Godaddy Virtual Dedicated Server vs. Amazon EC2 vs. Rackspace Mosso, which is better for a startup and why?

Over the last 2 years we (SimulScribe/PhoeTag) have spent a lot of time looking at the various cloud solutions that have come out. Amazon's EC2 is by far and away the best solution to run your technology platform on. They have maintained a clear leadership position in price, flexibility, up-time (I am sure a lot of people will dispute this but overall they have outstanding up-time) performance, etc.As a fellow entrepreneur who has spent way too much time analyzing this space I would say with 100% confidence that if you are a start up build everything on EC2 and use the time/money you save to focus on your business and market.

To put my money where my mouth is I am proud to say that SimulScribe/PhoneTag runs 100% of its technology/platform using EC2.

I trust GoDaddy as far as I can throw them, even if I am grateful from all of my former customers that got tired of being treated like crap by them. EC2 is being used by Mahalo Answers, so it obviously works. It could be expensive but you will need to run your own numbers before you can judge.

I haven't tried Rackspace Mosso myself, but so far none of my customers or peers ever complains about Rackspace, and they are a vocal bunch so I would expect them to start whining over the most trivial thing. I also don't know if Rackspace's cloud is like Amazon's or more like Google's.

If you really expect your start up to blow up with a lot of traffic, then go with EC2 or Mosso if you can afford them. Give Mosso a chance, they may be less expensive than EC2. The reason you would pick Mosso or EC2 over a regular dedicated virtual server is because (although there will be some extra coding involved up front) EC2 and Mosso will allow you to rapidly scale your site (basically a few clicks I think for EC2) if it suddenly gets massive increases in traffic.

You are going to pay more for that type of capability. Just know that your software developer will need to know ahead of time so that he can write your application with whatever platform you choose ahead of time. Actually, I would go over the options with your developer(s) before making the decision.

The main consideration before choosing to avail of the services of GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated Server, Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Mosso is to identify which type of setup your company or website utilize. If your site is designed with ASP. NET/IIS 6 service with a little bit of satellite features authored on PHP5 under the wings of Apache 2, the recommended sites for you would be the GoGrid.

Since you never mentioned about the design parameters of your site, lets discuss the finer details. Take the case of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, as far as costs is concerned, using EC2 will cost you an estimated $72, considering a month access on your site. In terms of performance, this type is found to be complex and users experience loss of information.

With regards to GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated Server, as far as shared computing is concerned, "needless to say performance was not up to speed. " Accordingly, "Mosso is a pay as you go but with $100 up front monthly entry fee and SQL Server databases costing additional monthly fees. You pay for bandwidth and processor cycles and it looks like after the $100 its fairly cheap for a "dedicated" box - as dedicated as a virtual instance abstracted away from you can be.

There is no ssh/scp access but they have temperamental FTP access (it disconnects you constantly). " And finally, "settled on GoGrid because configuration was a breeze, our ability to administer our servers did not require community supported tools (standard industry programs were suitable), our code ran exceptionally well, and for being a beta their uptime has been incredible thus far (100%). Revealed to us after the fact is great communication - we know what's going on at GoGrid via email updates in terms of scheduled maintenance.

You choice of web host depends on how demanding your web application is, and how much traffic you expect. "Shared Hosting" - which is what you are getting via GoDaddy, is the lowest level of service. This can be very economical for small web sites (those with under 1,000 visits per day).

There are many providers including DreamHost, and other smaller companies. Make your decision based on cost, reliability, and support of the application platform you want to use expect under $10/month. "Virtual Private Hosting" - This next level of service, provided by RackSpace, Slicehost, SoftLayer, and others, guarantees you a higher level of service, bandwidth, and control of your server environment.

If you need to install custom applications, and directly control your operating system configuration, you'll want at least this level of service. This is a good solution for web sites under 10,000 visits per day and configurations where multiple servers are needed; expect to pay in the $40/mo range per server. "Dedicated Hosting" - gives you exclusive use to your own server.

Most hosts have a manual provisioning process that can take 24 hours to setup your hardware. But then you have complete control and exclusive use of that resource. Depending on your application complexity, you can serve up to 100,000's of daily visitors from a single server.

More complex applications may require multiple front-end web servers, and one or more back-end database servers. Expect to pay $50-$100/mo per CPU, plus bandwidth charges. Amazon EC2 gives you a dedicated machine, but offers the flexibility to provision one of more machines very rapidly (and even go up and down as demand changes).

Pricing starts at about $80/mo per CPU. If you need the flexibility to scale your application as demand grows, EC2 is a great choice. You will likely find less expensive hosting dedicated hosting options, but with much slower turn around time on changing your configurations or adding machines.

Startups should also be looking at Google's AppEngine service. While not a generalized hosting model, AppEngine provides a different level of Cloud Computing that scales automatically when your demand goes up. Applications have to be written specifically for AppEngine (in the Python programming language, today), but the popular Django framework is supported.

AppEngine is in beta, but is FREE for web sites up to about 5 million monthly page views; so it's an excellent way for a startup to get their site up and running, and still have the potential to scale to very large numbers of visitors (pricing will be about $50/mo for each 5 million additional monthly views).

Over the last 2 years we (SimulScribe/PhoeTag) have spent a lot of time looking at the various cloud solutions that have come out. Amazon's EC2 is by far and away the best solution to run your technology platform on. They have maintained a clear leadership position in price, flexibility, up-time (I am sure a lot of people will dispute this but overall they have outstanding up-time) performance, etc. As a fellow entrepreneur who has spent way too much time analyzing this space I would say with 100% confidence that if you are a start up build everything on EC2 and use the time/money you save to focus on your business and market.

To put my money where my mouth is I am proud to say that SimulScribe/PhoneTag runs 100% of its technology/platform using EC2.

Thank you so much guys, really good info. I just want to ask, I am ready to proceed with GAE but they are offering only 3000 files limit in a web app. My app images will be a lot more than it ... how I can still use it?

Can I store image somewhere else using the API GAE is offering ... or what else solution I can use? I am in love with free quota offered by google to test my first startup app.

The main consideration before choosing to avail of the services of GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated Server, Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Mosso is to identify which type of setup your company or website utilize. If your site is designed with ASP.NET/IIS 6 service with a little bit of satellite features authored on PHP5 under the wings of Apache 2, the recommended sites for you would be the GoGrid. Since you never mentioned about the design parameters of your site, lets discuss the finer details.

Take the case of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, as far as costs is concerned, using EC2 will cost you an estimated $72, considering a month access on your site. In terms of performance, this type is found to be complex and users experience loss of information. With regards to GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated Server, as far as shared computing is concerned, "needless to say performance was not up to speed.

" Accordingly, "Mosso is a pay as you go but with $100 up front monthly entry fee and SQL Server databases costing additional monthly fees. You pay for bandwidth and processor cycles and it looks like after the $100 its fairly cheap for a "dedicated" box - as dedicated as a virtual instance abstracted away from you can be. There is no ssh/scp access but they have temperamental FTP access (it disconnects you constantly).

" And finally, "settled on GoGrid because configuration was a breeze, our ability to administer our servers did not require community supported tools (standard industry programs were suitable), our code ran exceptionally well, and for being a beta their uptime has been incredible thus far (100%). Revealed to us after the fact is great communication - we know what's going on at GoGrid via email updates in terms of scheduled maintenance.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.