Cloud suggestions for hosting company

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Posted by loganbest, 10-09-2011, 12:22 AM
I've currently got a dedicated box with cPanel/WHM which i'm pretty pleased with as I've had it since 2007 but I'm very interested in making a switch to complete cloud servers. I've been working with a cloud cluster on rackspace for a few months now and I love it. The only problem I can see with moving everything over to cloud servers for my current clients is the troublesome aspect for them. I only have about 14 accounts on my dedicated box and most of those aren't operated by me. For me to make a complete move to cloud servers I would need for my clients to have an account admin panel such as cPanel, (want to move away from cPanel) but lighter and cluster aware so that any changes on a users account propagate through the 2 web servers and database server. I would also like to ability to not always use the control panel to create user accounts so that I can manage my own affairs via command line and not interfere with the control panel accounts. I'm also not worried about hard disk space with cloud servers as I will outfit my clients with special access to their own S3 bucket for their web apps. Did I miss anything? Any suggestions on how to do this effectively or any control panel suggestions for this new setup? Logan
Posted by shell-box, 10-10-2011, 11:47 AM
Have you thought about using a cloud based VPS? I would suggest going with a company that uses OnAPP and offers cloud based cpanel VPS. If you have under 100 accounts that should suffice. This way you could keep cpanel and still have the benefits of a cloud. Make sure if you do decide to use an OnAPP host that they have a completely redundant setup including redundant SANs.. I know Hivelocity has a solution like this. I do not know if this what you are looking for but it is a good solution! Good luck!
Posted by Stratogen, 10-10-2011, 01:32 PM
If you go with a VMware based cloud you can use a free tool (p2v) to virtualise your existing physical server. Then it's simply a case of uploading the image to a suitable vcloud provider.
Posted by danweb, 10-12-2011, 12:38 AM
Hi mate I have been using Cartika, I have found my cloud slow compared to other VPS services and this issue isn't one we have been able to resolve (I have about 200 clients on it), but other than that they are excellent. Uptime is very good, there have been 2 unexpected outages in the last year or so and their service is great, the best bit is their live chat service, they are always there and will help with lost of small things that might be things that other companies would make you do yourself.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 10-12-2011, 10:48 AM
Hello danweb, Thank you for the kind words regarding our support and services. I am not sure why our cloud would be considered "slow", but, a couple of comments/suggestions which you hopefully will find useful 1) our cloud is not the same as a VPS and should not really be compared as such. We also offer a VPS service where you will likely see slightly better performance - but, our VPS is more closely related to something like rackspace cloud instances.. 2) if you are seeing performance concerns within your cloud instance, please ensure you have enough resources (cpu and ram) to accommodate your usage. Lack of adequate resources is usually the reason for poor performance 3) if you are absolutely certain you have enough resources, etc - and you are still seeing performance below what you feel is adequate - please ensure you are on our latest ZFS SSD/SATA-SAS hybrid storage platform. It can very heavy and spiky IO much more seamlessly vs our netapp platform. Hopefully this helps and thanks again for the very kind words and for your continued business Last edited by cartika-andrew; 10-12-2011 at 10:54 AM.
Posted by coolvserver, 10-12-2011, 09:26 PM
Migrate account by account is a lot pain. Both VMware cloud technology and Microsoft Hyper-V technology allow you to clone your physical dedicated server and turn it into a cloud server. No OS or application reinstall or reconfiguration. The sever content is exact the same. You don't even need to send the dedicated server or its hard disk to the cloud host. All you need to do is send them a copy of your server's Ghost image or Acronis backup image.
Posted by shell-box, 10-12-2011, 10:51 PM
Migrating accounts from cpanel to cpanel is pretty easy. You can probably just do a full migration from one server to another. Although converting a server to VMWare is pretty easy as well. HyperV has never been the best for Linux Virtual Servers unless something has changed since last year... You used to have to manually install the hyperv network driver in linux but I have not messed with HyperV in over a year they may have made it better but I doubt it. I do wonder what the price difference would be on a VMware/HyperV Cloud compared to Xen/KVM Cloud.

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