Re: Recommended/Not Recommended Hosts?

Josh Berkus wrote:
> What hosts, both virtual hosts and colos, do you recommend for
> PostgreSQL-based applications...
> For my part, I've had reasonably good experiences with:
> -- Rackspace rental servers (provided you're OK with Dell hardware)
> -- Layer42 for low-end colo, but watch your bandwith, they won't.
> -- Joyent for online data warehousing (if you can deal with Solaris)

For the extremely low end of dedicated servers, I'm very happy with
Server4You ( http://www.server4you.com ) and have been running
postgres-backed hobby sites on a few of their machines for
years. $29/month for a tiny cheap dedicated box is great for
small cheap clients starting out, and it's easy to upgrade their
plans to their slightly larger systems. They have nothing high-end,
though.

For the high-end systems we run our own servers at 365 Main in
SF (where we have mixed experiences - including a painful unplanned
downtime but it was rather affordable) and a Sungard facility in
Texas (which was much better, but not at all cheap).

> I've had bad experiences with:
>
> -- Amazon EC2: uptime and availability are great, but the servers are
> sloooooooow and fulfillment of new instances is unreliable. Also,
> CPU-stealing.

Curious which instance type you had those experiences with.

Amazon provides (expensive) solutions to help address each of
those complaints, at least to some degree.

* Their "High CPU" Instances (and I think even moreso their poorly
named "High Memory" instances) have vastly improved performance
over their sloooooow normal instances. At least an order of
magnitude when I tried, and 26 times as fast if you believe
their docs[1]. Those things go for $2.40 instead of $0.085
per hour, though [2]. The I/O performance of their small
instances are horribly too; and again much improved in their
expensive ones. You can also make RAID 0 arrays of their EBS
volumes that have higher performance than one.

I haven't noticed CPU stealing on the high-CPU instance I ran.

* Fulfillment of new instances is supposed to be handled by
their "Reserved Instances" feature. You make a one-time
payment of between 350 and 2800 dollars they're supposed
to keep it available for you for 1-3 years.

I like Amazon for servers and clusters don't need to run 24x7.
For example ones that only need to be up during business hours
or peek traffic periods. Also for short-lived servers - for
example I'll be setting up an experimental hadoopdb cluster
there. For servers running 24x7 for 30 days or more, it
seems to me other solutions are more cost effective.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
[2] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing