Reliable Cloud host ?

Thu Mar 1 23:44:07 UTC 2012

Randy Carpenter wrote:
> Does anyone have any recommendation for a reliable cloud host?

> Basic requirements:
> 
> 1. Full redundancy with instant failover to other hypervisor hosts upon hardware failure (I thought this was a given!)

Assuming a simple set up as you suggest. If what you want to do is a lot 
more complex it would be worth your while to use your own hardware at a 
coloc, and alternatively set up your own VPSes.

I think your best bet is to design your systems with failover taken into 
account and not to depend on the VPS provider to provide you this.

Say you want smtp in addition to DNS. You would set up a VPS in 2 
different locations (or more) using 2 different VPS providers. You set 
up your favourite name server and email server on each server, configure 
your mx records to point to both and you tell your registrar to use both 
servers as the nameserver for your domain(s).

When a server goes ofline dns queries and emails automagically go to the 
other server.

No need to depend on one single VPS provider and their crappy 
infrastructure.

> 3. reasonable pricing (No, $800/month is not reasonable when I need a tiny 256MB RAM Server with <1GB/mo of data transfers)

Lots of reasonably priced VPS providers out there. And once you have set 
up redundancy in your own design it doesn't matter much how redundant 
they are. More important will be how spam/pollution free the network 
neighbourhood is. Amazon would not be the best choice in that regard.

I have had good luck with small local VPS providers, often ISPs.

Greetings,
Jeroen

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