Cloud vs. Premium VPS

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Posted by MrWalter, 06-28-2011, 12:00 AM
What is the difference on Cloud Hosting and Premium VPS? I don't think Cloud is mature yet, at least from the reviews I see of those providers on WHT. And my final question, is how does one go about starting a cloud web host? For regular hosting, you just purchase one server, but with cloud, how do you setup more than one server to balance? ~w
Posted by tulix, 06-28-2011, 01:39 AM
You will have to get a software or install and configure virtualization software by yourself. Easier just to get a software - it will come with a hardware config recommendations - probably slightly different for each type of the cloud software.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 06-28-2011, 10:08 AM
typically the premium VPS (which some actually sell as a cloud) - will lack real high availablity, elasticity beyond what is left on the node the instance is on and fluidity between nodes as required Cloud works - and works great - its just like anything else in this industry - there are those that spend the money and have the know how to do it well and properly - and there are those that dont do it properly and give the technology a bad name. you should look at citrix xenserver enterprise or vmware - you then need some pretty hefty knowledge and investment in networking and in storage (this is where most cloud hosts dont invest properly and where things become an issue). If you are not sure how to do all of this, you should look at setting up a provate cloud with a provider who does this - and obviously, consider a provider who does this well - as if they do not manage their own cloud well, chances are your private cloud will not be ideal either. With a private cloud, you ca plug your servers (2 or more) into an existing network and either get your own volumes on existing storage solutions, or get your own shelves or even get your own SANs. It is all about cost - but, if you do not have the infrastructure setup - the most cost effective way to do this (both from hardware, staffing, software, etc) is to use an IaaS service and go the route of a private cloud hope this helps..
Posted by aodat2, 06-28-2011, 11:56 AM
Private Cloud is going to be a little costly to setup. With all the things that they need and all. Then again True Cloud is not cheap to setup. As Andrew mentioned, not many hosts out there are True Cloud hosts. I'll just say that true cloud hosts are done by the Bigger Companies. VPS providers often time call it cloud and try to compete but when it truly comes down to it, they are totally no comparison at all.
Posted by colosolutionz, 06-28-2011, 12:12 PM
Take Amazon for instance, who may be one of the largest public cloud providers in the world. They've had several long outages... It's not fully mature and a "cloud" will only ever be as good as it's hardware, network infrastructure, software, and data center infrastructure. If you need rapid scalability, go with cloud, but if you are just looking for a cheap slice, stick with VPS.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 06-28-2011, 12:19 PM
that is something completely different,and if you look at their outages - its not because they are a "cloud". The nature of their outages - they could have been a shared hosting provider or a dedicated server provider and they would have been down regardless. PLUS, they are running their own homegrown platforms, and they have had some issues in that regards as well (whereas Citrix and VMWare are much more mature and production and enterprise tested) we sell both, and there are advantages to both - but, end of the day, a VPS does not offer High Availability. If the node you are on fails - you are down. What the cloud offers is the most affordable way to get High Availability. Think of what real HA cost before the cloud. Elasticity and Fluidity are also nice features. VPS's do not offer this.
Posted by QuickWeb-Roel, 06-28-2011, 07:53 PM
At this point all i can say cloud is good on paper too much is being claimed about cloud server advantages over traditional VPS hence justifying you pay more, but reality is uptime is still sketchy, take VPS.net for instance http://status.vps.net/2011/06/ GigeNET cloud had some SAN issues as well. So far everyone is still gaining experience in the cloud environment on finding out what will work and not but nevertheless it is a very promising technology.
Posted by ShaunH, 06-28-2011, 08:38 PM
The issue that bugs me is as others have mentioned you pay sometimes double for the same resources and often worse Disk performance ( IOPs). Several users have tested various clouds and often its still behind VPS. And its not like the SAN's weren't of good quality either. Not many people recommend anything database heavy in the cloud. So why pay more for something that will preform worse and cost a great deal more. Granted the HA element is very attractive but still is it worth mediocre performance all the time. Also if you need management the idea of clustering the in the cloud becomes very expensive often times paying management for each and every node. The costs add up quickly. So if we really think about it. The cloud isn't to the point where it provides a real advantage to the every day hoster yet. Last edited by ShaunH; 06-28-2011 at 08:41 PM.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 06-29-2011, 12:45 AM
I cannot speak for others, but, I do not think these comments are fair. There have been many clouds in production for over a year without a single second of downtime. well, of course network based storage is going to be slower then local backplane based storage. But, this isnt the point.. even with legacy load balancing where data was offloaded to a SAN and accessed via NFS or whatever - there was the same performance hit - this is the price you pay for high availability. The costs for HA previously were 10x the price - now its double - this is the advantage of the cloud. Worse disk performance is a constant when storage is offloaded from the backplane to the network. in which aspect is it "behind" a VPS. Last I checked, a VPS is not HA, is not truly elastic or fluid. You simply cannot compare them. Now, if you mean that a VPS will perform better under high IO - then yes, you are right.. but, what you are basically saying is a VPS is better at ONE thing vs the cloud - and yes, that is absolutely correct. Heavy IO is best handled on a VPS over a cloud. You need the right infrastructure for the right job.. of course not - heavy DB should be done on local storage. This is a limitation of network based storage - nothing new - this has been an issue for DBs and HA for ages... you are paying more for the HA and the other benefits - and of course you will pay more for this. The trick is - there is no magic solution for anything. Use the cloud for what its good for - and then use other solutions for what they are good for. For example - for web services or for email services - the cloud will perform just as well as a local storage VM AND will give you HA, etc - for a nominal cost - so, use the cloud there - and use VPS solutions for heavy DB services - makes sense right? once again, right tool for the right job.... well of course you need to pay for management - is it supposed to be free now? I can tell you something with certainty. You could set up a small cluster - a cloud server for web services and a local storage VM for DB services. Fully managed would cost you a fraction of what a managed dedicated server from a good provider would cost you, and your mini cluster would kick the heck out of a single dedicated server. Performance wise, cost wise, flexibility, redundancy, etc, etc, etc... I apologize, but, I completely disagree - if you really think about it - the cloud has changed everything. BUT - you need to look at things practically - there is no single magic solution. The Cloud is just one type of infrastructure. You need to use the right infrastructure for the right job. Of course if you try and ask the cloud to do everything and do it better then any other infrastructure - you are going to be disappointed...
