WEB HOSTING COMPANY TO RECOMMEND!

[GPGT.org]

For sure, AWS is a lot more than a VPS. It has so many other platforms/services/infrastructure you could use to build a true enterprise application; but for development, it's really a lot easier to get up and running with DO imo. Different things for different purposes. If I were going to run a huge application I would definitely pick AWS over DO because of how sophisticated AWS load balancing is, among other things like their VPC and stuff. VPC just seems really confusing to someone who doesn't have much networking/sysadmin background though.

Linode is opening their datacenter in Singapore this month... it offers optional features load-balancing and some other goodies like monitoring/managed support which DO doesn't offer. If your instance is using more than 8gb ram then it makes sense to shift to Linode as it is more costly on DO and you can split them into multiple instances load-balancing. If your instance are small 1 - 2gb then it doesn't matter whether DO or Linode.

 

[davidktw]

For sure, AWS is a lot more than a VPS. It has so many other platforms/services/infrastructure you could use to build a true enterprise application; but for development, it's really a lot easier to get up and running with DO imo. Different things for different purposes. If I were going to run a huge application I would definitely pick AWS over DO because of how sophisticated AWS load balancing is, among other things like their VPC and stuff. VPC just seems really confusing to someone who doesn't have much networking/sysadmin background though.

Precisely that's why future developers will find themselves in deep trouble if they thought the skill set of networking, storage, database, application, distributed design are separate topics for different specialisation.

The introduction of real cloud platforms like GCE, Azure and AWS requires all skill sets to come together. No doubt they do away with a lot of nitty gritty having elaborate web console, but still, the skill sets to understand is extensive so that when an application didn't work properly, one must understand if it is due to network that caused it, a slow DNS server, or bottleneck is elsewhere.

Cloud platforms does in some way make less technical folks even worse, but they provide reach of an architecture beyond geographic, cost and effort limitations. One single good solution architect with full stack knowledge can effectively built a much larger solution with much less starting cost compared to decades back.

Well I'm not sure of your expectation for development. For me, AWS makes the best platform to me for fast startup and development purpose. Sometimes I need fast, powerful systems, I make use of spot instances at extremely attractive rates to fulfil it. There was once recently I used up to 6 c3.xlarge systems for distributed photogrammetry purpose and I only spend less than 200USD in the end across a couple of days for the whole exercise. So it really depends on what kind of experiments you are running. Options such as EBS snapshots, large amount of network and storage spaces with extremely fast network connectivity between my home and AWS SG is essential to some of the experiments I do. So far I don't think other platforms can allow me to setup fast, tear down fast with lower cost.

If you want best value out of AWS, you must be building solution of certain size and certain concept. I can assure you, if you just design traditional system concepts, it's way more expensive using AWS. If you understand how to use the services properly, you will see the cost saving. For example, you get web console cloud watch that can track various performance metrics of your instances, can you do the same for other "CLOUD" VPS offerings ? If you need to be notified of certain performance danger zone, can you do the same for other offerings without installing more application servers and maintain them ?

Not all components have to reside in a service provider, I will encourage a mixture at times if they make sense and the cost justified, but sometimes we give and take a bit having it's not entirely a hassle free experience if you make your system all over the place.

If you want to have better understanding over proper cloud usage with AWS, feel free to have discussion on it.

 

[natnai]

Linode is opening their datacenter in Singapore this month... it offers optional features load-balancing and some other goodies like monitoring/managed support which DO doesn't offer. If your instance is using more than 8gb ram then it makes sense to shift to Linode as it is more costly on DO and you can split them into multiple instances load-balancing. If your instance are small 1 - 2gb then it doesn't matter whether DO or Linode.

Thanks for the heads-up on Linode.

This one's just a small experimental application (personal project) which involves just a simple proof of concept, so I didn't trouble myself with load balancing. I also needed to get to grips with backend JS (node/express) coz all my prior experience was with PHP and Symfony2. If and when I do deploy I'll definitely look into Linode as an alternative to AWS

 

[natnai]

Precisely that's why future developers will find themselves in deep trouble if they thought the skill set of networking, storage, database, application, distributed design are separate topics for different specialisation.

The introduction of real cloud platforms like GCE, Azure and AWS requires all skill sets to come together. No doubt they do away with a lot of nitty gritty having elaborate web console, but still, the skill sets to understand is extensive so that when an application didn't work properly, one must understand if it is due to network that caused it, a slow DNS server, or bottleneck is elsewhere.

Cloud platforms does in some way make less technical folks even worse, but they provide reach of an architecture beyond geographic, cost and effort limitations. One single good solution architect with full stack knowledge can effectively built a much larger solution with much less starting cost compared to decades back.

