Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : What can I do with the cloud?

[pueblosnet]

Surely, if I'm doing this question, I don't need the cloud, but as all the people are talking about it, I think in it.

We host simple websites, with about 10GB/bandwicht/month as much usage. Actually we have 5 low budget dedicated servers instead to have 1 power server with all in, with that we distribute the possibilities of hardware fails.

We don't have any VPS, I personally prefer host in a physical server, we can put the 5 servers in 5 VPS into one big server, but if HD fails, all goes down.

So, now with cloud, I think it's the same that VPS, hardware could fails as always, and the cloud can complicate the resolution of a problem, so my final question, it's cloud for me? anything I'm missing?

Thanks as always for your replies! Anyway, it's nice to have a new technologie in the table to discuss about it!

[KDAWebServices]

As an example all of our new virtual hosting accounts are hosted on our cloud hosting platform - that way they are independant of any hardware, so should a physical hardware node fail it isn't an issue. The system will recover itself automatically within a matter of minutes - not that we have hardware issues very often with our current virtual hosting servers (careful choice of hardware - no cheap junk desktop kit etc.).

Not only do we get the benefits of self healing, we also use less power per customer as well - as we don't pile 1000s of accounts per server (less customers per "server" generally equals less problems to deal with) we were ending up using more kWh per customer than others would, by utilising our cloud platform we've been able to lower our usage per customer - offsetting the large rises in power costs.

[pueblosnet]

Thanks for your reply! If one HD fails, what happend with the data stored there? That's the same with a dedicated server sure? For that I don't see any difference.

[pueblosnet]

Another question in mind, with the cloud it have to be a "main" server sure? so what happend if this server goes down?

cloud = completely distributed system?

[KDAWebServices]

Hi,

We've not run *any* server without at least hardware RAID-1 for about 6 years now, so a single drive failure isn't really an issue. As for our cloud platform:

1) Each hardware node has a RAID-10 array of at least 8 drives.
2) Data is mirrored to at least 1 other hardware node as well.

So in effect you've got a RAID-1 of RAID-10 arrays, the data is doubly protected against disk failure. So much so, that the data doesn't even have to be stored on the hardware node that the hosting is running from (i.e. CPU/memory being used) - The sites can be running from Node#5 and the data is actually stored on Node#2 and Node#4 for example.

Not all providers are going to do things that way though, different strokes for different folks.

Thanks,

[dazmanultra]

Hi Karl - so you're running cPanel on top of a virtualized machine on your cloud?

Do you have any provision for software failure in that system (e.g. Apache failing, MySQL running into an issue)?

[eming]

the 'cloud' is still a quite fluffy thing...

Originally Posted by pueblosnet

Another question in mind, with the cloud it have to be a "main" server sure? so what happend if this server goes down?

cloud = completely distributed system?

yup - if the physical server (hypervisor) that your site resides on goes down your site might go down as well. Depending on what sort of self-healing remedies your cloud system has it will only be for seconds though.

In our case it's anything from 1-2 secs to 40 seconds of maximum downtime if a hypervisor blows up.

Originally Posted by pueblosnet

Thanks for your reply! If one HD fails, what happend with the data stored there? That's the same with a dedicated server sure? For that I don't see any difference.

On some clouds (but not all) storage is completely separated from processing so if a local HD fails your sites would still be cool, and if a storage unit fails the good clouds has some sort of redundancy to keep you up and running.
We do a raided setup of two raid 10 storage arrays to keep servers running even if some crazy thing happened and a whole bunch of HD's should blow up at once.


D

[KDAWebServices]

Originally Posted by dazmanultra

Hi Karl - so you're running cPanel on top of a virtualized machine on your cloud?

Do you have any provision for software failure in that system (e.g. Apache failing, MySQL running into an issue)?

Yep, cPanel is our stop-gap system at the moment, we've got much more interesting things then that going on in the background though

TBH it's incredibly rare for us to experience any kind of failure, be it hardware or software - most software failures occur because people try and run things not suitable for shared hosting or cramp 100s of bits of "fluff" software on (or just plain don't know what they are doing) or overload their "servers" - something we've never done. But to answer to the question, yes we do we have extensive checking in place and provisions for restarting failed services.

[dazmanultra]

Originally Posted by KDAWebServices

Y
TBH it's incredibly rare for us to experience any kind of failure, be it hardware or software - most software failures occur because people try and run things not suitable for shared hosting or cramp 100s of bits of "fluff" software on

Yes that's why I was asking. In our experience software failure (for whatever reason - cPanel update, DNS issue, Apache configuration) problems are more common than any kind of hardware failure.

Yep, cPanel is our stop-gap system at the moment, we've got much more interesting things then that going on in the background though

Cool.

PS. Thought you were a bit mean to us in .Net magazine, but PR is PR.

[KDAWebServices]

I've not read .net for about 6 years so I don't know exactly what was printed. If it's what I said to .net and not changed in anyway, then I don't think I was overly harsh, the same applies to some of the stuff we're doing as well (and many other people), I believe I did mention that. Should have dropped me a mail of given me a call

TBH cPanel for us has been very reliable, not had any major issues for about 3 years now with updates breaking things etc. Only Apache/Service failures I've seen lately are where customers have loaded up their servers a bit more than advisable (you know what they are like ).

[pueblosnet]

Thanks for all your replies! cloud sounds interesting.

[HostColor]

Hi,

Have you read what does "Cloud Hosting" mean in WHT Wiki? Cloud is more a way of doing things in computing, a style, an approach than any specific technology. Using a cloud hosting or clustered hosting platform will allows you to balance load and to scale your services. High Availability is another thing that comes with cloud technologies. There are many things to say, but it depends of what a particular company need as cloud class solution.

[pueblosnet]

I'm still trying to understand how all this works

[vpsville]

Wikipedia has an excellent write up on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

As HostColor says, its more about a philosophy than a technology, each company that implements it is probably doing something different.

[SolutionProInc]

With all of the "Cloud" and "Virtual" terms not being well defined in the world yet a customer should ask some important questions before commiting.

1. What type of storage is this running on. (You should have RAID at a minimum and some form of high speed SCSI. A SAN would be prefered.

2. What Hypervisor is running this.

3. What types of fail over options are available

You should be able to get a system with HA on highspeed network storage and system fail over for a reasonable price.