Been planning to set up a cluster with Hertzner using the EX 4, so the 4S is like getting 16GB more RAM for 10 Euros more a month. This is great news.
One thing I have wondered about is whether hosting in Germany is a good idea.
First is the latency issues. Will serving web pages to customers on the west coast of the US really suffer? (this is in the minimum viable product stage-- we're not google yet)
Secondly, I'm not all that familiar with all the laws of the EU. I don't want to run afoul of them, but I haven't found a good summary of best practices for services hosted in the EU.
Thank you. This presents some implications I'm going to have to consider in developing our application. Fortunately, in the early days we'll be collecting no personally identifiable data.
Half the memory, with ECC. Since 16GB is pretty sufficient for my needs, I think I'd use the extra 16GB for pure caching. (Riak has an in memory mode so you can run two backends- one backed by disk and one not backed. Using the in RAM one gives you a distributed cache over a bunch of machines. If you keep 2 copies and you have 4 machines, that each have 16GB dedicated to this in memory backend, that gives you a 32GB of distributed cache where any item in the cache is at most one hop away.)
I recently tried to research what ECC means operationally (I'm not really an operations guy.) Is ECC good for correcting bits flipped by cosmic rays? Or is it going to tell you that memory is failing? I've never, in the past 20 years, had memory fail on me over time.
Also, I'm not going to be running a single server such that if a server goes down my service goes offline.
I'm running a Riak cluster, of at least 3 nodes, maybe 4 to start. If any server goes down, the service stays online.
My software architecture is, near as I understand it, well suited to commodity hardware.
The 10 euros extra per month, on 4 servers is 40 euros, which is nearly enough for an extra server.
So, wouldn't it be better to have 5 commodity servers than 4 servers with ECC?
I wouldn't know what to do if I started getting ECC errors anyway (I know, I'm stupid, but we're a startup, no budget to hire an ops person.) I'd probably just ask them to give me a new machine.
ECC corrects single bit errors and detects multi-bit errors.
Why should you care? Well, if you are lucky, the machine crashes. If you are unlucky, it keeps running, and that bad data gets written to disk, or causes a cumulative error in some calculation, and you never know about it.
With the size of memories these days, chances of a corrupted memory are not exactly a rare occurrence.
I don't know enough about Riak, but a cluster is only going to help if key data structures are themselves checked for consistency across the cluster.
The question is: how does the size of memory affect the probability of a bit that matters to get corrupted? Who cares if one character somewhere among millions of product reviews or comments gets corrupted?
I have some applications logging to my server in hetzner from US (softlayer datacenters), and some from china. So far we didn't had any single issue with latency.
That is a myth.
You are not allowed to show symbols of an organization who is against our constitution, but only if it is not in the matter of science or history. The second law is, you are not allowed to call out for violence against a group/minority.
Censoring is illegal from our constitution, so you can only get sued by a court, but when you take it down it usually would be dismissed. It is not even an important public topic here.
I made an edit to my original post, though for some reason it didn't take.
Anyway, I'm not doing anything controversial, and I won't even be hosting user generated content (at least not in the early days, though we might later).
I just want to explain how a non issue this is here.
Twitter took this as an example to justify their new censoring features, that annoyed me a little. There is a difference between censoring and enforcement trough court. For the second one you just need a system for takedown requests.
One thing I have wondered about is whether hosting in Germany is a good idea.
First is the latency issues. Will serving web pages to customers on the west coast of the US really suffer? (this is in the minimum viable product stage-- we're not google yet)
Secondly, I'm not all that familiar with all the laws of the EU. I don't want to run afoul of them, but I haven't found a good summary of best practices for services hosted in the EU.