Well I'm not sure of your expectation for development. For me, AWS makes the best platform to me for fast startup and development purpose. Sometimes I need fast, powerful systems, I make use of spot instances at extremely attractive rates to fulfil it. There was once recently I used up to 6 c3.xlarge systems for distributed photogrammetry purpose and I only spend less than 200USD in the end across a couple of days for the whole exercise. So it really depends on what kind of experiments you are running. Options such as EBS snapshots, large amount of network and storage spaces with extremely fast network connectivity between my home and AWS SG is essential to some of the experiments I do. So far I don't think other platforms can allow me to setup fast, tear down fast with lower cost.

If you want best value out of AWS, you must be building solution of certain size and certain concept. I can assure you, if you just design traditional system concepts, it's way more expensive using AWS. If you understand how to use the services properly, you will see the cost saving. For example, you get web console cloud watch that can track various performance metrics of your instances, can you do the same for other "CLOUD" VPS offerings ? If you need to be notified of certain performance danger zone, can you do the same for other offerings without installing more application servers and maintain them ?

Not all components have to reside in a service provider, I will encourage a mixture at times if they make sense and the cost justified, but sometimes we give and take a bit having it's not entirely a hassle free experience if you make your system all over the place.

If you want to have better understanding over proper cloud usage with AWS, feel free to have discussion on it.

Thanks for the detailed reply as always, David. I am considering AWS for a personal project of mine (the one I'm currently experimenting with on DO). I think I mentioned it a few times over PM. The idea is to pull currency data from public broker APIs and feed it into my application's algorithms.

The problem is that the many of the public APIs are Java APIs, with a small smattering of RESTful ones. I'll have to learn enough Java to interact with these APIs, but that's another matter for another day.

Given my lack of experience with enterprise-level applications, I have been thinking to split up the application into a number of servers. One web server will just serve the frontend, which I'll build on angular. It'll probably query another server running Node, which I'll build a RESTful API for, which will in turn query a Mongo DB. But to be honest I have got no clue where or how I should architecture to fit in the Java component...

 

[davidktw]

Thanks for the detailed reply as always, David. I am considering AWS for a personal project of mine (the one I'm currently experimenting with on DO). I think I mentioned it a few times over PM. The idea is to pull currency data from public broker APIs and feed it into my application's algorithms.

The problem is that the many of the public APIs are Java APIs, with a small smattering of RESTful ones. I'll have to learn enough Java to interact with these APIs, but that's another matter for another day.

Given my lack of experience with enterprise-level applications, I have been thinking to split up the application into a number of servers. One web server will just serve the frontend, which I'll build on angular. It'll probably query another server running Node, which I'll build a RESTful API for, which will in turn query a Mongo DB. But to be honest I have got no clue where or how I should architecture to fit in the Java component...

Okay I think based on what you have described, perhaps AWS Kinesis, http://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/, might be of greater value to you. You will be billed on your actual workload instead of maintaining a virtue machine with most of its time doing nothing.

You probably, just probably, will still require a server to host your frontend. But I do have another solution for you, try explore outside of AWS. Try https://www.parse.com. It is a MBaaS or more generically known as BaaS. You can built your frontend on it, which can inturn ingest processed data from AWS Kinesis. Don't think of it as a mobile backend, although it does have a lot of such features. In fact, who knows if you can even totally discard AWS and have your solution all built in parse.com since it has the capability of running scheduled jobs too, using Javascript.

As for your mentioning of Java API, how does your sources export data using Java API ? Unlikely isn't it ? You mean XML or web services ?

Outside of infra and application design, I highly recommend you to look into Facebook React.js + Flux. You might find it is a very interesting alternative to Angular.js

 

[Bonadaly]

How about Google app engine / cloud?

Precisely that's why future developers will find themselves in deep trouble if they thought the skill set of networking, storage, database, application, distributed design are separate topics for different specialisation.

The introduction of real cloud platforms like GCE, Azure and AWS requires all skill sets to come together. No doubt they do away with a lot of nitty gritty having elaborate web console, but still, the skill sets to understand is extensive so that when an application didn't work properly, one must understand if it is due to network that caused it, a slow DNS server, or bottleneck is elsewhere.

Cloud platforms does in some way make less technical folks even worse, but they provide reach of an architecture beyond geographic, cost and effort limitations. One single good solution architect with full stack knowledge can effectively built a much larger solution with much less starting cost compared to decades back.

Well I'm not sure of your expectation for development. For me, AWS makes the best platform to me for fast startup and development purpose. Sometimes I need fast, powerful systems, I make use of spot instances at extremely attractive rates to fulfil it. There was once recently I used up to 6 c3.xlarge systems for distributed photogrammetry purpose and I only spend less than 200USD in the end across a couple of days for the whole exercise. So it really depends on what kind of experiments you are running. Options such as EBS snapshots, large amount of network and storage spaces with extremely fast network connectivity between my home and AWS SG is essential to some of the experiments I do. So far I don't think other platforms can allow me to setup fast, tear down fast with lower cost.

