[Web4lib] web hosting in the cloud

[Cary Gordon]

Perhaps it's just the hour, but I find your request confusing.

What do you mean by "the cloud"?

Do you mean hosting your sites on a distributed system like S3/EC2? Or
Rackspace's similar offerings.

Do you mean using servers that are virtualized?

Do you mean just having your hosting somewhere else?

I think that both Dreamhost and Mediatemple are pretty careful to
avoid the word, "cloud" in their service descriptions.

Every server, whether discrete or virtualized is running on hardware
that is sitting in a rack in a data center somewhere. I think that the
usual assumption is that the big cloud services like Amazon have
geographic as well as hardware redundancy. Dreamhost and Mediatemple
(and Slicehost and Linode)
all offer hardware flexibility, but while they may have multiple
locations, they are not generally offering unmediated geographic
failover.

Whatever you consider, do the math. Running multiple hosts 24/7 on
S3/EC2 is usually  considerable more expensive than running dedicated
hardware. The biggest economies that can be achieved using those
systems are is circumstances where a site has a volatile load profile
and benefits from the ability to spin up nodes on demand and only run
them as long as they are needed.

We run most of our servers virtually in a Xen environment because it
affords us flexibility and a very powerful automatic failover solution
at a very reasonable cost. At the end of the day, however, it is
hardware sitting in a data center, and while we back up everything
offsite (to S3), if the center goes down, we go down, at least for a
while.

Cary

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 8:57 AM, c <cbpurcell at gmail.com> 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
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>
>



-- 
Cary Gordon
The Cherry Hill Company
http://chillco.com