Re: Reliable Cloud host ?

[Ben Carleton <ben () bencarleton com>]

On 2/26/2012 6:04 PM, Mike Lyon wrote:
> Godaddy? Servint.com? Amazon EC2?
>
> -mike
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Feb 26, 2012, at 12:57, Randy Carpenter <rcarpen () network1 net> wrote:
>
> > Does anyone have any recommendation for a reliable cloud host?
> >
> > We require 1 or 2 very small virtual hosts to host some remote services to serve as backup to our main datacenter. 
> > One of these services is a DNS server, so it is important that it is up all the time.
> >
> > We have been using Rackspace Cloud Servers. We just realized that they have absolutely no redundancy or failover 
> > after experiencing a outage that lasted more than 6 hours yesterday. I am appalled that they would offer something 
> > called "cloud" without having any failover at all.
> >
> > Basic requirements:
> >
> > 1. Full redundancy with instant failover to other hypervisor hosts upon hardware failure (I thought this was a 
> > given!)
> > 2. Actual support (with a phone number I can call)
> > 3. reasonable pricing (No, $800/month is not reasonable when I need a tiny 256MB RAM Server with <1GB/mo of data 
> > transfers)
> >
> > thanks,
> > -Randy

With that some of those cloud providers are charging per-instance,
automatic hot standby is really not a given, but that could just be me :)

We use Amazon and are happy with them. With them, you would have to set
up your own failover operation but it's absolutely doable. They give you
all the tools you need (load balancing, EBS, etc) but it's up to you to
make it happen. We use their load-balancing feature with HTTP but it
looks like you could do it with any service (DNS, etc). As a result,
when they had their last huge outage (a whole datacenter), we lost some
of our instances but our customer-facing services remained available.

Their support options are pretty good but you have to shell out for a
package to get them on the phone. Pricing for that is tied to how much
of their resources you are using.

-- Ben