who offered this?

No, most people don't need it. Why bother with it?

It sounds like good future technology, but have all the bugs really been worked out of it yet?

I am sorry to say. You have no idea what you are talking about. Do you know that 100% of the fortune 100 use virtualization in there production environment. Do you know about 95% of the fortune 1000 use virtualization in a production environment? If there were performance issues. I do not think this would be the case.

A. If you do not have a server that is prepared for virtualization you should not be using it. (yes HP & Dell servers do have a configuration in the BIOS to set it up for Virtualization. It should be atleast Dual Quad Core with 32 Gigs of RAM minimal. Hopefully anyone running a Cloud service is smart enough to use Blades. )
B. I have yet to see a hosting provider offer SAS Harddrives. Let alone a good SAN solution.(if you are not using a fiberchannel SAN, an iSCSI SAN then there is no point on running virtualization in your production environment).

VPS is a form of cloud hosting. It already exists and is being used.

The major issue with the Cloud is security. Here is a nice article I read today about Cloud & Security. I wont rant on about this. Just read the article.

http://www.cio.com/article/499144/Fi...loud_Computing

@supz,

we're interested in testing clouds for our platform, do you have any good recommendations for providers? right now i'm looking at rackspace because its 4 cents cheaper for the same package at amazon. but would love any input.

i think the main thing i see from a virtualization vs dedicated server standpoint, is in the purpose of what you're using the product for. Also in the way you're application/site is coded. if you're running a straight php/cgi database driven site where you get massive traffic, then IMO you're in for a hurting no matter what you use if you're site isn't running some form of caching. Aside from our tube sites at the moment we use no PHP in our sites mainly because i refuse to lend assistance to a technology that too many people improperly use (complete database driven site). Sites should be coded either in an event driven fashion (ie CMS updates a page, or comment made, etc) or on a schedule, ie, once a day, or hour, etc. This is how i've coded our cms/sites because there's no need for immediate database connectivity data pulling.

Poor programming/and forethought leads to heavy applications, which leads to needing more equipment and more cost. imagine running your same site having less cost? I will say though that there are exceptions to the rule that you just cant get away from like ad serving. but so far i haven't seen anything that has dissuaded me from testing with virtualization, except maybe bandwidth costs. unless i can find someone that will give me a dedicated amount of bandwidth up front and anything over that is extra, like i have now with our dedicated servers.

Did I mention webair already? It's fun to be in the clouds... heaven :)

I don't have a complete understanding of all of the things that the term cloud hosting entails.

If you look at one scenario that I have heard described when talking about the cloud, operating systems, and applications will be hosted on the cloud and not on your computer. They will also be maintained and updated by the operator of the particular company you obtain the services from. You would not need to buy expensive software suites, but you would pay only for the time use them. This does sound nice.

If you look at the introduction of the ATM machine or the debit card, many of the concerns were the same as those voiced about cloud computing. Security, reliability and ease of access. For the most part, with a few glaring exceptions that pop up now and then, these problems have been dealt with to the point that people would not think of operating without these conveniences.

It will be interesting to watch this play out over time.

Cloud is ideal for the SaaS model or any software that needs to be scaled on demand. It's good for running software that is designed to run in the cloud...

However, I wouldn't use it for the old school FTP model, where you edit your website directly or play around with static HTML files a lot.

If you want to opt for cloud hosting, the software running your site has to be designed to run in the cloud.

i think we're all getting a few things mixed up here, cloud "hosting" vs cloud servers. i'm not sure about cloud hosting, as it's not something i've ever entertained a thought for, same as shared hosting.

however cloud servers are just like VPS servers in which its a rooted server you control. your "virtual" cloud server may be split between several physical servers, but you are in complete control over what software is on it and gets put on it.

Exactly..there are may uses for "cloud hosting" and may uses for "cloud
storage" alike. It all depends upon your unique setup. We offer MULTIPLE
CLOUD BASED SERVICES. Some are storage based only, so you can still
utilize your existing physical servers/assests, and some allow you to
consolidate your physical servers to cloud computing and cut costs while
gaining redudancy.

One instance in particular that has been very popular service for us is
our CLOUD STORAGE SOLUTION. This is a service that can be used NO MATTER WHERE YOU HOST. Some advantages are:

1) Endless storage - you never have to worry about adding more disk drives, having to take servers down for storage upgrades, etc. The cloud will look like its 100+TB to your machine.

