[Web4lib] web hosting in the cloud

[Cary Gordon]

I can see justification for having a separate dev box, if you are
actually developing software, as opposed to developing content. I
could probably write a (depressing) book about my adventures in
blowing up dev boxes. Who knew a comma in the wrong place could make a
floppy disk catch fire?

On modest-scale systems with single application/webservers, it is
probably better to actually stage content on the same server to
eliminate environmental differences.

Cary

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 7:04 AM, Ross Singer <rossfsinger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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>>
>>
>
>
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-- 
Cary Gordon
The Cherry Hill Company
http://chillco.com