If you want best value out of AWS, you must be building solution of certain size and certain concept. I can assure you, if you just design traditional system concepts, it's way more expensive using AWS. If you understand how to use the services properly, you will see the cost saving. For example, you get web console cloud watch that can track various performance metrics of your instances, can you do the same for other "CLOUD" VPS offerings ? If you need to be notified of certain performance danger zone, can you do the same for other offerings without installing more application servers and maintain them ?

Not all components have to reside in a service provider, I will encourage a mixture at times if they make sense and the cost justified, but sometimes we give and take a bit having it's not entirely a hassle free experience if you make your system all over the place.

If you want to have better understanding over proper cloud usage with AWS, feel free to have discussion on it.

 

[natnai]

Okay I think based on what you have described, perhaps AWS Kinesis, http://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/, might be of greater value to you. You will be billed on your actual workload instead of maintaining a virtue machine with most of its time doing nothing.

You probably, just probably, will still require a server to host your frontend. But I do have another solution for you, try explore outside of AWS. Try https://www.parse.com. It is a MBaaS or more generically known as BaaS. You can built your frontend on it, which can inturn ingest processed data from AWS Kinesis. Don't think of it as a mobile backend, although it does have a lot of such features. In fact, who knows if you can even totally discard AWS and have your solution all built in parse.com since it has the capability of running scheduled jobs too, using Javascript.

As for your mentioning of Java API, how does your sources export data using Java API ? Unlikely isn't it ? You mean XML or web services ?

Outside of infra and application design, I highly recommend you to look into Facebook React.js + Flux. You might find it is a very interesting alternative to Angular.js

Never knew about parse.com, thanks for rec, good one. Kinesis I have just had a brief look over, sounds pretty neat. I suppose now the question is whether I should try to build the whole stack in parse.com or split it up...definitely the sort who prefers everything in one place though.

EDIT: Just noticed Kinsesis streams only hold the data for 24 hours...hm. I suppose if you want to persist parts of the data or all of it, you would use a consumer to do so...perhaps one dedicated solely to persisting to the database. I'll have to dig deeper into that one.

Anyway re Java API, this is what I mean:

https://www.dukascopy.com/swiss/english/forex/api/jforex_api/

Now I know next to nothing about Java as of this moment, so take what I say with a pinch of salt - but based on what I'm reading on that page (and many others like it), I'm assuming that one would have to build a Java application with the provided SDK, and then use THAT application to build another REST/SOAP service to export data to the actual application server (where all the algorithms will live), and then spit that data out to the angular/react.js frontend for the end user.

Sounds like a lot of failure points I know, but as of now I don't see how else I can get around it if I want to pull data from more than a handful of sources.

 

[davidktw]

Never knew about parse.com, thanks for rec, good one. Kinesis I have just had a brief look over, sounds pretty neat. I suppose now the question is whether I should try to build the whole stack in parse.com or split it up...definitely the sort who prefers everything in one place though.

EDIT: Just noticed Kinsesis streams only hold the data for 24 hours...hm. I suppose if you want to persist parts of the data or all of it, you would use a consumer to do so...perhaps one dedicated solely to persisting to the database. I'll have to dig deeper into that one.

Anyway re Java API, this is what I mean:

https://www.dukascopy.com/swiss/english/forex/api/jforex_api/

Now I know next to nothing about Java as of this moment, so take what I say with a pinch of salt - but based on what I'm reading on that page (and many others like it), I'm assuming that one would have to build a Java application with the provided SDK, and then use THAT application to build another REST/SOAP service to export data to the actual application server (where all the algorithms will live), and then spit that data out to the angular/react.js frontend for the end user.

Sounds like a lot of failure points I know, but as of now I don't see how else I can get around it if I want to pull data from more than a handful of sources.

Okay I reviewed the JForex API and indeed it is only in Java, what a silly idea. They should have chosen either JSON or Webservices/XML/Soap. Actually there is a high chance they are either using Java RMI or just SOAP, just that it will require some inspection to know that. Still for the sake of simplicity, you will want to stick with Java for this isolated case.

Obviously for the sake of simplicity, one platform is preferred. However in your case, if you want to take advantage of the features in parse.com, you might need to split up. Just be careful and clear the way you segregate the tasks.

Despite the SDK is in Java, your option is not limited to Java programming language. You can use Python, Ruby with Jython and JRuby. Both allows the mixture with pure Java libraries. You can also choose to use Groovy, Clojure and Scala. See if there is any of these languages you are familiar with.

