[Web4lib] web hosting in the cloud

[Andrew Hankinson]

By "in the cloud" do you just mean using an external hosting provider? "Cloud" is such a loaded and, unfortunately unhelpful business-ese catch-word these days, so it's helpful to try and sort out what you're actually looking for.

True "cloud" services (like Amazon EC2) are massive datacenters that separate servers from actual hardware. That way, if a physical machine goes down they can simply move your virtual server over to another physical machine and you will not notice any downtime.

If your campus data centre is of any notable size, chances are they're running some sort of server virtualization system like VMWare ESX. This essentially provides the same functionality, albeit on a much smaller scale. 

I think the first thing you need to do is perform some sort of rough cost/benefit analysis. Pick an external hosting service, like Mediatemple, and spec out the minimum processing and storage specs you need. Multiply it by 3 for your various production/staging/test systems, and then factor in an estimated cost of downtime, in both personnel and organizational costs. 

Once this is done, it will be pretty easy to determine whether you'll actually get more for your money by going to an outside hosting provider. For any VPS "cloud" system, the big "gotcha" is always storage space, rather than processing power. Libraries usually have pretty large storage requirements, especially if they're working on any digitization initiatives. The top-of-the-line Mediatemple virtual server costs $10k/year, but only includes 500GB of storage; you can buy a 12-15TB storage server for that much, which will last you at least 3-5 years.

Hope this helps,
-Andrew

On 2011-02-03, at 11:57 AM, c wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Web4lib mailing list
> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>