2) Drive failures - never have to be down again because a critical drive that holds your content has failed or have to wait for backups to be restored, etc.

3) Additional redundancy - if a drive fails in one of our storage servers, or even if a group of the servers fail there is no outage for you. In fact you wouldn't even notice any issue. We take care of all of this on the backend. If you have a single content server or NAS/SAN today, you have a single point of failure. Our cloud totally eliminates that and the need to pay for a redundant box that does nothing until the primary fails. Your server/cluster will have 2 redundant connections to the cloud which are either gigabit or 10gigabit.

4) Speed - you're only going to get so much speed out of 1 drive in your server, or even a raid5 with 5-10 drive, its pure physics based on the spindle speed of the drives. With our cloud storage you benefit from having literally hundreds of spindles serving up your content. There is also a huge amount of cache which would be returning your
content without even having to reach the spindles. Our clusters are currently pushing 30+Gbps of content and are expandable to 500+Gbps. This will increase the life and use you'll get out of your server by not having to upgrade it prematurely because of i/o bottlenecks.

5) Backups - our cloud storage includes built in snapshots. By default we take daily snapshots and keep them for a week. You can access these snapshots directly via FTP or SSH, see exactly how ALL your content looked each day for the last 7 days and simply copy any files you need to your life file system. We also fully backup the clouds to secondary clusters as well. You can customize your snapshot frequency and retention yourself as well.

6) Cost - You only pay for what you use. Why buy a server with 2TB of storage because you think you may need it in 6 months or a year? You'll be paying for all that extra storage for months! With our cloud storage you only pay for what you use and you can scale to unlimited storage without any growing pains.

great post. I didnt know you can still use cloud if your hosted elsewhere... thanks Webair

@webair,

do you offer canadian or EU ip addresses with your cloud servers?

yes we can do Euro IP addresses, feel free to contact me for more info. :thumbsup

We do contact me for a FREE TRIAL :thumbsup

Bardman ~ yes you can use our cloud even if you are hosting elsewhere! That is one of the many benefits of out cloud hosting solutions!

Yah, 12 years hosting experience and no clue what I am saying. Sorry, forgot how GFY works.

So, my test platforms are dual quad core xeons, 16 & 32gb ram, 8 sas or wd velociraptor drive array powered by an adaptec 5805 w/bbu actually installed on the SAME server. Why? Because network attached storage has overhead. Yes, even Fiber does - and guess what? 99% of hosting providers offering networked storage are not using fiber, or even 10G stuff, they are using simple gigE networking. Now granted, most of the really cool shit about Virtualisation is when you have networked storage. But for this test, I simply want to see the overhead Xen has (Xen is what powers most cloud platforms out there).

With no xen, just straight up centos install a couple of bonnie runs, some dd, a little foray into iozone all showed my 8 drive array pushing just a hair under 800mb/s and about 1200 IOPS.

With Xen, 1 domain setup, oodles of testing to find the best setup for performance... we get well under 400mb/s and about 400IOPS.

Tell me there isn't overhead.

Virtualisation is GREAT in many cases. Just not for high performance webservers, mysql servers, email servers - basically, everything that applies to "hosting" in this industry. If it did these things awesomely, cloud hosting would account for more then the 1/30-1/60th of total hosting industry revenues...

Sure with a CDN, some good opcode cache, play around with memcache/whatever & a lot of monkeying around with your cms and coding you CAN make clouds work halfway decently. However, the average webmaster is not a programming wizard nor even an entry level system admin... how can they accomplish this? By hiring a third party who will charge then $100/hr? They might as well buy a monster dedicated server, get better performance, avoid cloud vendor lock-in (nasty api's!) and have a lower monthly bill!

Cloud hosting is VPS hosting with a fancy billing & provisioning system. But until cloud hosting can automatically scale, automatically build out clusters or have transparent process migration like HPC stuff, then it isn't going to be a good fit for the majority of people needing hosting services.

Anyways.

Give clouds another year or so. The virtualisation overhead is getting less and less everyday, performance is getting closer to bare metal and thats what we want. New features are coming out pretty much weekly and it's very interesting. For now, get shared hosting or a dedicated if you need the power. VPS is great for development or if you are on a budget, want a little extra security and aren't really concerned about performance.

Get a rackspace cloud server. Run bonnie or just do a dd.

If you can pull over 25mb/s let me know. I can't. Not with softlayer, rackspace, amazon (CRAP) or even most VPS providers.

