[clue-talk] Enterprise level hosting provider

[Greg Knaddison]

Rackspace has three major kinds of hosting, so it's important to know
which you're talking about.

Rackspace "Managed Hosting" is physical hardware (this is what they
build their name on and is simple to understand).

Rackspace Cloud Servers are virtual private servers which can be built
on top of popular distros, and have their resources re-allocated
somewhat dynamically (it requires a reboot, but works). This is based
on slicehost.com which RackSpace bought. You can call support and get
to the same technicians that support their dedicated servers,
especially if you have a lot of VPS machines with them, but they also
have a lower tier or two first. Much cheaper for a single server.

Rackspace Cloud Sites which is a grid kind of cloud where your site is
on a cluster of servers. They measure "compute units" and charge you
for bandwidth, disk, and compute units. Pages are served in about 2
seconds. Always. Get a spike of traffic? Still 2 seconds. Have a site
with no visitors? Still 2 seconds. Cheaper than a single dedicated
server, more expensive than a single "cloud server".

Ski Dawg: Is it important to you whether the hosting company is "local" or not?

A few "enterprise" types of companies I suggest:

* Voxel - which is NYC based.
* NeoSpire - Texas based.
* Rackspace - especially for the cloud servers.
* Amazon EC2 along with EBS and perhaps RDS can be useful, but you
have to understand how ephemeral their cloud is when you design your
application. Also, considering buying their support when you compare
apples-to-apples with Rackcloud servers.
* Linode, Rimuhost, and probably a dozen other commodity VPS hosts
which are not quite as "enterprise" but are quite good.

I only have direct experience with Rackspace and Amazon's offerings.

Regards,
Greg

--
Greg Knaddison | 720-310-5623 | http://growingventuresolutions.com
Mastering Drupal | http://www.masteringdrupal.com




On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 12:05 AM, Brian Gibson <bwg1974 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Amazon EC2 and Rackspace come immediately to mind, and by that token, are
> probably already on your short list.  The only experience I have with Rackspace
> is for vanilla hosting space and not virtualization.  There service is top notch
> and fast.  Their customer service is very responsive, but like any other
> provider, by the time you're calling them, you often have to escalate the
> problem to a senior tech because you know more than the junior ones fielding the
> front lines.  We ran into a technical issue with how they configure their load
> balancers where the .NET load balancers are prioritized before the Linux ones
> even if you disable .NET on your account.  They were able to help diagnose and
> resolve the issue in a relatively timely manner given that it wasn't a mission
> critical problem.
>
>
> - Brian
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Ski Dawg <skidawg at skidawg.org>
> To: clue-talk at cluedenver.org
> Sent: Tue, September 14, 2010 2:26:31 PM
> Subject: [clue-talk] Enterprise level hosting provider
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> At work, we are looking into other enterprise level hosting options
> for our web applications, and I was wondering if anyone had any that
> they would recommend.
>
> Our applications run in a LAMP environment, currently running on
> CentOS. At this time, we are not interested in hosting and or
> maintaining our own hardware, but rather have a provider that will
> take care of that side of the equation. We can maintain the OS and
> software on the servers themselves, once they are in place.
>
> We would like a setup where we can run a few virtual machines on the
> physical hardware, to better utilize the resources. Our current host,
> provides this capability by running VMWare ESX on the hardware, then
> creating multiple virtual machines on that physical system. A VMWare
> solution would work, but we would be open to other options that
> provide a similar end result.
>
> Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
> --
> Doug
>
> Registered Linux User #285548 (http://counter.li.org)
> ----------------------------------------
> Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.
>   -- Steve Wozniak
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