Hello, On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 10:56 PM, 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)
Well, as everyone has been saying, unfortunately with "infrastructure" clouds, you have to engineer your set up to their standards to have failover. For example, Amazon (as mentioned in the thread) give a 99.95% uptime SLA *if* you set up failover yourself accros more than one "Avaliability Zone" within a region. Details are at http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-avai... and http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/03/26/setting-up-a-fault-tolerant-site-using... (though clearer, this one is a bit of an advert). As mentioned, with Amazon, you can use support if you pay for it, it's not included as standard. If you fancy some help though, people like RightScale sounds like exactly what you are after to make management much simpler for you http://www.rightscale.com/products/why-rightscale.php, but pricing for services like that can be a little high for small setups, though they do have a free edition that may be suitable. You can get the same kind of 99.95% SLA from other providers if you follow their deployment guidelines regarding their type of "zones". Microsoft will do it for not too much )http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/sla/) include online and telephone support in the price and are in the process of making Red Hat Linux available. But let's not forget simply buying the software as a service is also an option, where fail-over becomes Someone Else's Problem. For DNS, EasyDNS (https://web.easydns.com/DNS_hosting.php) are rather good and not too expensive, and you can get a 100% up-time guarantee if you want. A review of them regarding availability is at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/31/why_i_use_easydns/ Do let us know who you end up picking and how it goes. Alex