[Web4lib] web hosting in the cloud

[Thomas Krichel]

  Andrew Hankinson writes

> "Cloud" is such a loaded and, unfortunately unhelpful business-ese 
> catch-word these days, 

  I completely agree.

> 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.

  This clarification is really helpful. 

> The top-of-the-line Mediatemple virtual server costs $10k/year, but
> only includes 500GB of storage;

  That seems expensive. I rent with Hetzner, their X3

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x3

  would give you more space (if you disable the software raid) 
  for probably less than $700 a year. It's a dedicated
  server, so it does not fit your definition of a cloud machine,
  but that's a side issue, for me. 

  I'd be very happy to read about cheaper deals. 

  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1
                                               skype: thomaskrichel