[Linux-aus] Virtual Servers - was Re: Annual General Meeting 2011 Minutes

[Russell Coker]

On Sun, 6 Feb 2011, James Iseppi <lists at iseppi.org> wrote:
> Commercial providers of VM's are setup to handle a whole bunch of things
> that LA probably isn't: * High availability (redundant disks, redundant
> servers, failover on hardware failure) * Hardware refreshes and failures
> are included in the price
> * 24/7 Support and Monitoring
> * Multiple physical locations for servers (generally different capital
> cities, or even countries) * The ability to move a VM from one physical
> location to another with minimal downtime.

As an issue entirely unrelated to LA hosting but of general interest to 
sysadmins:

Do you know of a good relatively cheap provider that meets all those criteria?

Linode.com is cheap and offers a good level of hardware access and they have a 
good management console.  But their disk IO capacity is limited and there is 
no apparent quota enforced (sometimes disk just goes slow presumably due to 
what other DomUs are doing).  Also for Linode moving to a different physical 
location can only be done by creating a new DomU and deleting the old one 
(which is run well through their GUI) or by manual intervention by their 
sysadmin team (file a support ticket and wait).

Also most virtual hosting companies offer fixed deals, you have X amount of 
disk space, Y amount of RAM, etc.  If you want something different then you 
end up paying a lot (with Linode it's usually cheaper to get a bigger package 
even if you don't need the extra RAM and CPU if you want more disk space).

I'm interested to learn about new hosting companies that I can recommend to my 
clients.

-- 
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