Scott - think it would be less hassle for you to just buy some cloud space and put this onto a hosted server somewhere?
Power issues - gone
ISP gerfing their routes - less likely, someone else would complain first/louder
BW? Non-issue
Need more space/speed/BW/sw - just stroke a monthly check
thoughts?
Been there, done that. I've used various hosting solutions over the years, including for CACC.
The cloud solutions that I've looked into are either too expensive, too proprietary or too slow. I've experienced all three to varying degrees. (Mosso for instance)
As for shared (virtual) hosting, anything reasonably priced is also too slow due to being shared with too many sites plus there's a basic lack of control.
Dedicated server is a good solution for speed but the costs are high. Just as an example, the same type of hardware we're running on now would cost close to $200/month from The Planet. Others are similar.
As for the specific issues:
BW - we have 1mbps up right now going to 2mbps up soon. We're averaging about 50kbps. Some occasional spikes but it's really not an issue. Yep, I monitor it.
ISP screw-ups - yeah, that pissed me off this week. Everyone makes mistakes though and even the big DC's get hit by massive problems some times.
Power - totally agree and that's my problem to fix. Something I've been meaning to do for a while now.
Space/HW - way more than we need at the moment and I'm positioned to upgrade it easily. I'm sure everyone noticed the forum software upgrade a couple of months ago because that was kind of painful. I don't think anyone noticed that I've upgraded the hardware a couple of times in the last 3 years. Yes, I'm running the forum in a VM. The forum is snappy today (in my opinion anyway) because of the hardware it's running on.
Believe me, I've debated in my head the different options and the trade-offs for each. If Google or Amazon adapt their cloud platforms so I can run the SMF forum software on one of them, I'll have to give that serious consideration. Until then...
Once I get the power situation resolved my only concern is non-diverse transport. For now that's something I'm ok with.
If anyone has a different opinion about any of this please let me know. Or if someone can find some really cheap rack space? And I mean really cheap.
Tim, thanks for bringing this up. Rest assured I'm constantly exploring the different options especially as cloud computing evolves. That's part of my day job after all. I'm hopeful that'll be the right solution in the future but for a site on a budget it just isn't an option today.
