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No shared hosting seems to imply that VPS won't cut it either--depends on what "shared hosting" really means. So you are left with looking for a dedicated hosti

No shared hosting seems to imply that VPS won't cut it either--depends on what "shared hosting" really means. So you are left with looking for a dedicated hosting plan. I'd say check out a company like Rackspace (disclosure: I work there).

kgrin 16y ago
Happy to use Rackspace or another dedicated server provider... the trick is that we don't want to be responsible for, say, security patches to the kernel. So really the question is: is there a company that'll manage the damn server(s) for us so that we get to deal with a nice, clean abstraction similar to shared hosting? Basically I want a HIPAA-compliant Heroku (though in this case not for Ruby).
- icey 16y ago
  It's not cheap, but Rackspace has people you can pay to do this sort of thing for you.
- patrickgzill 16y ago
  There are plenty of companies that will do this for you, probably from about $250 per month; what I would recommend is a reasonably powerful dedicated machine on which you install your own VPS solution. Give one large VPS to your production app, and create other VPSes for testing or development purposes. The reason you want to use a VPS on top of your own dedicated hardware is to gain the benefits of VPS control, including easy archiving of the entire system, snapshots, easy moves to new hardware even if the hardware is different, etc.
- bradleyland 16y ago
  The company we use, Rimuhosting, has sysadmin services available at $40/hr, which is pretty reasonable. Their dedi-server plans are reasonable as well.
CWuestefeld 16y ago
depends on what "shared hosting" really means I think that's the key. My employer hopes that a virtual machine on a private VLAN, with a fully-encrypted virtual disk, qualifies. This seems reasonable to me, but reasonableness isn't necessarily a part of any regulation.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  FWIW, I think I recall the OpenBSD devs coming out pretty hard against considering a VPS to be "secure" in most senses of the word; they seem to have thought that there were theoretical ways for VPSs to on the same machine to break through their respective barriers. I can't find any links about this though and it's been months since I've kept up on OpenBSD-misc, so I might be full of shit. Personally, I would tend to choose a theoretically-insecure VPS over a vhost environment any day.
- hmahncke 16y ago
  I don't know of a specific rule that prevents shared hosting - and if you do, I'd love to see it (as I mentioned, by company is in the middle of a similar process). What is clear is that you have to document access and changes, which could be trickier in a shared hosting environment. But if the host itself has processes in place, and documents them to you, you should be fine.

kgrin 16y ago

Happy to use Rackspace or another dedicated server provider... the trick is that we don't want to be responsible for, say, security patches to the kernel. So really the question is: is there a company that'll manage the damn server(s) for us so that we get to deal with a nice, clean abstraction similar to shared hosting? Basically I want a HIPAA-compliant Heroku (though in this case not for Ruby).

icey 16y ago
It's not cheap, but Rackspace has people you can pay to do this sort of thing for you.
patrickgzill 16y ago
There are plenty of companies that will do this for you, probably from about $250 per month; what I would recommend is a reasonably powerful dedicated machine on which you install your own VPS solution. Give one large VPS to your production app, and create other VPSes for testing or development purposes. The reason you want to use a VPS on top of your own dedicated hardware is to gain the benefits of VPS control, including easy archiving of the entire system, snapshots, easy moves to new hardware even if the hardware is different, etc.
bradleyland 16y ago
The company we use, Rimuhosting, has sysadmin services available at $40/hr, which is pretty reasonable. Their dedi-server plans are reasonable as well.

CWuestefeld 16y ago

depends on what "shared hosting" really means I think that's the key. My employer hopes that a virtual machine on a private VLAN, with a fully-encrypted virtual disk, qualifies. This seems reasonable to me, but reasonableness isn't necessarily a part of any regulation.

thaumaturgy 16y ago
FWIW, I think I recall the OpenBSD devs coming out pretty hard against considering a VPS to be "secure" in most senses of the word; they seem to have thought that there were theoretical ways for VPSs to on the same machine to break through their respective barriers. I can't find any links about this though and it's been months since I've kept up on OpenBSD-misc, so I might be full of shit. Personally, I would tend to choose a theoretically-insecure VPS over a vhost environment any day.
hmahncke 16y ago
I don't know of a specific rule that prevents shared hosting - and if you do, I'd love to see it (as I mentioned, by company is in the middle of a similar process). What is clear is that you have to document access and changes, which could be trickier in a shared hosting environment. But if the host itself has processes in place, and documents them to you, you should be fine.