Shared AND colocated?

[Richard]

How about someone offering a budget PHP shared hosting service that posts your site on colocated servers for 100% uptime. Does this exist?

In my case, I don't need much bandwidth or drive space, but I do need reliable uptime without the expense of dedicated colocated servers. Must be a lot of users in this catagory who don't have streaming media and want reliability and to share colocated servers with a lot of similar low bandwidth users. Better yet to combine this with VPS for more isolation.

Probably wouldn't be easy to do this and offer mysql though

If not, could be a niche market for someone.
On the other hand, using nameservers and seperate hosts one could probably accomplish the same thing.

Features I'd like:
SSH login/file transfer
PHP with MCRYPT
MYSQL
100% uptime
Fast

[Robert]

Have you considered a VDS.. Virtual Dedicated Server or as others call it, VPS, Virtual Private Server.

[Richard]

I am considering VPS as an affordable alternative, as it is said to be more stable than simple shared servers. Still the collocation/redundancy issue remains, if the VPS server goes down, what can you do then? Does anyone know how the speed of VPS compares with simple shared hosting? I would guess the overhead of the VPS would slow things down a bit. For redundancy, I suppose I could have a second copy of my site on a cheap shared server somewhere else and list that as the third and forth DNS. Of course, all database access would go down with the VPS server so the functionality of the redundant server would be limited, or else I'd have to deal with coordinating the information across two databases on different machines - no an appealing idea.

[tranz]

Richard,

When setting up a box for a VPS/VDS solution the engineer should build a box with enough brute power that the VPS layer will not degrade the speed of the box. It is also contingent on how the VPS layer is set up and the amount of resources that have been allocted to each VPS.

You can take one machine and only place one VPS on it, thus giving it all of the resources, shared with no one else. Why would this be done. Well if a client damages the VPS layer then it can be rebuilt in a matter of minutes not possibly hours.

The VPS solution would also allow you to keep your DNS, DB and anyother application running on different VPS layers within the same box.

A dual Xeon box with at least 4 to 6 Gigs of ram are needed. It can be done on less but I wouldnt. The hard drive space can be configured in several ways. Internat drives, these could be SCSI or Serial ATAs at 146G each, a SAN or Storage Area Network leaving the possibilities of expanding to well over 100TB or a NAS, expandable to around 4TB.

The SAN solution would make the most sense as it would allow the admin the ability to carve off the amount of storage and allocate it to that VPS solution in less than a minute. Providing that the space is available.

Example: 100TB could be carved into 100G blocks and allocated out to several VPS solutions. If the client leaves the 100G block of storage is absorbed back into the 100TB pool.

Hope my ranting helped it all.

Good Luck

[tranz]

Also, most VPS solutions take incremental snap shots of the VPS layers that are depoyed.

If the actual hardware dies there is a copy of the site available. When a new server is placed into the cabinet or parts repaired it is possible to simply copy the last snapshot over to the new VPS layer with all of the same configurations. Thus you are back up and running.

[Richard]

The Dual Xeon box with 4 gigs sounds great! I bet finding vps hosting with that kind of power is going to be pretty expensive though.

[Robert]

Tranz, have you guys decided what VDS Software you will be using?

[tranz]

Robert,

The server is a blade server and go to a max of 8G of memory total.

I am going to deploy Ensims VPS and also utilize their Server Manager software as well.

I will be taking several blades and dedicating them to the VPS deployment.

I will then pull the amount of storage needed from the SAN and allocate it to each VPS as needed.