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  1. #1
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    Status of TheGridLayer?

    Last I checked, they were doing upgrades that took it down for a good while. Is anyone hosted on a TGL system? Is it more reliable? I had one around Thanksgiving and it was only up about 80% of the time. The drives mounted in read-only mode for 24 hours, etc.

    When are the higher-end grid servers coming out, and does anyone know pricing?

    I thought by 2007 all of this would have been public info but things have been surprisingly quiet so far. Was AppLogic "grid" hosting a late 2006 fad?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jan 2006
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    I dont think the grid concept is a fad, if anything, it should be one of the core implementations needed in the future of web hosting industry.

    Just like anyone who want to be housed in a datacenter does not have to own a datacenter. Anyone who wants a dedicated server does not have to own one. And I dont means VPS.

    VPS is like VCD, you probably dont remember but it was a format of discs that lived for a little while between CDs and DVDs, but then DVDs took over.

    Grid is basically a larger scale but cost as well as power efficient with no single point of failure.

    I am not saying LT or MT have or dont have grid configuration, but some hosts these days setup a cluster and advertise as grid.

    As you should know, cluster is not the same as grid.
    Email: info ///at/// honelive.com

  3. #3
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    I think LT's system should be called a failover-VPS instead of a grid server. Anyone disagree?

  4. #4
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    Nov 2006
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    41
    I couldn't agree more...

    At the core it is nothing more than failover Xen VPS System.

    I can easily make my own grid (Although I must admit must be very time consuming):

    1) Xen for the VPS
    2) DRBD to replicate over the network
    3) The AppLogic end of it is the main control for the VPS, etc.. Probably can be done by doing major customizations to heartbeat, and a lot of coding/scripting.

  5. #5
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    The biggest downfall to AppLogic was its billing per meg of memory usage.

  6. #6
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    I looked at the AppLogic setup and have to agree the billing for usage was a huge turnoff. Just struck me kinda odd in a era where we've been trying to get away from nickel and diming from the likes of per minute cell phone charges, ISP dialup fees, etc yet we've got a shared hosting solution calling home to report on per GB memory usage.

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by drewnick
    I think LT's system should be called a failover-VPS instead of a grid server. Anyone disagree?
    I agree 100%. Too many people are being suckers for the term "grid" and fail to release exactly what it is.

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by sshepherd
    I looked at the AppLogic setup and have to agree the billing for usage was a huge turnoff. Just struck me kinda odd in a era where we've been trying to get away from nickel and diming from the likes of per minute cell phone charges, ISP dialup fees, etc yet we've got a shared hosting solution calling home to report on per GB memory usage.
    Yeah I'm glad someone agrees with me. The good thing is, AppLogic/3tera can change this policy with the stroke of a pen! If they do, they will succeed.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
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    251
    Quote Originally Posted by drewnick
    Yeah I'm glad someone agrees with me. The good thing is, AppLogic/3tera can change this policy with the stroke of a pen! If they do, they will succeed.
    What really matters is the pricing that LayeredTech and others place on selling VPSs based on AppLogic and not the price AppLogic charges them.

    LayeredTech's pricing is all wrong to attract those that only need a single dedicated server for their current needs. The way I look at it, they are charging twice what a normal VPS would run for a service that is really in beta. They are running it on ancient hardware. AppLogic needs to be upgraded to Xen 3.0 and run on multi-core servers and LayeredTech needs to seriously upgrade their servers in the grid. If you are going to pay twice what a normal VPS would run you, you at least want it running on server class hardware and not a bunch of desktop PCs.

    Also, the technology has to be more stable than a normal VPS.

    I like MT's pricing model of making the entry price $20 per month and trying to figure a valid rate for those needing more than the minimum. TGL needs to make a similar pricing model and not try to charge by the GB/hour. Rather, I would try to come up with a formula based on disk space/bandwidth/CPU/memory usage and illustrate intended pricing for different VPS server loads (like how much to run a vB forum with 250 active users or 1000 active users or 10000 active users or how much for a file sharing server serving up 10GBs per day, 50GBs per day, 100GBs per day or 500GBs per day).

    Until people can understand the pricing and how it will scale if their website grows, TGL is nothing more than a curiosity. That is, unless you already run on a cluster and want your own private grid (where the costs are probably much easier to get a handle on). But, in a shared grid, you want to know that the pricing is competitive to other technologies and that if your website gets digg'd, the grid can handle the surge in traffic and your hosting bill isn't going to be through the roof based on a pricing model that doesn't make sense.