 

[natnai]

Okay I reviewed the JForex API and indeed it is only in Java, what a silly idea. They should have chosen either JSON or Webservices/XML/Soap. Actually there is a high chance they are either using Java RMI or just SOAP, just that it will require some inspection to know that. Still for the sake of simplicity, you will want to stick with Java for this isolated case.

Obviously for the sake of simplicity, one platform is preferred. However in your case, if you want to take advantage of the features in parse.com, you might need to split up. Just be careful and clear the way you segregate the tasks.

Despite the SDK is in Java, your option is not limited to Java programming language. You can use Python, Ruby with Jython and JRuby. Both allows the mixture with pure Java libraries. You can also choose to use Groovy, Clojure and Scala. See if there is any of these languages you are familiar with.

I know right? 2015, why is it not a RESTful web service?? Perhaps developers these days are just spoiled (me included). I think I will just take it upon myself to learn Java. I was planning to learn it at some point anyway, at least the basics, which should be enough to let me use this type of API and export it using some sort of HTTP library for Java. Any good ones in mind?

 

[davidktw]

I know right? 2015, why is it not a RESTful web service?? Perhaps developers these days are just spoiled (me included). I think I will just take it upon myself to learn Java. I was planning to learn it at some point anyway, at least the basics, which should be enough to let me use this type of API and export it using some sort of HTTP library for Java. Any good ones in mind?

There are good HTTP libraries such as the one from Apache. I think there are also event driven ones too. But ultimately if you want to offer a RESTful design converting the one offered now, you will want to learn frameworks like SPRING. Go get a book on it, SPRING is not that lightweight

 

[natnai]

There are good HTTP libraries such as the one from Apache. I think there are also event driven ones too. But ultimately if you want to offer a RESTful design converting the one offered now, you will want to learn frameworks like SPRING. Go get a book on it, SPRING is not that lightweight

Yeah, thanks for the advice David. I heard Symfony borrows a some architectural and design concepts from SPRING (dependency injection ftw), so hopefully the learning curve won't be too insane. I'll bug you if I have problems with Java...

 

[littleprincey]

How about Google app engine / cloud?

I tried that before. Google is secretive about the location. From the latency, it seems that their Asia location is in Taiwan. No Google App cloud in Singapore yet.

 

[xorionn]

using a good sg hosting provider, good uptime and speed.

 

[Jacqueline.]

been with exabytes for more than 4 years

paid around $100for 2 years...every 2 years, keep creating new account to take advantage of 50% for its EBiz Gold Unlimited..now is $160

looking to switch since the website loading speed is quite slow

just an ecommerce site with less than 50 traffic a day?

any recommendations?

not a programmer! have to be user friendly with cpanel!

any help is appreciated!

 

[natnai]

been with exabytes for more than 4 years

paid around $100for 2 years...every 2 years, keep creating new account to take advantage of 50% for its EBiz Gold Unlimited..now is $160

looking to switch since the website loading speed is quite slow

just an ecommerce site with less than 50 traffic a day?

any recommendations?

not a programmer! have to be user friendly with cpanel!

any help is appreciated!

Just learn basic Linux command line/server administration. I have never used a host with cpanel that can handle anything more than basic static pages even with low traffic. You should consider one of the IaaS/PaaS providers like AWS or Linode or DigitalOcean (most user friendly imo).

Or pay me to do it for you. I think the second option is better...

 

[chiamtj]

Is anyone using Vodien.com?

I just started hosting with them and noticed a huge amount of 301 & 302 redirects occurring in the background. Like 60% percent of all traffic.

I moved one website to another web host and the 301 and 302 redirects disappeared.

I'm afraid this issue with Vodien will affect my site's ranking.

 

[ricky_villa]

Is Siteground good? Looking for a wordpress host for 1-3 wordpress sites with staging option. Cheap and good will be great

 

[yh_lee]

I have been using Hostwinds for many years and for just a few dollars a month,its worth it. I have a couple of wordpress sites and multiple domains. I have zero issues with them and their customer support are helpful and responsive. Check out here :
http://tinyurl.com/p4cf5e3

Is Siteground good? Looking for a wordpress host for 1-3 wordpress sites with staging option. Cheap and good will be great

 

[littleprincey]

Is anyone using Vodien.com?

I just started hosting with them and noticed a huge amount of 301 & 302 redirects occurring in the background. Like 60% percent of all traffic.

I moved one website to another web host and the 301 and 302 redirects disappeared.

I'm afraid this issue with Vodien will affect my site's ranking.

You might have a problem with resources usage. You can check the Cpanel to see how much ram is allocated to you.

 

[jf]

I have been using Hostwinds for many years and for just a few dollars a month,its worth it. I have a couple of wordpress sites and multiple domains. I have zero issues with them and their customer support are helpful and responsive.

I specifically block all traffic from hostwinds. After seeing a lot of persistent spam from whole blocks of ip addresses owned by them, that is what I'm doing with them.