Re: Recommended/Not Recommended Hosts?

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 10:43, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> All,
>
> What hosts, both virtual hosts and colos, do you recommend for
> PostgreSQL-based applications, and which ones have you had bad
> experiences with?   If we get a list together, we'll put it up somewhere
> community.
>

From the colo perspective:

If your app is bandwidth-hungry, I recommend Equinix or some other
carrier neutral facility where you can get good bandwidth prices.
Space will be more expensive, but if you're using a lot of bandwidth,
it should be cheaper and more reliable overall.

Now for carriers in such a facility (I generally run BGP with multiple
carriers):

*) Cogent - I've had good luck with them overall, and they're cheap.
*) Level(3) - No issues with them either. They also offer IPv6 now I
believe. NOC is kind of a pain though to get through to though.
*) Internap - They're fine, but I don't think they're worth their
price premium. This is all anecdotal, but I've had more reliability
issues with them than I've had with Cogent. So YMMV. If you're going
to only have *one* carrier though, this might be a good choice as they
have transit (not peering) agreements with everyone that should make
them immune to the various political peering disputes that have
happened over the years.

There are a ton of other carriers that I don't have recent experience
with, so ask around.

Usually, I'll setup 2-3 carriers, then give Cogent highest preference
for all traffic that doesn't terminate on one of the other carriers.
Otherwise the other carrier wins. I find that it's a good way to go
for bandwidth cost savings, but now I'm getting into more of a network
engineering discussion. Dedicated servers/cloud stuff can help you
avoid this infrastructure stuff, but at the cost of much higher MRCs
when you get above very small deployment sizes. But if you're at the
stage where you're wondering which host to use, that's probably the
size you're at.