snapito-blog

[snapito-blog]

You’re paying too much for Server CPU

Working out the bang for buck for low cost hosting

At Snapito.com we are CPU bound our service’s main constraint is CPU, not network, disk or anything else.

We’ve experimented with bare metal and cloud solutions. And the results have been surprising. At this point if you’re looking for scientific analysis you should go elsewhere. If you’re interesting in a mixture of simple benchmarks and cost analysis based on high CPU requirements, continue.

I benchmarked a good few systems, but I’ve kept this article deliberately short and included only the key providers. Below is a simple list of provider versus Geekbench Benchmark Score divided by cost per month(geek/$). The bang per buck. Remember we’re only interested in CPU — and I’ve put the maximum score found for the provider.

Online.net — 171 (geek/$)

Hetzner (SSD) — 167 (geek/$)

Digital Ocean (2GB)** — 160 (geek/$)

OVH — 132 (geek/$)

RedStation — 64 (geek/$)

Amazon AWS ** — 17 (geek/$)

** Cloud service

My experience has been that all the hardware provided by low end bare metal providers is unstable under heavy persistent load. Which is what ruled out Online.net, OVH and Hetzner. Redstation was too expensive and Amazon well, I think that’s the wrong tool for this job.

I was amazed at the Digital Ocean score for the 2GB instances, this was a surprising quirk of the pricing system that gives us maximum bang per buck and nearly at the price of bare metal! We have had a very good experience of DO so far, but are always looking for the best value.

[snapito-blog]

Diagnosing Problems

Taking snapshots of websites can be a tricky thing. We do everything we can here at Snapito.com to take the pain out of it for you. But sometimes it just doesn't work out as you or we expect. So let me introduce the diagnose parameter :

http://api.snapito.com/free/lc/sky.com?diagnose

This will return an XML formatted (at the moment, will be HTML eventually) diagnosis of your request instead of the image itself. This includes the HTTP headers sent and received, as well as how we rendered the image and any problems the renderer experienced.

Let us know if you have any problems or questions using this, we're support@snapito.com.

[snapito-blog]

Our new BETA website.

[snapito-blog]

The beginning of a new chapter for Snapito

As you may have noticed we're transitioning from a 'hobby project' to a serious high capacity service at the moment. This is a process that we've been going through over the last year. It's been an interesting experience as we've learnt to work with better and better tools and have built a faster, more responsive and scalable solution for our API customers.

We're currently processing about 1.5 million requests a day and taking about 100,000 new snapshots a day. We can create images of a clean website (like google.com) in about 0.6 seconds now.

That translates to a nice, nippy feeling for the new public capture tool at http://new.snapito.com 

There's a lot to talk about, so I'll be doing frequent updates to the blog over the next few weeks, please follow us on Twitter or Tumblr to keep in the loop.

We'd really love your feedback as we go through beta testing the new site before our launch early 2014. Please feel free to drop us an email at support@snapito.com.

[snapito-blog]

Bookmarklets

The Snapito! bookmarklets are a great way to take snapshots directly from the page you are visiting - and they’re much simpler than a browser plugin. All you need to do is drag them to your bookmark bar on your browser.

The simplest and most useful bookmarklet is the ‘Screenshot’ bookmarklet, this simply screenshots the entire current web page and downloads it as a PNG file.

For Pinterest users, when you’re visiting a cool new website and you’d to share the website with others users all you have to do is click on our Pinterest bookmarklet and it'll snapshot the website for you. It will then send you to the Pinterest page to create a new Pin. How much simpler can you get?

To find out more and to get our bookmarklets, just visit: http://snapito.com/extras

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Advanced Snapping

If you visit the Snapito! website (http://snapito.com) you’ll notice that the Snap! button has a drop down next to it. Here you’ll find some advanced features, for example sending a website to Pinterest as an image, downloading a website as an image file or getting the most up to date snapshot of the website.

In future posts we’ll be introducing you to these advanced features and how to get more from Snapito!

[snapito-blog]

Introducing Snapito!

Snapito! is a new full page website screenshot service.

Why would you want to use it? Maybe you want to keep a record of how your website looked on a particular day, or because you’d like to add the work you have done on a website to your portfolio, or a whole bunch of other reasons why you’d just like to save a picture of an entire web page.

As you may have realised already, it’s not actually an easy thing to do on your computer and you really don’t want to add yet another browser plugin. Much easier just to visit http://snapito.com type in the URL and press Snap!, that’s it.

There’s a whole bunch of ways Snapito! can keep your life simple, and we’re going to be showing you day by day in our blog posts. So watch this space!