A few days ago I moved the server again. If you remember, after my last hosting provider was broken into by malicious hackers and I had no ETA for my server being available, I moved OSG into Amazons EC2 infrastructure.
The process was quite straight forwardand their clear pricing meant that I could be sure roughly how much it would cost. The only part I couldnt work out is the bandwith costs. Anyway I decided to leave OSG with Amazon for one month so that I could get an idea of the total cost of hosting a server instance with them.
Its been about a month now and the costs are in. The bandwith costs were tiny (probably due to the very small ammount of traffic that my site gets) and so my calcualtions were spot on.
Does it compare?
How does it compare ? Well thats not a straight forward comparison as my old server had 512megs of Ram and the smallest Amazon instance is 1.7gigs. So while the Amazon instance is more expensive, when you compare it to a server with the same amount of RAM its actually a very good price.
That said, I dont need all that extra RAM, so I have elected to move OSG back out of the Amazon cloud and back to a hosting provider.
Where did I go?
I have moved over to Linode – these guys seem to have good feedback on http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ and my experience with them has certainly been very good so far compared to my previous hosting provider.
I will no doubt do a mini write up on that in a week or two but please let me know if anything isnt working
OSG
Some of you may have noticed that this site was down for a little while. It seems my hosting company were victims of a massive incursion by malicious hackers and, at the time of writing, my original server still hasn’t been restored after 24 hours downtime.
While you have to feel sorry for them and all the extra work that they have been doing to rectify the issue now is a good time to go back over that age old question. Do you have a DR plan? Are you backing up, is your documentation up to date, have you tested a restore? Luckily I was in the process of documenting my setup when this happened and so my pain hasn’t been as great as I should imagine some others are experiencing
I think its also worth mentioning that, as I had no ETA of when my sites would be restored (or even if they could be restored by the provider) I moved everything into Amazons EC2 offering. This seems like an ideal platform for just such an occurrence, if you dont know how long your main site will be down you can very quickly get servers back on-line and then when and if your original platform is ready you can move back and you will only have had to pay for the hours/bandwidth that you have used.
If your on-line presence is important to you, and I cant think of many businesses that this doesn’t apply to, I would encourage you to look at adding something like Amazons Cloud offering to your DR strategy – and don’t forget to test, remember you only pay for the hours that you use and this is from as little as $0.10 an hour
OSG
For sometime now I have been of the opinion that email is broken. It worked at the time but now over 90% of email traversing the internet is spam. Sure, there are pretty good anti spam and anti virus systems but I honestly think we are just postponing the inevitable. I have had this conversation with friends many times and mostly they disagree but I honestly think we need something to replace email
Google Wave
Ive just watch the 80minute talk about Googles Wave and I think they really could be onto something. It combines rich interaction with very social features and its kind of an opt in model, like Facebook or Twitter, where you have to add people to your system. This means no unsolicited waves.
They have been working on this for two years and it looks really good. Dont take my word for it, go and check out the video here
Finally, and I have saved the best until last, they will be releasing it under open source so that you can set up your own Wave platform and it has federation built right in so that it will interoperate with other Wave platforms brilliantly
Lets hope this finally kills off email – it had a good innings but its time for it to go now
OSG