Linux hosting options, pros and cons

Dan Jenkins dan at rastech.com
Sat Feb 10 11:18:08 EST 2007


Ted Roche wrote:

>  A client with a database-backed LAMP application is considering
>  moving to a new hosting provider for their system. Surfing the web,
>  they find all of these $6.95/month deals and can't figure out why
>  anyone would pay more. I know there are a number of folks on the list
>  who provide such services for themselves or their customers, and
>  would welcome feedback, from what questions should be asked to what
>  features we should be looking at. (I should explain "we" - I am the
>  developer of the app, and an adequate sysadmin, and will likely end
>  up installing, configuring and maintaining the system)
>
>  Bandwidth: minimal. The system is a custom query application used by
>  a small number of customers. Data is plain 'ol HTML with a few token
>  branding graphics.
>
>  Basic software requirements: Linux Apache 2.x SSL PHP 4.3 or better
>  with the ability to add PEAR modules MySQL 4.1.19 or later or 5.1
>  ssh/scp access, preferably on a non-standard port rsync support
>  ability to add custom cron jobs outgoing email, a few a day.

Barring SSH/SCP and RSYNC, ICDSoft provides the above for $6 per
month. I have used them for some years happily. You can get SSH and
RSYNC, but you need to explicitly ask for a shell account and you'll be
on a different class system, which I have not used. The pricing was the 
same.

>  Storage: data is dinky, a couple of megabytes, HTML, CSS and .js
>  files a few hundred K

1 GB storage, 20 GB bandwidth per month for ICDSoft

>  Reliability: of course, clients expect web presence to work like
>  dialtone: five 9's at no extra cost.

For the five servers we use with ICDSoft, four had uptime stats of 99.967%
and one 99.997%. They all used to be 100%, but their upstream provider for
the Boston location messed up rather badly (failed to have a functioning
failover line, contrary to the SLA, and did not have any spare parts to fix
a failed router) and created a 7 hour outage. That has been the only outage
in our five years with ICDSoft. Out of 1314720 minutes (913 days) uptime 
for
one of the servers (all are similar times), there were 426 minutes 
downtime.
Before the upstream messup it was 2 minutes downtime (which was scheduled).

>  Security: Client requires https communications, so a certificate is
>  mandatory. Only one httrps per IPaddress/port combination, so an ISP
>  would be charging extra for that, too.

No additional charge for SSL support. Get your own certificate from 
whomever
and they'll install it. I prefer Thawte, but have used those cheapy 
chained certs
without any problems for other clients.

>  The data is confidential business information, so there would be a
>  concern with sharing an instance of MySQL and Apache. What are
>  opinions of the current technologies of VMs and VPSes and UMLs?

 From my viewpoint with ICDSoft, I appear to have separate MySQL areas. I
have never tried to break such isolation though. I do have two clients 
on the
same host and the only way to share data between them is by enabling remote
connections, which are off by default. I have asked if there was another 
method.

My other recommendation is MV Communications. The only outages I
experienced was due to the city-wide (Manchester) very long outages.

My first criteria for vendors is level of support. MV is a pleasure to 
work with.
ICDSoft uses a web-based system, which emails you when they answer. They
guarantee one hour response time, but the longest I ever waited was 23 
minutes.
They apologized as they had had an earthquake. The average response time is
3.4 minutes for me over the 115 questions I've posed to them (excluding 
the 23
minute reply). More importantly, all of the answers have been correct.

Hope this helps some.
-- 
Dan Jenkins (dan at rastech.com)
Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA --- 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support Excellence for over a Quarter Century



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