    So far, TGL gets an F from me purely based on their advertised pricing model and the non-competitive pricing that seems to result from that.
    Kevin, The Walrus

  10. #10
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    The fact of the matter is, TGL cannot scale multiple servers like MT can, so for large forums it will enver be better than a single-server. Yes, TGL can let you build virtual appliances and deploy them to other servers, but at the end of the day if a single Apache can't scale multiple servers, you're no better off with TGL than with a 2.4 GHz server running RAID-1.

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
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    Not true. TGL scales much larger than a single server. Your appliances can be multiple load balanced Apache servers.
    Kevin, The Walrus

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
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    You can create a "Load Balancer" appliance and have multiple apache servers. This is no different than setting up LVS on 2 servers, and load balancing apache on your own nodes.

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Aug 2004
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    I think a whole lot of poor marketing has really confused people on what the software can do and such. Like it's not just a VPS you can run multiple appliances and start building useful things such as a load balanced apache servers + mysql + nas all with no concern on whether you're hosted on 4 machines or 2 it does not matter, what does is the amount of resources each appliance is given. This is also why the need for more powerful machines does not make sense as well my dual cpu box running apache could be replaced by 4 single cpu machnies running 4 apache's load balanced.

    But hey I'd rather have people believe the software is nothing more than a failover vps with no use at all. It'll sure make me more unique when I am running such a system in a hosting environment of some kind or using it for high traffic sites.

    Another thing I'd like to point out I'm not to impressed with TheGridLayer or the others offering the software right now they all seem unorganized and not prepared to do the offering. But the software itself seems to be really nice.
    Tony B. - Chief Executive Officer
    Hawk Host Inc. Proudly serving websites since 2004
    Quality Shared and Cloud Hosting
    PHP 5.2.x - PHP 8.1.X Support!

  14. #14
    Who is "MT"?
    OSHS Ltd
    OSHS Services - DNS Clusters | R1Soft Licenses | R1Soft CDP Storage | UK Server Colo | UK Rack Space

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
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    251
    MT == MediaTemple
    Kevin, The Walrus

  16. #16
    Ah nice one, thanks!
    OSHS Ltd
    OSHS Services - DNS Clusters | R1Soft Licenses | R1Soft CDP Storage | UK Server Colo | UK Rack Space

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by TonyB
    But hey I'd rather have people believe the software is nothing more than a failover vps with no use at all. It'll sure make me more unique when I am running such a system in a hosting environment of some kind or using it for high traffic sites.
    Exactly. The smart people here will realize that this is the future of hosting. AppLogic and Amazon's S3 and EC2 will be the new way of hosting services. Yesterday after signing up for the EC2 beta, I brought up my first "cloud". It is remarkable that, from a DOS box on my office PC, I can bring up a whole server instance ready for my use instantly. This is the future.

  18. #18
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    The stupid people will immediately start using these new technologies for production environments.


  19. #19
    It's been at least 2 months now that TGL has been launched. Those who use it are happy so far? Do they have full uptime as advertised?
    Josh Lieber

    iTechPath | Fully managed servers with 24/7/365 support.
    PHP 5, MySQL 5, RHEL, cPanel & rvskins, and much more...

  20. #20
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    Looking at the LT forums, the system seems to have become stabilized moreso than it was when I was on it. I'd give it a bit more time.

  21. #21
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    One other interesting thing is that they claimed to be releasing an Opteron-based grid, which sounded good to me. I never saw anything else. They may be abandoing the project after all of the negative feedback it got initially. Once they work it out, they'll be fine.

  22. #22
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
    Location
    Frankfurt, Germany
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    Is it stable yet?

  23. #23
    I don't see many people using it on the forum. There's gotta be some one who use it. It looks so promising...
    Josh Lieber

    iTechPath | Fully managed servers with 24/7/365 support.
    PHP 5, MySQL 5, RHEL, cPanel & rvskins, and much more...

  24. #24
    Join Date
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    If they are like me, they jumped to soon, got burned, and are watching from a distance.

  25. #25
    What I don't get is that the grid is not managed (in other words you have to apply security fixes, etc... yourself) and it is "highly available". But then "high availability" depends partly on your own level of expertise, otherwise you'll have repeated downtime if you don't do a good job managing it.
    Josh Lieber

    iTechPath | Fully managed servers with 24/7/365 support.
    PHP 5, MySQL 5, RHEL, cPanel & rvskins, and much more...

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