Cloud with independent RAM/CPU/Bandwidth

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Posted by danmaz74, 04-21-2011, 07:42 PM
Hi I'm looking for a non expensive cloud offer where I can independently set my RAM, CPU, disk and bandwidth. This is because I'll need a lot of RAM (and reliability) but much less of every other resources. So far I've found glesys com (I can't post urls yet!) which looks promising, but I'm looking for more suggestions if you have any... Thanks Dan
Posted by Soroush, 04-22-2011, 09:10 AM
Check these: http://cloudsigma.com/ http://www.elastichosts.com/
Posted by iTom, 04-22-2011, 11:47 AM
When building a cloud infrastructure most of the time RAM is what you run out of first, therefore this really is what defines the hosts pricing structure (unless someone is going to go crazy with bandwidth etc...) However this means that most of the time if you get a custom server with a high amount of RAM, it will probably be a very similar price to a "large" VPS. Or it always has been in my experience, so don't forget to compare your quotes to other hosts standard packages, you might be surprised
Posted by JasonD10, 04-22-2011, 12:36 PM
Dan, Hello and Good Friday to you. While this won't exactly answer your question, I thought it would be helpful to yourself as well as others when price shopping for this exact scenario. Some things that could be less dependent on the physical server (Bandwidth, and possibly Storage), CPU and RAM normally go hand and hand. The reason why is that if RAM is allocated and not CPU, or visa versa, then this would result in waste on the server. So if a server has 8 CPU Cores, and 8GB/RAM then the provider will normally provide 1 core per 1GB/RAM. If someone were to order 4GB/RAM and 1 core, that is going to offset the use and more than likely result in the provider not being able to offset that and waste the resources. Some providers may be able to give a little room as they'll be able to fit a small variance of a customer who wants more CPU but less RAM, and then one who wants more RAM and less CPU, but if a provider allows full freedom then that will be priced into the service to allow for that waste and every customer will ultimately end up paying for it. Until technology evolves to allow memory sharing of a single environment across multiple physical nodes this is unfortunately a limitation we must adhere to as a provider, or price structure accordingly.
Posted by danmaz74, 04-24-2011, 01:35 PM
Hi CloudWeb (and iTom); I understand your point, but I think that with big enough physical nodes it would be possible to distribute customers with complementary needs to have a good use of resources. If, on the other hand, everybody wanted more RAM and little CPU, it would be possible not to max out the CPU slots, use cheaper CPUs, and so on. Anyway, there are some offers like I was looking for, I just hope that those providers aren't going out of business because of that pricing structure Dan
Posted by devonblzx, 04-24-2011, 03:07 PM
Usually it is harder for web hosts to add more RAM to a server than disk due to motherboard limitations, this is why usually hosts either charge more for RAM or include disk with RAM. Many big sites don't require as much disk space as RAM and CPU. You could also contact hosts as I'm sure some would be willing to customize a plan for you depending on your specific needs.
Posted by NikkoMars, 04-25-2011, 09:10 AM
I know that HPChost.com private cloud is letting you configure the RAM, CPU and HD as you want. If you are familiar with VMware you will get access to the vsphere client. Also they let you do some snapshot and cloning.
Posted by tchen, 04-26-2011, 03:40 AM
If you look closer at Amazon EC2's pricing structure, you'll notice that they actually have high-memory and high-cpu variants of the different sizes. Depending on your usage, it might be more affordable to go that route.
Posted by kmonchamp, 04-26-2011, 04:05 AM
I have used Terremark's vcloud express system and it allows you to fully customize the requirements of the machine, such as number of virtual cpus and amount of ram and disk. They are on a bit more of the expensive side but are very reliable and have fairly decent support. All system resources that you pay for is dedicated to you so performance is excellent. That is the only service that comes to mind that is completely customizable.
