Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Cloud Hosting : Need Enterprise IAAS Provider in Canada

[Chasem]

Preface:
Hi guys, my name is Chase. I currently own and operate a small hosted PBX company located in Canada. We run a piece of software called 4PSA VoipNow Professional (specialized Asterisk), which runs on CentOS Linux. We spent a significant portion of last year’s profit to purchase 3 high-end Dell servers, storage array and switches. The software platform itself is running off OnAPP. While the hardware is working great, we had a significant downtime from our data center. Data Centers Canada was down for over 11 hours. Needless to say, this was extremely detrimental to our business. Thank god there is a backup call routing system in place (located in Edmonton) this only allows for emergency routing to customer’s cell phones however. We lost business, and are now trying to look for a more reliable service/provider. We have a couple options in mind, but enterprise reliability and low latency is key. We were thinking of selling off our current hardware and moving to a cloud solution provider. We also don’t want any mickymouse service providers. We need to be able to pick up the phone and talk to somebody if there is an issue.


Current Options:
IBM Smartcloud Enterprise (trying to find if this is available in Canada)

Amazon EC2 (We would strongly prefer the service to be located in Canada)

Primus Virtual Managed Machine (very limited knowledge, runs on VMWare)

Softlayer (again located in US, and not sure of the reliability)


I would greatly appreciate any feedback and options. Thank you

[Amanah]

Hi Chase:
Do you have a specific budget that you are working with?

[Chasem]

Originally Posted by Amanah

Hi Chase:
Do you have a specific budget that you are working with?

Since we lost business, I'm trying to minimize costs, but right now we are spending about 400 bucks a month for the colo.

[Amanah]

are you looking for a colocation, dedicated or a cloud provider?

[dediserve]

You are currently running your own OnApp cloud but wish to drop it and outsource?

I'm not aware of any Canadian clouds at the moment but there are many options across the US

[Chasem]

Originally Posted by dediserve

You are currently running your own OnApp cloud but wish to drop it and outsource?

I'm not aware of any Canadian clouds at the moment but there are many options across the US

That's the idea anyways. We are running an entire Cloud.... for 1 service.

Doesn't seem to make much sense.

[Nicarlo]

Hi Chase,
Data Centers Canada was down for 11 hours due to a bandwidth or power outages?
I personally think your current setup although maybe a little overkill is probably the most ideal. Have you considered moving to another data center with a better track record?

[Chasem]

Originally Posted by Nicarlo

Hi Chase,
Data Centers Canada was down for 11 hours due to a bandwidth or power outages?
I personally think your current setup although maybe a little overkill is probably the most ideal. Have you considered moving to another data center with a better track record?

Hi Nicarlo, it was due to Network connectivity. They entire data center was down, and they are taking 0 responsibility. Not to mention even their own website AND phones were down.

We couldn't contact anybody there or even see status updates.

and that's my thought exactly, I think our system is a little overkill to run an Asterisk service. IBM Smartcloud would work out to around 200-250 a month.

Whereas it's about $500/month right now for Colo+OnApp licensing

[dediserve]

What kind of level of resources do you actually need? (CPU, RAM, Storage, etc?)

Are most of your customers located in Canada?

[Chasem]

Originally Posted by dediserve

What kind of level of resources do you actually need? (CPU, RAM, Storage, etc?)

Are most of your customers located in Canada?

All of our customers are located in canada and we would strongly like to keep our services in canada.

Right now 4gb ram, 2.5ghz min and 60gig hdd would be enough. We have low bandwidth requirements as well. But it needs to be able to scale, and have extremely low latency to our pop in edmonton canada.

[Chasem]

As an update, Zunicore looks decent... and has a data center in Toronto.

Really not a fan of their IP address allocation and lack of backup capability though.

[Amanah]

you can also check out cartikahosting.com // it is a decent company.

[Chasem]

Originally Posted by Amanah

you can also check out cartikahosting.com // it is a decent company.

Thanks for the reference. Cartika looks decent as well.

Both Cartika and Zumicore look to be about $200/month for what I'm after.

I guess it all comes down to reliability.

[UKDirectHost]

Zumicore is affiliated with PEER 1, who have an excellent network and are extremely reliable. PM me if you want some contact details and I can send them to you.

[Amanah]

if not mistaken, Cartika is colocating with Peer1 so there should be no problem with the network. You can ask for a free test.