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Summary of "Mosso alternatives" hosting discussion in #drupal
I asked for some advice for moving a client off of Mosso (managed cloud vps hosting) in #drupal tonight. Here's a summary:
* Lots of people in the room use Slicehost for their own personal development stuff. They give VPS hosting plans and are owned by Rackspace, but are *far* cheaper. Downside is you have to manage everything yourself, which as you've already said you don't want to do.
* However, someone pointed out that Pair.com (who have been around basically forever and host PHP.net among other large sites) has a new managed VPS hosting just unveiled last week: http://www.pair.com/services/vps/ This got a lot of "Ooohs" and "Aaahs."
* Of course, none of these offer the sort of robust "auto-scaling to the cloud" thing that Mosso does. I discussed with a few people about that, though, and they had their doubts. What it sounded like to them was that in actual fact what that meant is that your resources used on your VPS would scale up to the maximum of a single machine.
* One way around that might be to hire a company to do monthly maintenance on your cloud instance. One of the names recommended was http://totalserversolutions.com/, but there are lots of companies that are basically "sysadmins for hire" for hourly rates. This would allow you to choose any cloud host you wanted, like Amazon (which is apparently kind of pricey) and let someone else worry about getting the LAMP stack humming along.
Other keywords from the discussion:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/: Where to go for opinions on web hosts. There's a very long Mosso thread at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=492340
Wiretree, Liquidweb, Knownhost : Good managed VPS hosting.
Kurt Vanderwater of http://www.worxco.com/ (a Drupal company) was in the channel, has his own data center and is able to set up custom packages.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/ - allows you to install your own operating system on a cloud instance on the web. This apparently gets operations managers "in a tizzy." :)
http://rimuhosting.com/,http://www.servint.net/, http://mediatemple.net/: Other hosts mentioned.
Avoid DreamHost. :P
admin companies
We were using totalserversolutions but they were unable to keep up with up our demands (this might have been our fault). We now use admingeekz.com and we are very happy. (We have more than twenty servers. Your experience might different for a VPS or two.)
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Just wanted to throw in my
Just wanted to throw in my two cents. RiffTrax.com has begun to buckle under server demand, and so we are looking at two solutions: Acquia Fields (which seems to be available now, but you have to call them for a quote), and WorkHabit's Elastic2, which is not available to the public until in June, according to David, the head sales guy.
Both companies' hosting solutions are built upon Amazon AWS and EC2, the Elastic Compute Cloud, and include in their infrastructure Drupal-specific technology to automatically scale the hosting capacity as demand requires.
We're chomping at the bit to get on with them; will let everyone know as soon as we go live.
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afaik amazon is not pricey
that is all.
I'd love to see comparisons that show faster VPS for less money from a reputable company.
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"Avoid DreamHost. :P" Why?
Curious why people suggest avoiding DreamHost ?
B) Don't give up your biological right to think.
DH is ok
I've been using Dreamhost for a few years and haven't run into problems yet. I'm not using it for anything major, just my person site(s), for anything terribly important I'd go to slicehost.
Avoid Dreamhost... for *MySQL-based* sites
The problem with Dreamhost is latency. They separate their MySQL database servers from their apache servers, and load both with hundreds of users (on their basic accounts, at least). This means that applications like Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, etc., have to spend an extra bit of time connecting with a separate server for every database connection. Thus they have a bad reputation for CMS folks... and I can back that up with real-world experience. For cheap hosting, I'd go with HostGator or Hot Drupal rather than DreamHost.
I have never tried a VPS through Dreamhost, but I know they have a tendency towards overloading servers.
Slicehost is great if you have the admin moxie to configure the server.
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No better with Dreamhost PS
I upgraded to a PS machine about 5 months ago at Dreamhost. I am having major problems. Periodic slow page loading is a huge issue. Sometimes my frontpage on a test server is taking 10-20 seconds to load. No help from support (which is email only). They seem to think it's my drupal configuration and modules. They don't seem to hear the part "It was working great 2 months ago and nothing is changed on my end." Today I decided to switch providers.. What used to take me 10 minutes to do admin wise is taking an hour. ENOUGH!
one PS or two?
If you use Dreamhost PS you need two PS servers: 1 for web and 1 for database. Otherwise the database is still a shared machine and you will be almost no better off than before...
They also offer LigHTTPD as an option for the webserver now, for those who like that.
As I've said before, I use/support Dreamhost, Mosso, Amazon EC2, Slicehost, Mediatemple, RackSpace, and colocated/hosted dedicated servers. None of them are a clear answer as being the "best" one to use...it's a nuanced and complicated situation.
