NYCPHP Meetup

[Paul A Houle]

Aleksey Korzun wrote:
> Hello,
>
>    Just wanted to throw in another suggestion of using Rackspace Cloud
>    (http://www.rackspacecloud.com/); specifically their Cloud Servers
>    offering.
>
>   
    I still like the stability of just plain ordinary dedicated hosts.  
You just need one site that pulls in $250 a month to pay for hosting for 
a hundred smaller sites.  You can install the PHP and other software you 
want (right now I have a PHP 5.2 and a PHP 5.3 server running side by 
side),  and not deal with the weirdnesses that tend to exist with 
virtual servers:  for instance,  I used to be on a virtual server that 
did something strange that wouldn't let you compile GNU emacs.

    Six months ago I was running big batch jobs that took three days to 
run.  I was thinking about going to Amazon EC2,  Map/Reduce and all 
that.  Then I thought through the problem again,  compressed my data 
structures,  put all of the random-access stuff into RAM and found my 
three day jobs became 20 minute jobs.

    When my data set gets 100x bigger (maybe in 2012) I'll need to think 
about cloud computing again.