Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

Greg Smith wrote:
> What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of
> dedicated hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in a
> RAID configuration and a battery-backed write cache. The cache is
> negotiable. Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also
> work; not Windows though (see "good DB performance").

We tried this with poor results. Most of the co-location and server-farm places are set up with generic systems that are optimized for small-to-medium-sized web sites. They use MySQL and are surprised to hear there's an alternative open-source DB. They claim to be able to create custom configurations, but it's a lie.

The problem is that they run on thin profit margins, and their techs are mostly ignorant, they just follow scripts. If something goes wrong, or they make an error, you can't get anything through their thick heads. And you can't go down there and fix it yourself.

For example, we told them EXACTLY how to set up our system, but they decided that automatic monthly RPM OS updates couldn't hurt. So the first of the month, we in the morning to find that Linux had been updated to libraries that were incompatible with our own software, the system automatically rebooted and our web site was dead. And many similar incidents.

We finally bought some nice Dell servers and found a co-location site that provides us all the infrastructure (reliable power, internet, cooling, security...), and we're in charge of the computers. We've never looked back.

Craig