Cloud server better than deicated servers
 

How many of you have moved from dedicated to Cloud servers?

I'm so far behind that I don't even know what a Cloud server is.

I'm assuming it's just a computer in the NOC at a hosting company right?

So how can it be "better"?

Educate me!

I am not sure.

I was told its better for loads and the hardwear is better than dedicated.

Doesn't make much sense to me. If you want better hardware for your own server, just buy a newer box.

Anyway, I'm ignorant of it all. Sounds like a new fancy word for "virtual hosting" (not owning your own server and sharing one with thousands of other people to save money)

no, you still own it like dedicated but from what i gather its a bit better.

i thought it was just about sharing files, but i think its also to do with how it processes fils to lots of people at a time.

i have no idea to be honest. i am sure somone will tell us.

he he

i may as well talk about how planes can fly as i have no idea how they do and why when they slow down to land that they simply do not drop out of the sky. i sit under the local aiport watching them comer in slowly and still do not understand how somthing so heaving going so slow does not simply fall.

Fuck that shit

Cloud instances are part of a server you can rent on an hourly basis instead of a monthly basis. Basically, it allows you to use computing whenever you need it.

Let's say your site is huge (20 million unique per day) and that most of your traffic is in the US. That would mean that you have very big peak times.

If you run your platform on the cloud, you will be able to increase the amount of instances you load balance with during your peak time and reduce it when you have less people using your platform.

This process would save you quite a lot of money, since you don't need to rent the hardware for a whole month.

Another good usage would be if you encode videos. Let's say you run a site like youtube and most of your traffic, is again, in the US. You want to be able to encode videos very quickly but you don't want to have machines waiting to encode videos during your "less busy time".

By using cloud instances, you will be able to increase your amount of servers that encode videos during your peak time and reduce it when your video queue gets empty.

In short, cloud instances makes it possible for your application to scale up and down, which decrease your total monthly costs.

Obviously, if your platform is not very busy, you might not need this elasticity feature. :thumbsup

I'm kinda interested in www.digitalocean.com ... not ready to dump my dedicated boxes just yet though. I used their pricing to haggle a better price ;)

The hardware might be better, but it depends on the host. There are many hosts that run redhat cloud farms on crappy old hardware, so just because its "cloud" don't mean its better or faster.

Ideally Virtualization can vastly improve efficiency, free up resources, and cut costs... when done RIGHT

Here are my experiences...

MediaTemple
- piece of shit, constant database problems, ftp problems, files unavailable etc... avoid at any cost... :mad:

DigitalOcean :thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup
- for that money gives way more then some entry level server...

did some benchmarks and here are the results:

$5/month droplet with a single core and 512mb ram has score of 963
http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2013...OVhySBltZn5wHJ

$70/month intel atom (2 cores, 4 threads) server with 2gb ram has score of 432
http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2013...36b259NVOfmd5Z - $65/month

reason for this is that DigitalOcean uses premium quality hardware (SSD drives, Xeon processors, quality DDR3 ram) while on entry level server you get crappy/old/slow hardware...

I have $80 droplet and it's fucking FAST and works flawless... :thumbsup:pimp

So it all depends what do you compare...
If you compare it to quality Xeon server with SSD drives it that will cost more but the question do you need all that power, can you use it all, do you need it NOW (you can scale droplets easily) etc...

Cloud Servers – Virtualized servers running Windows or Linux operating systems that are instantiated via a web interface or API. Cloud Servers behave in the same manner as physical ones and can be controlled at an administrator or root level, depending on the server type and Cloud Hosting provider.

Cloud Service Architecture (CSA) - A term coined by Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at Amazon Web Services. The term describes an architecture in which applications and application components act as services on the cloud, which serve other applications within the same cloud environment.

more at http://cloudtimes.org/glossary/

Cloud here

If monthly billing fits your needs take a look at our OpenVZ and Xen plans, here's an article on the difference between these two most popular virtualization methods, we support both: https://secure.xenlayer.com/index.ph...openvz-and-xen

It's so cute you post a question like this whilst having no idea what the terms you use even mean.

With the amount of traffic you get, I am amazed you're even paying for a dedicated box. You could host your sites on a Pi. On a household internet connection and see no problems.

We started using cloud servers whenever we have 3rd parties develop software solutions for us where we need to analyse performance and resource usage.

We also moved several parts of our system to cloud servers, mainly parts that previously have been under DDoS attacks or where we often see spikes in the traffic. this allow us to quickly added more resources or isolate problems.

We have our phone systems, soft-switches, load balancers etc available on ready to deploy VPS images to restore services pretty much instantly if required.


We tried out a few different cloud providers but from what we could find neither of them had the required technical expertise to support our infrastructure so the cloud services we have now is more a cloud setup using xen or vmware on dedicated servers.
it's very useful especially if you use software you can bind to a cpu core / that only
support 1 core, low memory requirement etc