Agile In Everything Web And Mobile – AgileStorm

Here are the Slicehost’s advantages:

• Easy provisioning of new or existing slice(system).  Take a couple of minutes to create a new slice.  You can also resize slice’s memory easily(be warned though: the time it takes to get the resize done depends on how many people are ahead of you doing resizing and some other things).
• If you mess up the slice(eg: mess up the network setting so that you can no longer ssh in), you can use the web-based console to get in. When you really mess up your slice, you can drop into rescue mode to fix your slice image.
• You can get private IPs for your slices.  So every bit that transmits between your slices using private IPs is not counted against your bandwidth.
• All your slices’ bandwidth to the outside world is pooled together.
• Slicehost has a API that you can use other services like CloudKick to monitor your slices.
• Slicehost uses Xen-based virtualization which provides better isolation so my neighboor slices in the same physical machine can’t bring my slices down.
• Excellent documentation,  article and tutorial on getting things up and running.
• Active user community(forum, live chat).
• Quick responses on support tickets.  It usually takes less than 10 mins.  Or you can go directly to live chat to ask for an update.
• Last, the most important and useful feature that we can’t ABOSOLUTELY live without: one-click manual/scheduled backups(up to 3 backups per slice), restore a backup to any slice we own.  We have a peace of mind when we know that every slice is backed up on a daily basis.  Second:  When we do upgrades, we can rollback to a backup if the upgrade fails.  Third:  whenever we need a new slice, we can create one based on a backup.  so we don’t need to set up a new slice from scratch.  The backup feature is totally worth the extra charge.

As good as Slicehost is, here are some gotchas:

• Some people argue that Slicehost’s 64-bit systems use more memory than needed.  But I am not going to try another provider without the backup feature.
• As told by Slicehost support:  don’t do OS upgrade on your slices as it’s most likely to break, and Slicehost isn’t going to provide support the upgraded OS.  Your best route is create another slice with the latest OS you want, and load the data on it.  So when you pick a OS for your slice, you should get one with long term support(eg: for Ubuntu, pick the one with LTS).
• Slicehost doesn’t allow you to transfer IP address from one slice to another slice.

Slicehost has become a role model for every hosting provider.

admin IT Amazon Web Services, Backup, Hosting, Slicehost, Virtual Private Server, VPS

When you need to have a web site, a web application or a mobile application(it still needs to communicate your own server) online,  you need to decide what hosting service you need.  For starters, it boils down to the following three choices:

Shared Web Hosting

• The cheapest option.  Service is managed.  Provider takes care of security patch, and system-wide software updates
• No guarantee of resources – providers generally pack as many accounts as possible in one box.  They’d shut you off when your site becomes popular as it eats up too much resource.  Your site’s performance will also degrade when another site on the same machine gets popular
• Very limited control of environment.   You can’t install your own software which depends on system software that the server doesn’t have.  Shared hosting providers are reluctant to install not-so-common software

Dedicated Hosting

• You rent a physical machine from your hosting provider. You can install whatever you want with the machine
• It’s generally more expensive than VPS.   They are mostly self-managed(you takes care of security patch, and system-wide software updates), but you can pay more to get managed dedicated hosting
• Hardware cost is going down every year as new hardware comes out(Moore’s law).  Providers generally don’t low the price on your plan or upgrade even though the hardware of your machine has depreciated a lot. So you may get stuck with a outdated machine for a while.  It’s generally easy to have your provider upgrade the memory
• If you want to upgrade(moving to a new plan),  you generally need to transfer all the data on your own and reinstall everything.
• If your server is sitting idle most of time(your website/web application doesn’t generate enough load/traffic), you can’t really scale down the server resource(reduce the memory, downgrade the CPU) so that you can pay less

VPS(Virtual Private Server

• A physical server is partitioned into smaller isolated containers(VPS) using virtualization software.  The virtualization software allocates resources(CPU, memory, bandwidth, etc) to each VPS.  Each VPS has its own operation system you choose.  You can install whatever you want in VPS
• VPS is generally cheaper than dedicated hosting, but it really depends on the server spec
• Sometimes, a VPS is more powerful than a dedicated machine because the VPS sits inside a very power machine
• Hosting providers can generally give you more resources when you upgrade to your hosting plan, or take away resources when you downgrade your hosting plan
• Some VPS providers let you clone your VPS.  One common use is that you can set up one VPS, then clone it to have a cluster setup
• It’s easy to back up a VPC by taking snapshots.   Whenever before you upgrade/patch software, take a snapshot so that you can  roll the server back if something messes up(this happens more often than you think)

Our recommendation

We recommend going with VPS instead of dedicated hosting because VPS gives a virtualized dedicated hosting environment with more flexibility in regard of resource and backup.

We never recommend clients to use shared hosting because it’s too easy to grow out of it.  Lacking control of the hosting server really tights our hands.

When you grow your business after the above options are no longer good enough, you can go with colocation(bring and install your own hardware in data center.  Data center takes care the power and network connectivity), or scale up/down on demand with cloud computing(eg: Amazon web services such as S3, EC2)

admin IT Dedicated hosting service, Shared web hosting service, Virtual Private Server, Web Hosting