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Oh I have a PS database and a
Oh I have a PS database and a PS server. For the last month I have been having up to 15 second load times ... on the front page. After about 15 emails I was told to perform some process monitoring (isn't that their job?) and report back with the findings. They also wanted me to completely remove all my modules and run the site daily, adding back in modules 1 by 1 until I found the problem child.
They don't seem to understand that my site has been unchanged for over 2 years, was running fine until a month ago and now it has periodic slow response. traceroutes have always been fine. It's not on my end.
last night, my site suddenly, without any intervention was flying along again. Funny, how it happened just after I signed up for an account with Mosso (now formally rackserver Cloud Array.. or something like that).
For about 5 hours I thought I had acted prematurely, but then again this morning, load times of up to 10 seconds again.
10 seconds doesn't sound like a long time but when it takes me 10 minutes to do the job with a 1 second page load, and now it's 10.. Suddenly the job becomes 100 minutes long.
I think everyone should be
I think everyone should be inherently distrustful of any service which promises "unlimited" disk space and bandwidth, as Dreamhost now does, for reasons I outline in this blog post. Stick with companies which have clearly-defined limits on your resource usage, so you know what you're getting when you put your money down. I used to be a fan of Dreamhost, but left them around the time they started with these sorts of hijinks - the fact that they had a major outage around that time may or may not be coincidental, but it sure didn't help.
For VPS service, our company has recently opened an account with RootBSD, which provides the cheapest FreeBSD VPS service that I've been able to find. Aside from their web-based control panel, which is ugly and weird, I have no complaints so far; though on the other hand, we've yet to either really stress the system or file a support ticket, so don't take this as a ringing endorsement just yet.
Linode.com
Perhaps marketing is what linode lacks, which is otherwise a no-brainer alternative to slicehost (sorry fanbois) for VPS solutions. And it's cheaper too! The back end and management features.. nothing that I miss in there for all fairly moderate Drupal websites!
But in the end, anything that provides SSH access and doesn't store the passwords in text will do :P for "running basic Drupal stuff".
VPS, or rather cloud services is where you start the game, having the customizability of dedicated servers at a cheaper prices (mostly). Enterprise requirements are a different talk altogether.
Why
Why move of mosso in the first place?
[Drupal++]
No SSH
No SSH on Mosso.
My two cents...
I've been running with Spry for almost 3 years now on their VPS and they have been very helpful, reliable, and configurable. It's not cloud, but burstable RAM, in my opinion, can be just as effective for those 'Digg', 'Slashdot', or 'Techmeme' times.
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I could care less about
I could care less about shell. A really good ftp client does everything I need. I have had shell for 3 years and have never once accessed it. I do 99.9% of my work inside of drupal and .1% in an ftp client. If the host can do the server maint and tuning then I don't even need to be in shell. The last time I was using shell extensively, I was running a MOO. That was a long time ago. I hate command lines.
An FTP client is sufficient
An FTP client is sufficient for installing and maintaining a couple standard Drupal installations. But for developers or people running Drupal installations doing esoteric multisite stuff and such, life gets really, really hard if we don't have shell access - if we don't have the ability to use the server like the computer it is, instead of just a remote disk.
Never felt the need for anything more complex than FTP? Fair enough - though I at least hope you're using SFTP. No need to fix what ain't broken. But for some, including myself, shell access is impossible to live without.
I can't imagine maitaining
I can't imagine maitaining Drupal without SSH. Setting up symbolic links, updating modules, even a last minute edit of a file in vim (may it rot in hell). I've even taught a few people how to use the command line just because I couldn't watch them uploading over FTP. Trying to upload TinyMCE over FTP is very very time consuming. No SSH is a deal breaker on hosting for me but I can see how many people would find it sufficient.
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vim (may it rot in
Emacs fan?
HotDrupal
I swear by HotDrupal (a service from Holistic Solutions). After moving off shared hosting, I tried MediaTemple because of the supposed scalability but it never lived up to the hype, my sites were slow and I was constantly paying overage charges.
Then I moved to EUKHOST which was great but the self-management part was tough and I couldn't keep the server properly maintained. I really like their service but they're not Drupal specialist.
Came across HotDrupal on d.o, tried one site and moved the rest over there. I'm now serving several sites on there with a total of about 15000 uniques a month and all that for $25 a month. The service and reliability are without parallel. It's not as customisable as a true VPS but I have SSH access which makes me happy enough and the CPanel manager's easy too.
Dominik
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http://bohemica.com
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Dominik Lukes
http://www.dominiklukes.net
http://www.hermeneuticheretic.net
http://www.czechupdate.com
http://www.techwillow.com
I have used Media Temple and
I have used Media Temple and i think very powerful.
Drupal Development - Drupal Tutorials
Are we talking about cloud
Are we talking about cloud hosting providers? There are a few: Mosso, MediaTemple, Uptimehost. I think Hostway also has their own now too.
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