Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Craig James <craig_james(at)emolecules(dot)com> wrote:
> 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 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.

I ran this way on a Quad-processor Dell for many years, and then,
after selling the business and starting a new one, decided to keep my
DB on a remote-hosted machine. I have a dual-core2 with hardware RAID
5 (I know, I know) and a private network interface to the other
servers (web, email, web-cache)

Just today when the DB server went down (after 2 years of reliable
service .... and 380 days of uptime) they gave me remote KVM access to
the machine. Turns out I had messed up the fstab while fiddling with
the server because I really don't know FreeBSD as well as Linux,

I think remote leased-hosting works fine as long as you have a
competent team on the other end and "KVM over IP" access. Many
providers don't have that... and without it you can get stuck as you
describe.

I have used MANY providers over they years, at the peak with over 30
leased servers at 12 providers, and with many colocation situations as
well. The only advantage with colocation I have seen .... is the
reduced expense if you keep it going for a few years on the same
box..... which is a big advantage if it lets you buy a much more
powerful box to begin with.

Providers I prefer for high-end machines allow me to upgrade the
hardware with no monthly fees (marked-up cost of upgrade + time/labor
only).... that keeps the cost down.