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I think the first point is the most important, expect downtime. This is the one thing we have come to accept with hosts. For us now it is a case of how easy it

I think the first point is the most important, expect downtime. This is the one thing we have come to accept with hosts. For us now it is a case of how easy it is to keep those servers up if things do go wrong. If you can afford to have a fail over data centre then this is the only way to keep things running.

acdha 14y ago
> This is the one thing we have come to accept with hosts. I think it's more that this is something we've come to expect about reality. It used to be that you'd get sales pitches from extremely expensive hardware vendors claiming improbably high uptime but the results never matched those claims for many reasons. Now we're not fooling ourselves into thinking this strategy is effective.
Silhouette 14y ago
I think the first point is the most important, expect downtime. The trouble is, a lot of these cloud services have one big sales pitch, and it is based on the improved ease of mangement and reliability you get from outsourcing to them instead of letting your own in-house IT team run things on your own systems. If it turns out that hosting in the cloud isn't really any more reliable than doing stuff in-house -- and yes, I did tell a lot of people so, and so did many others who looked at the facts rather than the hype -- then you've just undermined the main argument for using these services. The rest is a cost issue, whether it's cheaper to use scalable, cloud-based resources or to buy in whatever big iron you need, and to some extent whether it's cheaper to hire smart people to maintain your systems or to outsource the management work. I think most of us who've looked into it know the answer to that one, which is that unless you really do have a very dynamic system where your resource needs vary by orders of magnitude within a short space of time, cloud hosting is disproportionately expensive at almost any scale even taking overheads into account.
- chrislomax 14y ago
  It's weird because when I compare the pricing of cloud compared to our current setup, the cloud always comes out cheaper. I think this is the main thing I am looking at currently. We pay around £1400 a month for our hosting at the minute. This entails 1 DB server, 2 Web servers, 1 mail server, a load balancer and some other tricks like a SAN and a NAS. Comparing that to the likes of Azure where I would only need 2 web servers (for redundancy) and SQL azure, the cost comes in at around 1/2 of what I am paying now. I always feel like there is going to be a stinger somewhere in that when we move it all over, we get some stupid high bill for something that I didn't take into account or was not obvious.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    I assume from the currency that you're in the UK like me. In that case, it sounds like your current hosting is on the expensive side, unless perhaps you have particularly high-spec servers or transfer very large amounts of data that you didn't mention before. FWIW, I suggest spending a few minutes looking up what a couple of other hosting services would charge you for a similar set-up today, assuming you haven't done so lately. I'd be a bit surprised if you couldn't save a substantial amount of money each month for a relatively simple set-up like the one you described.
    - chrislomax 14y ago
      Our main out goings are software licenses to be honest. SQL has gone up to 240 per CPU now which racks up. Thanks for the advice though as I will certainly look around. I do like the propspect of te cloud though and instant scaling which is why I was looking at cloud solutions anyway
      - seunosewa 14y ago
        You're comparing apples and Oranges. SQL Server costs the same amount on Amazon EC2 if you use it.
        chrislomax 14y ago
        Well we were thinking of using SQL Azure. It's £50 for a 20gb db. This gives you triple redundancy. To get this type of redundancy in a hosted platform would be at least 3 sql licenses and 3 machines to put them on and manage the failover layers I wasn't thinking of using SQL in aws, although it is slightly cheaper
  - awj 14y ago
    One general trend in cloud hosting is to have multiple sources of the cost for a system. For instance with EC2 you have a per hour price for the virtual server and a per gigabyte price for data transfer. If you want any kind of permanent storage that's a separate thing with it's own per gigabyte stored and per gigabyte transferred costs. Not only is it easy to miss these, but they're not things you pay as much attention to in a typical hosted server environment.

acdha 14y ago

> This is the one thing we have come to accept with hosts. I think it's more that this is something we've come to expect about reality. It used to be that you'd get sales pitches from extremely expensive hardware vendors claiming improbably high uptime but the results never matched those claims for many reasons. Now we're not fooling ourselves into thinking this strategy is effective.

Silhouette 14y ago

I think the first point is the most important, expect downtime. The trouble is, a lot of these cloud services have one big sales pitch, and it is based on the improved ease of mangement and reliability you get from outsourcing to them instead of letting your own in-house IT team run things on your own systems. If it turns out that hosting in the cloud isn't really any more reliable than doing stuff in-house -- and yes, I did tell a lot of people so, and so did many others who looked at the facts rather than the hype -- then you've just undermined the main argument for using these services. The rest is a cost issue, whether it's cheaper to use scalable, cloud-based resources or to buy in whatever big iron you need, and to some extent whether it's cheaper to hire smart people to maintain your systems or to outsource the management work. I think most of us who've looked into it know the answer to that one, which is that unless you really do have a very dynamic system where your resource needs vary by orders of magnitude within a short space of time, cloud hosting is disproportionately expensive at almost any scale even taking overheads into account.

chrislomax 14y ago
It's weird because when I compare the pricing of cloud compared to our current setup, the cloud always comes out cheaper. I think this is the main thing I am looking at currently. We pay around £1400 a month for our hosting at the minute. This entails 1 DB server, 2 Web servers, 1 mail server, a load balancer and some other tricks like a SAN and a NAS. Comparing that to the likes of Azure where I would only need 2 web servers (for redundancy) and SQL azure, the cost comes in at around 1/2 of what I am paying now. I always feel like there is going to be a stinger somewhere in that when we move it all over, we get some stupid high bill for something that I didn't take into account or was not obvious.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  I assume from the currency that you're in the UK like me. In that case, it sounds like your current hosting is on the expensive side, unless perhaps you have particularly high-spec servers or transfer very large amounts of data that you didn't mention before. FWIW, I suggest spending a few minutes looking up what a couple of other hosting services would charge you for a similar set-up today, assuming you haven't done so lately. I'd be a bit surprised if you couldn't save a substantial amount of money each month for a relatively simple set-up like the one you described.
  - chrislomax 14y ago
    Our main out goings are software licenses to be honest. SQL has gone up to 240 per CPU now which racks up. Thanks for the advice though as I will certainly look around. I do like the propspect of te cloud though and instant scaling which is why I was looking at cloud solutions anyway
    - seunosewa 14y ago
      You're comparing apples and Oranges. SQL Server costs the same amount on Amazon EC2 if you use it.
      - chrislomax 14y ago
        Well we were thinking of using SQL Azure. It's £50 for a 20gb db. This gives you triple redundancy. To get this type of redundancy in a hosted platform would be at least 3 sql licenses and 3 machines to put them on and manage the failover layers I wasn't thinking of using SQL in aws, although it is slightly cheaper
- awj 14y ago
  One general trend in cloud hosting is to have multiple sources of the cost for a system. For instance with EC2 you have a per hour price for the virtual server and a per gigabyte price for data transfer. If you want any kind of permanent storage that's a separate thing with it's own per gigabyte stored and per gigabyte transferred costs. Not only is it easy to miss these, but they're not things you pay as much attention to in a typical hosted server environment.