[Web4lib] web hosting in the cloud

[c]

My boss would like me to look into the potential of hosting all of our
library sites in the cloud. Boss likes the hardware redundancy potential of
the cloud. I like this as well but I have my concerns and thought I would
shoot out a question to see what other people's experiences and opinions
are.

Right now we run a pretty uncomplicated stack:
- drupal
- wordpress
- mysql

I really would like to have a 3 level environment, at least for our primary
site (production, staging and test). In this situation I have the ability to
actually change php memory settings, tweak drupal, mysql, and wordpress as
needed, without my tweaks on test potentially impacting the controlled
environments on production and staging.

It seems to me that we would need 3 VPSs then and I am not sure that we gain
much since that is basically the setup we have with central IT, except that
with external hosting we are not down when the campus network is down and
any host is going to have more hardware than we do.

My initial thought was to look into dreamhost and mediatemple. Has anyone
had any good experiences with them or any other hosts?



Thanks,
Chris Purcell
Web Developer