Where do you host your startup?<p>I am looking for a solution that is cost-effective.
I want to keep costs very low to start,
but I can pay-as-I-grow for increased resources.<p>Imagine a URL shortening/redirecting service (e.g., bit.ly)
That's not what my startup is about,
but I will have that kind of traffic.
I need to handle lots of hits to my web site,
but each requires minimal processing and bandwidth.
Top requirements are 99.9% uptime and low latency (&#60; 20 ms).<p>A typical cheap/shared hosting service is not acceptable,
even when just getting started, because they all suffer from downtime
or "brownouts", where response latencies get slow if there's a traffic spike,
of is some random user on the shared service is doing lots of database queries.<p>My application is currently built using Apache, MySQL, PHP, and C.
I also need SSH access.<p>To process each "hit" to my web site, I have rather minimal requirements
for CPU time, memory, database size, and data-transfer per hit.<p>What really seems to be the challenge (when just starting)
is getting a guaranteed 99.9% uptime and low latency
without paying a lot per month for dedicated hosting.<p>(I confess that I don't have any experience with Amazon EC2,
so I don't know if that would be appropriate.  If you have any
practical experience with the time/cost to get up and running
on "the cloud", I'd love to hear from you.)<p>Any recommendations, suggestions, comments, or advice
would be much appreciated.<p>You can reply here, or by email.<p>Thanks in advance,<p>David Jones, PhD,
Pairwise Affinity<p>dxjones@gmail.com,  http://dxjones.com<p>djones@pairwiseaffinity.com,  http://pairwiseaffinity.com
Ask HN: Where do you host your startup web services?