Now, I am biased I suppose, being a host. But I don't push my hosting to this community, I target local business mostly. Adult needs far more bandwidth and lower cost per mbps then I can typically offer nowadays. That doesn't mean I don't work my servers to eke out every drop of performance I can though. My office does a lot of benchmarking and testing on this stuff... likely webair does more but then they have to be 10-20x larger then us :)

I tend to disagree with your opinion on a couple of accounts, good feedback though!

First of all the WEBAIR Cloud Hosting Solutions have been out for awhile now (Well over a year). It has been extremely fast, flexible, and stable, not to mention redundant. With regards to benchmarking we have easily pushed well over 100 mbps live video streaming on our smallest VPS package w/o any tweaking or crazy customization.

We don't look at our Cloud offerings as a replacement solution for everyone, it has place between our other product offerings, however as we've been improving its technology and capacity its starting to make sense for more and more type of clients.

As an example take a low end single dedicated server. You have multiple points of failure there. Single hard drives prone to failure, power supply motherboard, CPUs, and even RAID cards which are not the 100% reliable devices that people tend to think they are.

Compare that to a VPS that may be half the price, which gives you the same guaranteed memory/CPU, sits live on MULTIPLE physical servers, each of which can fail without any impact to you, and which utilizes the cloud storage network so you can grow your capacity needs endlessly without having to worry about drives filling or failing.

Now can you take a multi-gigabit load balanced setup and replace it with a few VPSes? No, but the decision is still open for optimization and increases to your infrastructure's efficiency.

Thanks for your feedback LM!

:)

I'm growing at a point that I'll be moving onto their Cloud Storage services verrryyy soon. Even though I have multiple NASes and they are huge, I don't think I want to invest on any more of them especially when Webair already has it in place.

20,000 HD movies in different formats and sizes already online, with another 30,000 already encoded waiting to be added due to need of writing/splitting/screenshots/etc first, the amount of storage I use now is craaaaaazzzy.

I wouldn't think of going anywhere else than Webair when I'm ready for it... they've been my host for years!! I push on upwards several Gbps sustained... not a glitch.

If anyone is considering it, you should test it out first like they said.... it's a FREE FUKEN TRIAL, so you got nothing to lose... he he he.

Peace,
Ben

I always thought you had a lot of content, but now you are telling me you have 30k more in the pipeline? holy shit - im signing up right now

Me too that's an easy sale!!! :)

The problem with cloud "storage" is that it's VERY slow for a high performance site.

Want infinite and easy to grow storage? There are your easy solutions:

1 ) Install lustre on the bare metal server. http://www.lustre.org. It's free and very easy to manage once you set the first minimal cluster to have it running. the only disadvantage is that it needs to be in the same datacenter as your web servers.
This is the cheapest solution to run in the same datacenter and have a really good storage infrastructure. The top500.org most powerful clusters use that one.

2 ) Build your own cdn and have it use bare metal boxes. Make it geolocalized and to stream from the nearest server to the surfer, preferably a server into that surfer country.
This is the cheapest option for websites that demand high bandwidth and low prices. We have a tube project running on such a thing burning near 500 Mbits for 0.50 ? (about $0.75) per Mbit (server included), or $350 for 500 Mbits server included in the price... and since the surfers are receiving the content from their own country it's considerably faster than any other hosting solution based on a single datacenter or running everything from one only place/country.

Webair Cloud has been out for well over a year now and we have tested extensively prior and during this time. Cloud Storage is much faster than traditional servers. By simply comparing the number of spindles your content is being served from you can clearly see the differences in speed. With a single server or even a few drives in RAID5 you only have a few spindles at best. With Webair Cloud Storage you're being served off of hundreds of spindles!

Yes CDN is obviously going to be fastest for the end user downloading content. But we leverage Webair Cloud for CDN and our CDN sits on our Cloud as well.

Feel free to contact us for FREE TRIAL :thumbsup

I'll chime in here and mention that lustre and other file systems of this like have GREAT performance on LARGE data sets that require large sequential reads.


If you try sucking images/lots of random small files your performance goes down the drain.

the top500.org refers to SUPERCOMPUTERS that do LARGE data computations and spit out tons of data and READS tons of data.

