When embarking on a new Neo4j project, one of the things you have to figure out is where to run it. Most of the time the answer is just your laptop. Other times, using Heroku works great. However, if you are at the stage of your testing where you have billions of nodes and relationships, you need something a little bigger.
If you are not ready to commit to purchasing a 100k server for testing, then I suggest you borrow one for a short time. You can try to spin up an Amazon EC2 instance, the high memory large ones go up to 60 gigs of RAM. But what if you need more? Lots more?
The answer for me has been WebNX.com It’s a data center out of Los Angeles that has great deals on big boxes.
The best deals however, are not found on their site. In fact none of the data centers offer their best deals on their websites. They offer them on the dedicated hosting offers forum of web hosting talk.
If you search the dedicated hosting offers forum for webnx, you’ll find threads like this:
Yeah… that’s 128GB of RAM for $339 a month.
They can custom build a server for you and go all the way up to 512GB of RAM if you need. Even if you don’t need that much, it’s better to borrow a big box, test with different performance configurations, and once you know how much you need, you can confidently buy a new box knowing what kind of performance to expect.
I’ve been a happy WebNX customer for 3 years, and I highly recommend them.
Max De Marzi 
[…] Getting a Big Neo4j Test Box for Cheap! by Max De Marzi. […]
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