[sf-perl] Hosting/Colo?

Earl Ruby eruby at knowledgematters.net
Mon Dec 14 12:34:01 PST 2009


On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:02 AM, David Fetter <david at fetter.org> wrote:
> I'm looking for good, bad and ugly experiences with (virtual) hosting
> and colos, in particular ones that have at least heard of PostgreSQL.

I've had cabinets with my own servers at HE (Fremont) and at Coloserv
(SF). HE tries to suck people in with cheap cabinets that have a
single 15A circuit. If you're running large database apps you can use
up that 15A really fast, and then they'll gouge you for more power.
After your initial one year contract is up they'll gouge you again and
try to lock you into another 1 year contract at double or triple the
previous year's price, figuring you'll pay rather than move. (I told
them I could get cheaper space at Coloserv than they were offering
under my current terms, and unless they were willing to drop my rent
I'd move. They were unwilling to negotiate, so I packed up and moved.)

Coloserv was a much better deal and I stayed there (with my equipment)
for many years. I never tried their virtual hosting so I can't comment
on that.

For virtual hosting I use SliceHost (http://tinyurl.com/cpmt64) and
they have excellent service. I set up some Puppet scripts to configure
my servers there and I can build a new server and provision/configure
it in minutes. If you want a small one-person mail server or a remote
Nagios monitoring system it’s yours for $20/month. They support
current versions of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch, CentOS and Gentoo.

I have some telecom services I'm setting up this week where I need to
be able to get a fixed IP address that stays mine for years and I need
to be able to repoint that address at any server I want, so I'm
looking at using Amazon EC2 with Elastic IP Addresses. Unfortunately I
need to run this application on OpenSUSE 11.1 and there are no
OpenSUSE 11.1 images on Amazon EC2, so right now I'm trying to create
my own. If anyone knows of a virtual hosting company that supports
OpenSUSE and gives you virtual control over a fixed IP address I'd be
interested in learning more. (I looked at Linode and they appear to
give you a fixed IP when you set up a server but it sounds like you
can't move that IP to a new server.) Or if anyone has any
good/bad/ugly EC2 experiences to share I'm interested.

-- 
Earl Ruby
http://earlruby.org/


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