[Web4lib] web hosting in the cloud

[Ross Singer]

I guess I have a few questions here:

1) why do you need a lot of hardware for PHP and MySQL?

2) why do you feel you need 3 VPSes?  It doesn't seem like you're
doing anything that could just as easily be done with one - just use
different Apache ports and database names

3) how much PHP/database tuning do you really foresee?

I get the desire to move to a more stable network, but there are other
considerations: who will administer and back up your VPS?  Will you
have any sensitive (for instance, personal) information in your hosted
MySQL db?  If the campus network is so flaky, isn't it just as likely
that you won't be able to get to the library sites, too?

It seems perhaps as worthwhile to focus on fixing the campus
networking problems as it would be to move into the cloud.

-Ross.

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 11:57 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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