Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Cloud Hosting : SoftLayer Cloud Computing

[WireNine]

Has anyone had the pleasure of testing out softlayer's cloud computing? How has your experience been with it? Did you see any cost/performance margin difference compared to a dedicated server? Any kind of downtime experience? Hardware failure causing downtime? I've seen other cloud hosting unable to prevent downtime, how is softlayer's platform helping the cause?

[Zaffer]

No personal experience, but this may help you dig further.

[Scott.Mc]

It's extremely slow disk wise, you couldn't replace your dedicated with it if operating anything meaningful. It also has continual storage issues causing extended downtime (see the thread linked above).

Definitely avoid at all costs.

[WireNine]

That's the kind of feeling I was getting from reading over their cloud computing pages that there is a serious bottleneck for disk i/o, and their cloud computing really just sounds like a VPS with SAN storage nothing more. Really Disappointing.

[WireNine]

Providers are using Cloud hosting as a marketing gimmick now a days even though it really shouldn't be. SoftLayer's Cloud computing is nothing more then a VPS however, it shouldn't be a Cloud at all.

[barry[CoffeeSprout]]

I left the service a long time ago due to the IO issues and a few downtimes.
From what I heard the IO is still a big issue (which it shouldn't be at the prices Softlayer commands)

[GregEm2727]

We've been using it since June with no issues. The failover works beautifully. Only had a handful of them so far but it was nice to have virtually no downtime during the process. From my understanding it isn't ideal for applications that need high disk performance but that's what dedicated is for.

[barry[CoffeeSprout]]

I disagree, with a pricepoint far beyond simple VPS servers I expect it to have IO at least on par with those.
While of course dedicated servers with their own hardware are better, a simple "ls" should not be lagging.

[cloudharmony]

SoftLayer has a pretty good cloud offering. I've heard of complaints about disk IO which is understandable because cloud instances are all run off shared "SAN" storage. Most likely the SAN is 1GB and if that is the case, disk I/O is going to be significantly slower than typical local storage for VPS services. The advantage to this, is that if the underlying hardware your VM is running on fails, it won't take your server with it. Their bandwidth quality is good, they offer a broad range of services including server templating, 10-1000 Mb/s uplinks, CDN services, reasonably priced bare-metal servers, multiple data centers (TX, WA, DC), and their support is very responsive. Pricing for their cloud servers is a little high at $99/mo minimum or $0.15/hr. Other cloud vendors you might consider are Linode, Amazon's EC2, Storm Cloud, and Voxel.

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