To buy the hardware or not to buy the hardware .... that is the question .... hmmm ....
So the goal of the garage datacenter team was to purchase the hardware as cheap as possibe but to ensure that the hardware platform does not jeopordise the application performance. There are many options to go with regard to the hardware platform , there is the hosting of own hardware and there is the VPS route. There are pros and cons to both and its basically about weighing out the best options:
Hosting our own hardware
Pros:
Pros1:
There is full flexibility on our server configuration. We can use as much hardware as we like and there is no additional price for extra hardware or resources other then the cost of the equipment.
Pros2:
We have full control of the parameters that we require and we can do various different clustering configurations with ease
Pros3:
There is no prices for rack space or any additional cost of hosting
Pros4:
Increasing resources like capacity, memory etc, doesnt attract a premium price as you can buy the memory cheap and do it yourself.
Cons:
Cons1:
Electricity and power consumption needs to be considered. It may be insignificant but it depends on how much power we are drawing per day. We also need to consider the amount of watts being used from a saftey point of view and ensure all our power sockets, fuses and breakers can withstand the current being drawn.
Cons2:
Internet costs need to be considered because if the application becomes popular, increasing bandwidth may require clever bonding or aggregation of connectivity to increase the speed of the internet or going with a bigger pipe which may have a much larger cost then currently being used, if available. Worst case scenario is that there is no option to increase bandwidth and it may require that there is a relocation of equipment
Cons3:
You must be full in charge of your own own SLA's and uptimes. If a server fails then you need to make sure you are on hand to ensure it comes back up in an acceptable amount of time.
Virtual Private Server - (VPS)
Pros:
Pros1:
SLA's are taken care of by the datacenter operations team so any downtime will be addressed by a specific datacenter team
Pros2:
Speed of the internet is taken care of by the datacenter operations team and will increase when required
Pros3:
There is no seperate price for elecricity as it is bundled with the whole package
Pros4:
Prices for VPS's are usually very resonable if only a small amount of servers is required, however when requiring more then one or two servers, the price can be quite costly
Cons:
Cons1:
If you require a standard server configuration its fine, but anything outside the standarad requirement will attrack a premium price
Cons2:
Requiring an increase in the amount of servers or specifications can be quite expensive, so requireing 5 servers can attract a price of $250 to $300 a month assuming that a VPS is about $30 - $50
Cons3:
Less ability to tune and tweak the network and hardware setup to meet needs
The Decision
The decision is not an easy one to make cause as you can see there are quite a few for and against. You need to think about growth, ease of maintanence and how you expect to grow. It is also highly dependent on how you want to run your application.
The decision that the garage datacenter team was to host our own equipment. We had alot of equipment already lying around which we could use, and we knew that purchasing other equipment second hand could allow us to get the hardware we wanted at a lower price.
One of our main concerns was the power saftey issue but after discussing with various electricans installing larger power sockets is not an issue. Also with the introduction of Annex M we can get very good upload speeds at a very good rate and if larger bandwidth is required, we can go via the bonding method or increase our internet requirements with the ISP as there is still room to move.
With this we began to build our equipment requirements and began to purchase our servers nd network equipment from all different locations to ensure that we can get the most reasonable price and still run our application correctly. Our next phase is the actual procurement of our hardware, this alone was a pretty interesting journey ....
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