Grid/redundant hosting?

vagueware · 22nd July 2008

Hi all,

I'm new here, but have quite a lot of experience of dedicated server set ups and used to (some years ago) do an awful lot of web hosting myself.

I'm now a consultant (without the capital CON I hope) and have a client who needs something like MediaTemple's grid service but located within the EU.

He has what is in effect a Drupal site with a lot of Amazon S3 integration around assets, and he's expecting to grow quite quickly. What he'd really like is to have some redundancy and failover and the ability to grow, but right now he doesn't have the team or the VC funding in place to go down the route of dedicated hardware with a failover switch of his own making.

I'm convinced that such services exist - basically it's just a load of Apache/PHP boxes talking to a SAN, with a MySQL server somewhere (also in redundant config). Does anybody know of any such services?

We've looked at the dedicated server stuff like Flexiscale and it's not quite right for him - he doesn't want to have to manage hardware.

Anybody?

Thanks in advance, and hope that with my first post I've not broken any house rules!

Paul Robinson

dch · 22nd July 2008

Hi Paul,

With flexiscale I'm pretty sure you don't have to manage any hardware - you just buy a virtual machine with an OS pre-installed, this VM would be on a redundant setup, and you can add remove resources as required - so you only have to manage the one server as it were. I'm not saying it is the right solution for you, but you could look at setting up a test VM with them, since you can just enable it for the time you are testing and then disable at the end of the day which means it can be pretty low cost to try it out to see if it fits what you want.

You could look at GAE if it can be written in Python - I'm not sure if I quite trust that yet though with any commercial application.

I'm sure the rest of they guys here will have some more advice, and possibly even recommend going for a dedicated server with a good company as their support in *potential* downtime situations may be good enough for your client while starting out.

Cheers,
Sean

edb49 · 22nd July 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by vagueware

We've looked at the dedicated server stuff like Flexiscale and it's not quite right for him - he doesn't want to have to manage hardware.

I assume by "hardware" in this context, you really mean the operating system? With dedicated servers you don't touch the hardware, people like us look after it for you.

vagueware · 22nd July 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by edb49

I assume by "hardware" in this context, you really mean the operating system? With dedicated servers you don't touch the hardware, people like us look after it for you.

Sorry, yes. He doesn't want any responsibility for OS either, my bad. I meant hardware in the sense he doesn't want to manage failover hardware either.

In other words, he wants a UK version of the MediaTemple's grid service - fire and forget, no OS or hardware maintenance work required, period.

JamesSykes · 22nd July 2008

Sounds like you want something like Mosso, just a bit more enterprise.

They basically provide shared hosting but their platform is scalable so your sites get served by lots and lots of servers. I guess much like Media Temple.

I've not heard of anyone offering such a service in the EU. Your best bet might be to find a hosting partner that can store snapshots/configs for you so that you can rapidly scale out.

If you planned it advance and didn't need to make many changes to your APP servers you could make it so that you could just turn app servers on and off as you need them and scale upwards. It is still gonna need some o/s management, if you really don't want to do any management then I think you are going to have to pay someone to do it for you!

tony · 22nd July 2008

We're planning a new service on top of FlexiScale that will deliver exactly this, but it won't be ready until near the end of the year I'm afraid.

vagueware · 23rd July 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by JamesSykes

Sounds like you want something like Mosso, just a bit more enterprise.

They basically provide shared hosting but their platform is scalable so your sites get served by lots and lots of servers. I guess much like Media Temple.

That's right, that's exactly what I'm after, but preferably inside the EU. It looks like both MT and Mosso would do the job adequately, they're just in a country with awful data protection legislation. :-)

Quote:

Originally Posted by JamesSykes

I've not heard of anyone offering such a service in the EU. Your best bet might be to find a hosting partner that can store snapshots/configs for you so that you can rapidly scale out.

I considered that, but the problem is this site has real bursts of traffic and we need something that "just works".

Quote:

Originally Posted by JamesSykes

if you really don't want to do any management then I think you are going to have to pay someone to do it for you!

It's more that this guy doesn't want to pay anybody for it if he can get away with it (including me). He's really after a "fire and forget" solution.

Amazed there isn't anything like this out there, so maybe I'll just need to look at setting it up myself. :-)

PT-Rob · 23rd July 2008

You could always try iWeb - not sure if they have servers in the UK though... There also quite expensive

http://iweb.com/managed-hosting/web-cluster/

Edit: no they don't have a UK presence