Posted by sailor, 04-26-2011, 01:56 PM
You have a great idea and I agree with you that you should be able to custom combine your various resources how you like. You should be able to buy each resource and then spin up vms that take the right amount of parts from the bulk supplies you buy. the totally customizable vm. I know of a few that will be able to get this to you. It is on vmware which is another win. Last edited by anon-e-mouse; 04-27-2011 at 03:28 AM.
Posted by danmaz74, 07-01-2011, 02:25 AM
I want to thank everybody who answered and update you about how things went. I opted to use glesys, which allows to independently set the amount of RAM (up to 8 GB), and everything worked very well. You can also make changes without having to restart the VPS, so, even if you need the extra RAM for just an hour, as it happened to me, you can do that without downtimes. The only things I don't like very much are that the invoices aren't very clear about the hourly usages, and that the Swedish VAT is a pretty high 25%.
Posted by Stratogen, 07-01-2011, 03:02 AM
What you are talking aobut is VPS style hosting - it's not the case with true cloud hosting. Most of the VMware hosting providers will let you specify exactly what you want in terms of CPU, RAM and disk, and the workload gets spread across the cluster. Easy scaling too.
Posted by HostColor, 07-01-2011, 03:29 AM
Hi Dan, Do not get a Cloud instances from any provide if you believe that their pricing structure is inadequate and if their selling model looks risky. Let's not encourage this in the Cloud hosting market. We saw enough poor services in Shared Hosting and other hosting niches. I'd suggest you to go and a web host that deal with flexibility and scalability only and does not address load-balancing and other issues which are described as challenges in traditional computing. If the Cloud hosting provider does not offer back-up and some other value added services (I mean valued added in Cloud Hosting) as a part of its standard offerings, this would decrease the monthly costs.
Posted by danmaz74, 07-01-2011, 03:39 AM
Hi hostcolor I was just making a joke because according to some what I was looking for was impossible With my architecture for hashtagify.me I can go even use not very reliable providers because I'm already doing load balancing with a very reliable one (rackspace) and the data is easy to replicate in real time and backup every day. Anyway, with glesys everything worked fine, and I don't think they're going out of business anytime soon, even if I'm not going to use them anymore because I decided to go the dedicated server way, as I wrote here: http://blog.hashtagify.me/2011/06/30...dmonth-part-1/
Posted by danmaz74, 07-01-2011, 03:56 AM
AFAIK, the workload doesn't get spread across the cluster, unless you specifically design your system to use more nodes. VMware clustering can move a host to a bigger/less used node if necessary, but you still can't use more resources than those available in a single node without doing your own parallelization. For sure it is currently impossible to spread among more nodes a single application using a single thread which needs a lot of RAM, which is what I would need with a big Redis DB...
Posted by Stratogen, 07-01-2011, 04:06 AM
VMware uses Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) to move workloads to an appropriate host (physical server). On our platform these physical servers are running with over 150GB of RAM and many, many cores so you won't find restrictions on the amount of CPU or RAM you can specify for your virtual machine. I'm sure the other VMware hosting providers will also allow you to specify exactly what you want.
Posted by sailor, 07-02-2011, 12:21 PM
Yes and if they have vcloud director employed they can alow them to combine them any way they want. you should search for someone that has vcloud director in use - its the way of the future with vmware cloud.
Posted by kris1351, 07-02-2011, 01:54 PM
If you get a provider that controls their own hardware this is easier to do, but cheap should not be your budget point. Each provider has to make up for loss on a server if you take 8GB and 1-2 cores, that leaves 6 cores that have less resources. Now that machines are going past that 128-192GB in ram mark that will get easier, but ram is still pricey and for every stick you have to install you have to have 1-2 sticks as spares.
Posted by danmaz74, 07-03-2011, 01:19 AM
If by "spread across the cluster" you meant that cloud VPSs get moved between physical hosts to optimize resources, then ok. I had understood what you wrote as if the resources of more hosts could be combined for a single VPS/task, and that still isn't possible (and with the Von Neumann architecture it will most likely never be). 150 GB is a lot of memory, but with some applications you are still going to need parallelization at some point.

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