NYCPHP Meetup

[Kenneth Downs]

Joseph Crawford wrote:
> if you want fast stable machines i would suggest rackspace, although 
> they are not the cheapest around they have excellent support and service

I just went through this with a customer.  Here is the rehash.

My experience:

Rackspace: triple the cost.  What do you get?  Very knowledgeable tech 
support available w/in 5 minutes 24/7/365.  They claim 100% network 
uptime through multiple redundancy.  I've run one server with them.  My 
customer paid $500/month and they did everything we asked.  A little 
beauracratic when you first get started.  They do Red Hat, but no 
gentoo.  However, and this is HUGE, they offered absolutely no 
guarantees about repair time in the event of catastrophe such as loss of 
hard drive or CPU blowing out (it happens, and always at the worst 
moment).  This struck me as extremely odd.  I went around with them on 
this several times asking the question many times and the answer was the 
same, if the machine goes down due to hardware failure we make no promises.

Sevenl.net.  Lowest price.  What do you get?  A machine up and running 
in 24 hours. They had intermittent network outages when I first started, 
nearly 3 outages of up to 10 minutes.   They also had a neighborhood 
power failure during business hours last month and were down for several 
hours.  These systems are suitable as failover servers, because it is 
reasonable to expect them to be up for the few hours you may need one if 
the main server goes down.   I've had one for a year, and have just 
leased a new one on behalf of a customer.  And they install gentoo 
linux, the coolest distribution ever.

ServerPronto.com.  Same basic services as SevenL.net, except the machine 
was running a few hours after they charged my credit card, instead of 24 
hours.  I've had exactly one incident of downtime for about 3 hours one 
evening in the one year that I've had one of their servers.  They do gentoo.

Bottom line: If you want guaranteed million-percent uptime, you will 
have to go with two servers, one as a failover if the main one goes down 
(remember Rackspace is only perfect until the first time they aren't, 
and on that day you'll be in the hotseat explaining, "well gosh, I mean, 
it's never happened before.  Failover server?  Well, no, we didn't, 
because Rackspace is so expensive and they never have problems...."). 

So my customer and I figured we could go with Rackspace at 400/month + 
SevenL.net at 100, or, since we were going the failover route, take the 
ServerPronto at 150/month and the failover on SevenL at 100.

If you do the failover route, its a good idea to pick systems very far 
away from each other and owned by different people.  I do the SevenL + 
ServerPronto because one is in Florida (hurricanes) and the other is in 
Canada (icebergs).  I figure the chance of both going down by natural 
disaster or mismanagement is pretty small.

>
> On 11/14/06, *David A. Roth * <rothmail at comcast.net 
> <mailto:rothmail at comcast.net>> wrote:
>
>     It can have great prices, fast machines with tons of disk space,
>     wonderful customer service and be totally Linux friendly, but if they
>     are down 40 minutes or so at random times it isn't acceptable to an
>     online catalog web site. While a promise of an uptime of 99% sounds
>     near perfect, 1% downtime can be a lot especially when its at peak
>     times. I might be expecting too much, and it might cost too much,
>     but I
>     thought I would post and see if anyone has recommendations and
>     solutions for web hosting services that have better than what I have
>     described in uptimes.
>
>     Thanks in advance,
>
>     David Roth
>     rothmail at comcast.net <mailto:rothmail at comcast.net>
>
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>
> -- 
> Joseph Crawford Jr.
> Zend Certified Engineer
> Codebowl Solutions, Inc.
> http://www.codebowl.com/ <http://www.codebowl.com/>
> Blog: http://www.josephcrawford.com/
> 1-802-671-2021
> codebowl at gmail.com <mailto:codebowl at gmail.com>
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