Hosting options.

[John Lennard]

Hi,

I am currently in the process of working on some hosting options for a project and the current scope requires that the site may well need to be hosted in some form of elastic/scalable hosting environment as opposed to our own, NZ located servers.

I am curious as to what platforms people have used, such as AWS, Engine Yard, Heroku, Rackspace etc. and also if you have been using a CDN independent of the hosting platform.

It is also important to know what problems you may have had with any of these solutions.

Cheers

John

[Boyd]

you may find the AWS conference in Auckland on the 30th helpful if you
didn't already know about it.

[lenz]

the short answer is: worked with most of them, they do what they say, if you have never worked with EC2 based systems you may find some of the concepts new and i highly recommend playing with a simple setup before you build a production system on an architecture you don't have experience with.

the long answer is that if the site "may well need to be hosted in some form of elastic/scalable hosting environment" and you have never done it, be open with your client about it. a highly scalable website is not something that is done on a standard stack with run of the mill components. If you have never used a CDN or several (randomly appearing and disappearing) instances that together form a working site, then welcome to a whole new world. the misconception that any of the above platforms just magically scale any code can leave you (and your customer) stranded pretty high on a rocky beach with many bruises for all of you.

happy to help you with more details but this looks a bit like a bubble bursting exercise to me. if you are worried about scale, start with something that integrates in a simple way into your existing stack like cloudflare and then grow it from there.

cheers

lenz

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[Berend de Boer]

>>>>> "lenz" == lenz <nor...@gmail.com> writes:

lenz> the long answer is that if the site "may well need to be
lenz> hosted in some form of elastic/scalable hosting environment"
lenz> and you have never done it, be open with your client about
lenz> it. a highly scalable website is not something that is done
lenz> on a standard stack with run of the mill components. If you
lenz> have never used a CDN or several (randomly appearing and
lenz> disappearing) instances that together form a working site,
lenz> then welcome to a whole new world. the misconception that
lenz> any of the above platforms just magically scale any code can
lenz> leave you (and your customer) stranded pretty high on a
lenz> rocky beach with many bruises for all of you.

+1

These platforms are not auto-scale, you can make things that
auto-scale. If you don't know how, the learning curve can be
considerable.

If it's a new site, you might well wish to build something against the
features the platform provides, instead of trying to build on an
existing CMS, and trying to scale that.


The easiest way to scale is still vertical scaling.


--
All the best,

Berend de Boer


------------------------------------------------------
Awesome Drupal hosting: https://www.xplainhosting.com/

[vincenz2004]

I have used AMAZON Aws, Ec2, Amazon RDS and S3 and cloudfront.  They are very good and affordable.

There is a learning curve involved!

I have also used rackspace, and they are good if you want to tell them to do all the configs, but I know they had intermittent issues of downtime and they cost more than Amazon.

Scalablity requires some skills.  Load balancing, monitoring a part of that cycle and it also depends on your code.

If you want to email me I can assist with some questions, Im happy to advise.  It depends what the client wants.  If its mobile, they might be able to use a 3rd party managed cloud system.

vi...@vindi.co.nz
Vince Edwards
http://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentedwards