[Hidden-tech] host -- Try a cloud

[Rich]

For those interested in alternatives to dedicated hosting, we have mix 
of machines
we own/manage/rent managed and have started to use virtual cloud machines.

We now have about 20 virtual machines - some on Amazon's EC2 and some at 
Slicehost
At the low end Slicehost and for larger uses Amazon.

To give you some idea of what cloud computing offers:
We were able to deploy a 7 server load balanced search engine cluster in 
4 hours/

This includes 'creating the machines' (standard Centos 5 [I think]) and 
installing
a full multi-node Fast search engine (fastdatasearch.com) handling over 
4 million documents.
To do the same thing (ok 16 nodes) at Rackspace with physical machines 
took us 4-5 months,
a lot of which was paper work with sales people.

For those with more modest tastes, virtual machines at Slicehost.com run 
from $20/mon up.
And are even easier to setup -- you get a ssh root login from your 
browser at a control
panel and then have whatever a physical machine offers.

So far we've worked with vmware, Zen and openvz - there are a mix of 
tradeoffs for each,
once you get the machine running - there is some touchiness, otherwise 
you never know
there wasn't a box there.

For references, (for those that don't know) we are petty technical - put 
up our first web colo
in 1994 and unix/linux going back 10 years further, even so the 
commodity services like Slicehost
are fine for anyone with any linux experience, or even those who want to 
learn.

Rich

Roger Williams wrote:
>   > I'm also curious at to what other domain name / website hosts are out there
>   > that are good.  Any suggestions?
>
> We've had good experiences with local companies jagfly.com (Amherst, good web
> hosting) and webcs.com (Oxford, we have our dedicated servers with them).
>
>   

-- 
Rich Roth
CEO On-the-net

Bringing you complex online systems since the net was young
http://www.tnrglobal.com - http://www.on-the-net.com/rr/