Cloud hosts?

yapadu

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Joined
Jun 26, 2009
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I have a dedicated server on which I run DA.

I want to have a disaster recovery server configured and ready in the cloud.

Something like Amazon where I can do all the setup but leave the machine powered off until I need it (hopefully never). In the event I do need it simply power up the machine and restore from the most recent backups and it is going.

Problem is DA does not work with Amazon due to the private network address that Amazon assigns you.

Has anyone gotten DA to work with a different cloud provider?
 
DirectAdmin does work with the Amazon cloud; search these forums.

However you'll need to check carefully; My understanding is that when you shut down Amazon's cloud all the storage goes away. Perhaps under only certain circumstances, but certainly something to check.

There's a good comparison of the Rackspace Cloud and the Amazon cloud here (rackspace.com). For information on the storage issue, search the linked page for the word Persistence.

Jeff
 
Thanks for the link Jeff, it is seriously weighted in favor to rackspace to the point that they are leaving out important info to make Amazon look worse.

They do have instances now where you can keep the disk when shutting down the instance.

My only issue with Amazon is the private IP, and problem is causes with DA. I have seen documentation from DA on how to make it work but it is a PITA.

The link you sent does say rackspace provides a public IP which should make running DA easier. I will check them out, thanks.
 
Rackspace it out!

On this page http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing/ on the bottom in the fine print it says you are charged $100 account fee every month you power up a machine.

So if you use 1 hour of time it would be $100.15 for the smallest instance. I use CPU time and Amazon's edge network and gigs of storage and have never gotten anywhere near the $100 minimum fee that rackspace charges.

If they drop that fee it might be worth looking at, but until then I'll keep looking.
 
Ask DirectAdmin Support for the Amazon instruction for Private IP.

I have the link but i wouldn't prefer to post here as public, so, ask them for that.

I know is possible cause i saw the guide.

Regards
 
So if you use 1 hour of time it would be $100.15 for the smallest instance. I use CPU time and Amazon's edge network and gigs of storage and have never gotten anywhere near the $100 minimum fee that rackspace charges.

If they drop that fee it might be worth looking at, but until then I'll keep looking.
I'm glad you found that. I never did, and when I went to a multi hour presentation by Rackspace staff a few weeks ago at the Scale conference in Los Angeles, they never mentioned it while discussing their pricing.

Yeah, they're seriously doing bait-and-switch, in my opinion.

Jeff
 
1.) static IP adresses https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=295
2.) overview instance types http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
3.) calculate the price http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html?
4.) DA in EC2 http://www.jomyut.net/2011/04/directadmin-in-the-amazon-ec2.html
5.) EBS - Elastic Block Storage - Hold your data if EC2 goes down .. http://www.structuredthought.org/?p=182
6.) Nice Windows-Tool for S3 - http://www.cloudberrylab.com/ - Freeware Explorer and Payware Explorer and Payware Backup - I use both, they do the job fine.
 
Unless I'm mistaken, the Rackspace page said you could do persistent storage with Amazon by using block storage, but that it adds complexity to the mix.

I've been trying to work with company to create a hosting cloud, but so far we're just in the talking stage.

Jeff
 
I think one of the mainraisons is that amazon also hosts clouds in europe and asia. Since this was very painful in the beginning its now a lot easier to choose.
Do Rackspace have clouds in europe also?
 
I think cloud stuff is great and have had good luck with Amazon so far. However I have never found a business case for a 24/7 service on it but do use it for extra capacity and disaster recovery.

I did some CPU tests on Amazon a while ago to see how much performance you got for the money, I thought it was very interesting (and part of the reason I don't run any 24/7 services on it). Here is what I wrote:

------------------------------------------------------------


I like the concept of Amazon EC2, which allows you to rent computing power by the hour. Their entry level spec is called 'small', and costs $0.12 per hour for a Windows server based instance at their cheapest data center in Virginia USA, it provides you with the following:

* 1.7 GB memory
* 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
* 160 GB instance storage

Ok, everyone knows what 1.7GB of memory is, and 160GB of disk space. But what is an EC2 Compute Unit?

They describe that as "equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor", which unfortunately does not help much.

