September 4, 2008
More Virtual Servers: Slicehost update and GoGrid
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A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the experiences I had with looking into grid and VPS server solutions. Here’s a bit of an update on what’s going on there and a look at GoGrid, a “cloud computing” hosting solution that is taking on Amazon’s Elastic Computing service.
SliceHost Update
This blog is still running on a VPS at Slicehost. As you can read in my previous post, I started out with a very small, basic, slice and due to memory issues, I upgraded to 512MB and then fairly quickly to 1GB. Jangro.com has been running happily on that slice for the most part since then with one pretty major issue that came up a few days ago.
Sorry Larry. My server was locked up tight. I couldn’t get in through SSH but I could get in through the online console in Slicehost’s interface to see it frozen up with an out of memory error and some kill process errors.
I don’t often get to see the consoles of the Linux machines that I run, so that was new to me. I did find a lot of people seeing such errors with Ubuntu, so maybe this is an Ubuntu issue with memory. Maybe I’ll transfer jangro.com over to a CentOS slice. Ubuntu sure was easy to configure, but if it ain’t reliable…
My search continues. If nothing else, it is fun trying these out.
GoGrid
In the comments of that previous post, someone tipped me off to ServePath’s GoGrid service. So I thought I’d give it a try.
They promise some very nice features, including free load balancing. Their fee structure is usage based, so it’s a little uncertain as to what this will cost me. But I’m willing to give it a go for a little while to see how the math works out. At $0.19 per server RAM hour, my 512MB server will cost me about $70 for a month, plus $0.50/GB outgoing bandwidth. That could all add up, but seems reasonable to me for a great service.
Anyway, they’re offering a $50 credit, so this is on them for a week or two.
GoGrid is in Beta, so my expectations started out a little low.
The interface is well done. I can start up new server instances quickly. They have some pre-configured for Windows and Linux and as application servers or database servers.
After starting up my first server last night, a process that was very easy, my server was running within minutes on the CentOS Linux LAMP image that I selected. At least the interface said it was running. However, I couldn’t get to the server through it’s external IP address.
I jumped on a support chat session, and it was nice that someone was available at midnight. We went back and forth slowly for a few hours and we ultimately left it unresolved and escalated.
Hopefully this is a short-term issue that they’ll have worked out quickly. After seeing their interface and the promise of what’s possible there, I’m very excited about the service.
Again, reliability trumps all else, and if it’s not reliable it’s nothing.
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