Hosting

Hosting / IT / Utility — 2 Comments
23
Nov 09

Backups in the Hosting World

Something we’ve been finding pretty frustrating lately is the whole issue of backups. On my desktop I run Dropbox, but there still isn’t a Dropbox quality (or ease of use) service for hosting companies. If you run a website / service / business you need at the very least, a disaster recovery plan, and that plan involves backups. There are several ways hosting companies deal with this.

1) They dont do them

Yeah you read that right. You don’t actually get backups. These policies are buried deep in their terms of service or usage policies. It’s totally up to you to backup your server content. If you don’t and your server crashes its the end-users problem. High profile data losses can destroy any business, especially startups.

2) Highly Available Storage

This strategy is usually combined with #1 above. Instead of backing up your data they just replicate your data across multiple drives. This means that the chances of you losing your data go down, and depending on the technology used to safeguard against drive failure, you can get really high availability. (iSCSI and ZFS come to mind). Its important to remember that RAID is NOT a backup solution, only a way to mitigate potential failures.

3) OS Level Backups

In this strategy end users are still required to worry about their own data, and choose which sets of data they backup. A hosting company will provide an end-point for you to send your backups to. If you’ve ever done managed or dedicated hosting, this is often the product that is sold. Tivoli or some other backup client is provided, but still relies on either a consultant, sysadmin or service provider to configure correctly.

4) VM Level Backups

There’s another solution that works, and it gets around a lot of the issues with OS level backups, like running a database while doing a backup, etc. Snapshot the entire virtual machine and replicate the VM to an off-site storage system. For better performance, use data de-duplication technology to reduce the amount of time to perform your backup. This system seems to work well, however few providers are offering it.

What do you think? What’s your favourite backup strategy as a hosting company?

Amazon / Hosting / Oppportunity / Standards / Utility — No Comments
27
Oct 09

Competing in a Commodity Hosting Market

We knew it was going to happen but perhaps not so soon. Today Amazon announced that it would be reducing it’s pricing on EC2 linux instances by 15%. That’s a pretty significant cost reduction but we also have to factor in a whole bunch of other costs to figure out what their strategy seems to be.

Unlike with most bundled VPS services where you get a certain amount of disk space, bandwidth, memory and CPU resources, the Amazon model breaks things down into separate categories. You pay per use on everything. Instances per hour, Bandwidth and Storage per Gig, etc. Under this model it makes sense to shift your revenue to things that are higher margin. What that means is that with enough scale, you could almost afford to break even on the server instance and make money on other things – like bandwidth.

This is similar to the concept of “Freemium” in the Web Apps world. You get to use the basic version at a heavy heavy discount (in some cases free), but the add-ons, extra functionality, etc results in having to pay. The difference is that in the harsh reality of hosting, it costs real money to run a server.

Cloud Computing / GeoVPS / Hosting / Media — No Comments
16
Oct 09

Layerboom Launch – Announcing GeoVPS

We’ve really had our heads down working on our VPS platform. With every passing week we’ve made a lot of progress, hit a few road blocks, and learned a lot more about the hosting industry. We’ve also spoken with a bunch of dedicated server providers, developers, and a lot of really bright people. It’s through that process that we think we’ve come up with a solution that will help solve a major problem for many hosting companies by providing them with a way to start selling Virtual Private Servers in an efficient, economical, and easy manner.

We decided early on that part of the process in providing hosting companies with the best platform imaginable would be to get even more real world experience; To step into their shoes and demonstrate that – yes – this really does work.

So that’s what we did.

We built (in record time no less) a VPS hosting company using our Layerboom Platform. Our service is called GeoVPS, and it’s live right now. Go check it out, and if you’re interested in grabbing one of our hosted VPS servers subscribe to our mailing list and we’ll provide you with an account and a discount code that will give you 50% off your first server for 6 months.

Remember that we’re just starting out, so there will be some unanswered questions and that’s where you come in. We’re more than happy to answer your questions and listen to your feedback – If something is missing then please tell us! The best way is to hit us up on GetSatisfaction, or check out the Layerboom operated support system at support.layerboom.com

We’re lucky to be working closely with Peer1 Networks on this one. The servers have been provided by ServerBeach while we work with the Peer1 team as part of their CloudXcelerator program.

For those of you who have already signed up to the GeoVPS and mailing lists we’ll be emailing you soon with information and the supersecret location to sign up.

While we’re confident this service is going to be rock solid, we still have a whole bunch of features to add, and optimizations to make so that the experience for VPS customers, and hosting companies is the best it can possibly be. But we’re going to need your help so don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Thanks!

- The Layerboom Team

If you’re a hosting provider and you’re interested in chatting about the Layerboom Platform, then please send us a message and we’ll get in touch!

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