I set out to find out exactly how much power that is, by using PassMark's PerformanceTest 7.0. By running that on a few machines I had access to, and Amazon's small EC2 I could get an idea how much processing power you can get for $0.12 per hour (about $87 per month). Here are the results:

Core i7 920 @ 2.667Ghz - Passmark Score 5,706
Intel Dual-Core E5200 @ 2.50GHz - Passmark Score 1,574
Intel Pentium Dual E2180 @ 2.00GHz - Passmark Score 1,270
Intel Atom D510 @ 1.66GHz - Passmark Score 663
Amazon Small @ 1 Ec2 - Passmark Score 343

These scores are based on PassMark's CPU test only, and were not designed to test all aspects of the computer. With so much variation between disks, network and video performance I was really only interested in the raw CPU power.

The results were disappointing to say the least. You can purchase an entire computer based on Intel's Atom processor for $300 - $400 on the market right now (no monitor or keyboard). That much financial outlay will get you a machine with nearly twice the CPU power of Amazon's small EC2.

It would take you nearly 17 of these Amazon small EC2 computers to provide you with the same level of CPU power of a single i7 920 processor. So, if you want the i7 computing power on Amazon's cloud it would cost you $1,468.80 per month. With numbers like that you really need to do your homework, if you require something that is CPU intensive for long periods vs. burst usage for only a few hours you may be better off buying than renting.
 
when you did the tests? usa/europe/asia includes? I´ve found other things .. but .. cheep it isnt, thats right.. (ps: im aren`t amazon-reseller, i ask for my own, i am interested into it)
 
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When I did the test Europe was online at that time, but I did not test it. I was assuming a small instance in USA or Europe would have been the same CPU wise.

All I really wanted to know was how much CPU power you got, and I was shocked to see how low it was.

I currently use Atom computers to build servers, I think they are great with their low power and low noise. I have an office with a rack of servers in Tokyo, all Atom in a big cluster.

Of course, you gotta have bandwidth also... which I do! ;-)
 
I currently use Atom computers to build servers, I think they are great with their low power and low noise. I have an office with a rack of servers in Tokyo, all Atom in a big cluster.
In your own office, that's probably acceptable, but if you're renting a rack at high datacenter prices, then you'll probably want dual 4-core Xeon processors per 1-U server, to maximize return on cost investment.

Jeff
 
My server has exactly this same setup but I use a VMware hosting provider. DA installs fine on VMware.

Veeam does all the disaster recovery magic - it creates a replica of the server every hour (I think!) which can then be brought online if I ever need it. The replica server is in another datacentre.

It was hard to decide whether to go for a cloud solution or dedicated server as you feel much more in control with a real machine. But the benefits of an out-of-the-box disaster recovery plan pushed my to the cloud and now I think it's fantastic. My cloud provider is StratoGen - product page is here cloud hosting. I'm sure there are plenty of others that offer similar.
 
StratoGen looks interesting but I don't see pricing anywhere, and I'm not sure if they want to do business outside the UK, as they don't list their phone number in the international format.

Jeff
 
Clouds may not be as safe from downtime as their SLAs might have you think. What happened to Amazon yesterday (cnn.com) may serve as a good example

Their downtime, still continuing as of this writing by at least one major site (reddit.com) as of this writing (see the yellow box at the top of their site; if it's there, the downtime is still ongoing), has surpassed 24 hours and Amazon isn't talking much if the lack of information from them on Google News (google.com) is any indication.

There was also an outage of approximately 2.5 hour outage at non-cloud provider BocaCom (bocacom.net) yesterday, which affected, among thousands of other domains, files.directadmin.com. But 2.5 hours, while I'm sure painful to a lot of sites, isn't much compared to over 24 hours of major parts of the Amazon cloud. Assuming no other downtime this month, BocaCom's non cloud infrastructure has uptime of 99.65% for this month, while this one portion of Amazon's cloud only 96.66% (and still going down as of this writing). Not to ignore my own datacenter, due to a problem with a faulty cable this month our Los Angeles datacenter had downtime of 16 minutes this month, total uptime of 99.96%.

So it seems you pay your money and you take your chance.

Jeff
 
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