Funny all of this arguing, basically half the people saying "clouds rock" and
the other half saying "clouds suck". Both are half right and half wrong.
First, "cloud" is largely a buzzword with little meaning - it refers loosely to
a wide ranging number of technologies. Anyone who makes any claim about
"cloud" without getting MUCH more specific about one certain technology is
talking out of their ass.

Before going into detail, let me give you the quick summary -
By building one of the most state of the art clouds around, we learned
a lot about clouds. Here's the one and only thing most adult webmasters
need to know about clouds:

YOU DO NOT NEED CLOUD. NO WEB SITE NEEDS CLOUD.
YOU DO NOT WANT A CLOUD. PERIOD.

Secondly, and more importantly, each of these technologies that people are
suddenly applying the "cloud" buzzword to has it's specific use. None are
particularly useful for the typical adult site. If you need more than 8TB or so
of drive space, there are a number of SAN technologies to consider. SAN is
one large topic that falls under the "cloud" group. If you have less than a few
TB of content, a standard RAID array is for you. You will get no benefit from
a "cloud" (SAN). Instead, it will only cost you more money and hurt performance.

If you DO have more than 8 TB of disk space, a SAN (cloud storage) may help
you. How can I say that no web site needs a cloud, but then say that if you need
to have more than 8TB of disk space a cloud may help? Because what you NEED
is to store a shitload of data. If you need to store 20TB, you know it, and you won't
be on GFY asking "do I need to store 20TB?" The storage is the need - the cloud
may be a reasonable solution to your need, but the cloud isn't the need - it's
the solution to a need you already know about. It's also likely that some other
solution will be better than any new buzzwords, but the point is you'll have no doubt
as to what you need - tons of storage - so you won't be blindly signing up for some
cloud service without knowing why.

Similarly, if you run superbowl.com you get almost zero traffic all year, then suddenly
you get huge traffic for just a few days out of the year. You NEED to have a shitload
of capacity only for a week, and you know it. There are lots of solutions, some of
them involving stuff that is now sold as "cloud". But again you'll know what your
need, or problem, is, and your trusted sysadmin will advise you on the best solution -
which may or may not have anything to do with clouds.

So you can stop wasting your time thinking about clouds and go take care of your
business. If your current server setup is working for you, you don't need to change it.
If it's not working for you, contact your sysadmin and ask about how to solve your
problem - not how to waste money on a cloud or any other "solution" to a problem
that you don't have.

You miss the point entirely =) and no one is arguing this is a discussion =)

Yes cloud is NOT appropriate for all situations, only specific ones, we've outlined this already, some examples of how it MAY BE HELPFUL:

1) Endless storage - you never have to worry about adding more disk drives, having to take servers down for storage upgrades, etc. The cloud will look like its 100+TB to your machine.

2) Drive failures - never have to be down again because a critical drive that holds your content has failed or have to wait for backups to be restored, etc.

3) Additional redundancy - if a drive fails in one of our storage servers, or even if a group of the servers fail there is no outage for you. In fact you wouldn't even notice any issue. We take care of all of this on the backend. If you have a single content server or NAS/SAN today, you have a single point of failure. Our cloud totally eliminates that and the need to pay for a redundant box that does nothing until the primary fails. Your server/cluster will have 2 redundant connections to the cloud which are either gigabit or 10gigabit.

4) Speed - you're only going to get so much speed out of 1 drive in your server, or even a raid5 with 5-10 drive, its pure physics based on the spindle speed of the drives. With our cloud storage you benefit from having literally hundreds of spindles serving up your content. There is also a huge amount of cache which would be returning your content without even having to reach the spindles. Our clusters are currently pushing 30+Gbps of content and are expandable to 500+Gbps. This will increase the life and use you'll get out of your server by not having to upgrade it prematurely because of i/o bottlenecks.

5) Backups - our cloud storage includes built in snapshots. By default we take daily snapshots and keep them for a week. You can access these snapshots directly via FTP or SSH, see exactly how ALL your content looked each day for the last 7 days and simply copy any files you need to your life file system. We also fully backup the clouds to secondary clusters as well. You can customize your snapshot frequency and retention yourself as well.

6) Cost - You only pay for what you use. Why buy a server with 2TB of storage because you think you may need it in 6 months or a year? You'll be paying for all that extra storage for months! With our cloud storage you only pay for what you use and you can scale to unlimited storage without any growing pains.


HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND EVERYONE!! :thumbsup

check out mt (media temple www.mediatemple.com) for mainstream cloud hosting...

Naaa Webair is better :)

Carry on..