores, CDN, DNS, database hosting (with a lot of supported databases), media transcoding, ML literally dozens of other things, and extensive support for autoscaling all this.

This is useful if you need lots of separate compute instances, databases with replication, need to scale up rapidly if demand is bursty etc. IMO its best suited to startups for whom time to launch is more important than costs - otherwise if you operate at that scale just hire your own people to do it (as a fair number of former AWS users like Dropbox have done).

If you can fit everything you need on a single server (and a single server can handle a very heavy load these days), then using AWS is like using a fleet of taxis to move house instead of a single lorry.

One reason AWS is so widely used is that its a safe choice. Its the latest iteration of "No one ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/Whatever". Another is that startups start with it and do not want to take the risk and costs of moving (the latter especially if they have used a lot of AWS specific stuff).

 

[abdullah_20]

I'd probably recommend Digital Ocean (old time user), as it is much more robust and a cheaper alternative compared to GCE and AWS.

You can scale it upwards as well, but they do have a problem with customer support

You can choose Cloudways for Digital Ocean for the lack of customer support as there team is pretty quick to respond and resolve any issues present

With BFCM going around, it might be a good time to choose them, they got a deal of about 40% off and free website migration

 

[gpietersz]

I came across this quite coincidentally. It looks like OVH is also a leading target of DDOS too: https://arstechnica.com/information...portedly-deliver-internets-biggest-ddos-ever/

 

[Uwe (Invoiceberry)]

AWS is designed for a use case that is different from a VPS provider. It offers a huge range of services and a large number of locations,

They offer compute separate from storage, object stores, CDN, DNS, database hosting (with a lot of supported databases), media transcoding, ML literally dozens of other things, and extensive support for autoscaling all this.

This is useful if you need lots of separate compute instances, databases with replication, need to scale up rapidly if demand is bursty etc. IMO its best suited to startups for whom time to launch is more important than costs - otherwise if you operate at that scale just hire your own people to do it (as a fair number of former AWS users like Dropbox have done).

If you can fit everything you need on a single server (and a single server can handle a very heavy load these days), then using AWS is like using a fleet of taxis to move house instead of a single lorry.

One reason AWS is so widely used is that its a safe choice. Its the latest iteration of "No one ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/Whatever". Another is that startups start with it and do not want to take the risk and costs of moving (the latter especially if they have used a lot of AWS specific stuff).

I agree. I've used AWS as well as Digital Ocean for years now. I remember the days when AWS actually only offered like 10-20 services rather than the 100's of services you can find now in their list.

I wouldn't call Digital Ocean a simple VPS provider though since they also offer a lot of the services that AWS provides and location-wise they also have a lot of geo-locations these days.

Also played a bit around with VULTR which seems to have even more locations, but not too sure about their reliability yet.

 

[Waratel]

My favourite is Kinsta. It can be a bit more pricey but that comes with much faster load speeds as it uses Google Cloud premium servers, Cloudflare protection on all websites, and the security as they keep everything up to date so software never uses out of date vulnerable plugins or anything like that.

They have an article which explains this in better detail so that is below if interested.

kinsta.com/why-us/?kaid=JIDSTXJFQOBY

 

[Deleted member 315707]

I’ve used plenty of different virtual servers, hosting services, Google’s Cloud Platform, a little Azure but landed on AWS.

For me, their Lightsail offering (VPS, containers, hosted DB) are similarly priced to other offerings, super simple to set up and allows you to grow into other (more complex) AWS products and services as you scale.

Having just migrated my last Ionos cloud server stuck on Ubuntu 16.04 to an AWS set of services, I’m now almost all in on them.

 

[Kerwin]

I’ve used plenty of different virtual servers, hosting services, Google’s Cloud Platform, a little Azure but landed on AWS.

For me, their Lightsail offering (VPS, containers, hosted DB) are similarly priced to other offerings, super simple to set up and allows you to grow into other (more complex) AWS products and services as you scale.

Having just migrated my last Ionos cloud server stuck on Ubuntu 16.04 to an AWS set of services, I’m now almost all in on them.

I did the numbers, and using a dedicated server for my requirements is cheaper. AWS has some excellent features, but I wouldn't call it cheap.

 

[Deleted member 315707]

If you’re just evaluating based on price, sure. You also mentioned reliability and ease of use then asked for peoples opinions, which I gave.

I also didn’t say they are cheap. Compared to my experience with the others providers I mentioned I save time, money and have a better service.

I wish you good luck with your project.

 

[Kerwin]

If you’re just evaluating based on price, sure. You also mentioned reliability and ease of use then asked for peoples opinions, which I gave.

I also didn’t say they are cheap. Compared to my experience with the others providers I mentioned I save time, money and have a better service.

I wish you good luck with your project.

Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to argue with you. Just pointing out that in my research, it is cheaper to get a dedicated for media transcoding than it is to use AWS.

I appreciate your input.

 

[kasparpalgi]

It really depends on what stack do you use. Me as a developer, I like to keep every layer in a separate environment. SoundCloud sounds like a loads of data storage so I would store it in Wasabi that is S3 compatible, big reliable company and affordable. I don't know what do you use for the front-end and back-end but I would use Vercel for frontent and ServiceHost.io for the backend.