

Cloud Hosting (Amazon EC2, Rackspace etc), help please? - chrislomax

I am currently going through a cost saving excercise and looking at cloud hosting as a possible solution. I currently run 3 dedicated servers, 1 load balancer, a SAN and a NAS.<p>It was only by accident that I came across EC2 from another post detailing how to create a proxy using EC2 to access the internet. Quite a revalation as I do love the EC2 platform and how flexible it is. I have signed up to the Windows instance to check it out to make sure it does everything I need it to.<p>It turns out it does do everything I need it to but I am a little afraid of the hidden costs. With my dedicated servers, I pay an amount a month and thats it. With EC2 I have worked it out and we will save money but I always feel like I am missing something in the config and if I went full scale with it they I am going to get stung.<p>Whats everyones experience with services like this? Can anyone offer their experience or advice? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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gs8
For most projects you won't save money by using AWS or Rackspace. You are
better of with dedicated/colo servers, unless you have managed servers or
rackspace servers.

For CPU intensive tasks AWS is a good option, for CDN AWS & Rackspace are both
good choices depending on your needs.

I am currently using AWS, for our next project I plan on using a hybrid
solution VPS/Dedicated server-AWS CDN-Rackspace CDN.

Having used dedicated servers, AWS, and Rackspace. This is how I see AWS &
Rackspace.

AWS

Pros:

\- Easy to add/reduce capacity

\- Very powerful configurations available for CPU intensive tasks

\- Inexpensive CDN with SSL & CNAME support

\- Disk space can be expanded without additional RAM/CPU

\- Good load balancers

Cons:

\- Poor disk read/write performance [i.e. slow DB performance]

\- Very expensive compared to hosting yourself (if you can afford to buy
hardware)

\- Disk space is very expensive

\- Bandwidth is very expensive

\- Instances are expensive

\- No Customer Service (i'm not talking about technical support just basic
customer service) unless you pay for expensive support contracts

\- RAM/CPU can't be expanded without upgrading into a package you might not
need

\- Limited to 1 IP address per instance, which means you are limited to 1 SSL
site per instance (you could use SNI, but many browsers still don't support
it)

Rackspace

Pros:

\- Easy to add/reduce capacity

\- Better disk read/write performance than AWS

\- Inexpensive Akamai CDN

Cons:

\- Very expensive compared to dedicated/colo hosting yourself (if you can
afford to buy hardware)

\- Disk space can't be expanded without purchasing more RAM/CPU

\- Cloudfiles (file storage) hosting is very expensive

\- Bandwidth is very expensive

\- CPU/Bundles are expensive

\- CDN doesn't yet support CNAME

\- IP Addresses are expensive

(This is off the top of my head, I might have missed something.)

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chrislomax
Fantastic feedback. I would co-locate the servers but we can't afford to buy
the servers. The most expensive thing is the software for us, SQL alone costs
~£6k.

Hardware itself is cheap, setup times are long and exhaustive.

I just priced up Rackspace, its not an option, well expensive. Azure is hard
to price up, could they make their form any more difficult to understand??

My current dedicated hosting provider has just put our prices up another £200
a month so thats the reason for looking round. I love our host but it annoys
me that if I purchased the hardware then I would save us in 6 months what we
spend in a year.

It just means me spending weeks setting up the hardware etc. I can't load
balance, I won't have access to a SAN. I feel tied in.

EC2 say that the package I was looking at has good disc IO. Although I can't
scale it without purchasing it really

~~~
gs8
Didn't know you were in UK. Colo/Dedicated server costs are definitely higher
than here in the US. You might want to look for another dedicated server
provider rather than the cloud.

The best way to get good disk IO from EC2 is setting up using a medium or
larger instance and setting up a software raid.

~~~
chrislomax
Thanks for the info. I was going to get the double extra large on my db server
and double processor for the web servers.

Don't know what to do, I am finding myself pricing up SAN's etc this morning.

It's all down to time, I have the knowledge to do it all myself but I don't
really want the responsibility. I don't want to go on holiday and the whole of
our system to depend on me. I can make it as redundant as possible but as
usual there is a cost behind that. More servers are more money.

We currently spend around 17k a year though on dedicated servers so to
seriously save some money I would look at spending around that on actual
hardware.

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wilbanksmatt
I work at Rackspace as a Cloud Solution Specialist - if you have any questions
about how our cloud might compare to your dedicated configuration, I'd be
happy to answer them for you.

Email me any time at mw @rackspace .com or call direct at 210-312-5464.

Matt Wilbanks

~~~
chrislomax
Thanks Matt, I shall be in touch tomorrow

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curt
Just set up a cloud server on rackspace and it was my first time ever. Needed
help on a few occasions and the people manning their live chat were extremely
helpful. Took me a day to get everything online, setup, secured, and working
without any previous experience (apache, mysql, mail server, smtp relay, etc).

What I really like is that fact that I can increase the size of my foot print
in a few minutes. Since I'm starting to do PR and marketing this week if
anything catches on, not to worried about experiencing server problems.

~~~
chrislomax
Yeah I love this about EC2. I read an article this week that Rackspace hosting
can take around 1.5 times more load than their EC2 counterpart.

It is all a cost saving exercise though and Rackspace to me has always =
massive costs.

I'll speak to the guy who responded earlier though to see what they can do.

I do love all this cloud stuff though. I personally setup all my dedicated
servers last and I know what involved, its a pain in the ass. If I could
minimise that then that would be great.

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fjabre
From personal experience - AWS is slow. The latencies are far below industry
average in our testing.

~~~
chrislomax
Thanks for your feedback. I like the whole idea of AWS but I found their
pricing model mis-leading as their products were laden with text heavy pages
that were not clear cut.

It was only through actually setting up a reserved instance and seeing I was
still being charged every day did I realise that the reserved instances still
carried an extra cost.

Thanks for your feedback

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gexla
I don't even consider EC2 a hosting provider. I think you have to do a bit of
work to get around the various problems (slow, instances could disappear,
etc.) However, once those issues are dealt with, EC2 works well (see Heroku.)

~~~
chrislomax
Well I don't find EC2 very intuitive I must admit. I bought a windows reserved
instance and I thought I could just "Start" it. But not, I had to create a new
instance then guess which instance I had to start without being charged over
the odds.

I think their whole offering is fantastic, _if it works_.

I like the whole EBS, VPC etc. I love being able to snapshot drives and
recover in fails. I like that power I have to manage it.

Is Heroku purely Ruby?

I need to be able to deply Windows instances, I need MSSQL, I need to know my
data is safe. I like all this cloud talk and I am certainly not one to sit
still on technology when I could be saving money and getting more power with
cloud based hosting.

My Current dedicated host has a cloud hosting feature but its doesn't have the
same power as EC2. I want EC2 but I want the pricing to be clearer and I want
to ensure that I get the power I am paying for.

I'm considering Azure as well. In fact, I will consider anything anyone can
suggest.

~~~
gexla
Take a look at Rackspace.