Posted by QuickWeb-Roel, 06-29-2011, 01:18 AM
I'm not sure who they are but definitely not your cloud as per http://cartikaforum.com/topic/2027-m...h__1#entry6102 could true as some cloud hosts are actually running VPS model and they preferred to be called cloud host just because they can scale. Also i'm referring to cloud hosting not private cloud environment with few nodes. Last edited by QuickWeb-Roel; 06-29-2011 at 01:24 AM.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 06-29-2011, 01:26 AM
for the record, I stated that there were clouds in production for over a year without an outage - I actually didnt say ours... yes, we have had one brief outage ourselves in 18 months (and that was 8 months ago AND it was brief) - I am not denying that. Isnt this a GOOD thing though? shouldnt you be saying - wow - your cloud has had one outage in 18 months, it was brief AND its posted and documented?? To your point - how many VPS solutions will have ONE BRIEF outage in 18 months? so, the cloud is working right? yes, some hosts are certainly doing this. I am sure THIS TIME you are not talking about us correct? SOOOOO now that we have established that our cloud has had ONE outage in 18 months - and that SOME hosts run VPS solutions as clouds... which we ALL agree to.. can you address my other points? Last edited by cartika-andrew; 06-29-2011 at 01:31 AM.
Posted by QuickWeb-Roel, 06-29-2011, 01:59 AM
correct you did not include yourself, i'm just making it clear yours is not one of them which is a fact. well based on your announcement[1] you only got Cloud with true HA last Feb. 2010 therefore i assume this is the cloud that went down per your Nov 2010. [1]http://cartikaforum.com/topic/1639-c...h__1#entry5149 which lead me to think your original cloud (since 2009 with 18 months uptime as you've claimed) is quite close to traditional VPS model but maybe using SAN instead of local storage or what not. Nope i saw that you are now using cloud with HA since Feb 2010 as per your press release http://cartikaforum.com/topic/1639-c...h__1#entry5149 as above, but i can say your cloud is pretty much more solid than others we know of here at WHT, I got nothing against your company i'm just backing the argument with fact using some reference not something like "There have been many clouds in production for over a year without a single second of downtime." -- care to share with us who? Last edited by QuickWeb-Roel; 06-29-2011 at 02:03 AM.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 06-29-2011, 02:18 AM
I apologize, but, what are you trying to say, Since Feb 2010, we have had ONE outage - AND that outage was 8 months ago. What exactly is your point re this discussion? (which you have nicely sidetracked) Yes, our cloud has had ONE BRIEF outage since Feb 2010. You are right, this is 16/17 months, not 18.. yes, when did I say otherwise? I completely agree with you - our cloud has been in production since Feb 2010 (so 16 months and 17 months in a couple of days) I think you are sidetracked here. You mentioned that cloud hosting is not reliable and has many issues. I mentioned that good clouds do not have this issue - and you in turn pointed out our cloud has had ONE BRIEF outage in almost 1.5 years - which is a good thing right?? it actually proves what I am saying correct?? no, not really - I am proud of our ONE BRIEF outage in almost 1.5 years (so 5 9's of uptime for our cloud since launch right???).. I can name at least 20 clouds that have had 100% uptime in 12 months - and in 4 more months - we will be in that category as well.. in the interim, and from a provider that offers both VPS and Cloud solutions - you will never get a VPS solution to be as reliable as a good cloud...
Posted by QuickWeb-Roel, 06-29-2011, 02:29 AM
No i'm not sidetracked, you are clearly not included, you launched your cloud Feb 2010 and your first downtime Nov 2010 how that become 17 months uptime i can only count 9 months? you clearly don't have over 12 months continuous uptime which is what i'm talking about not the age of your cloud.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 06-29-2011, 02:36 AM
Listen - I am trying to be nice - but, let me be clear.. when did I EVER say we have 12 months of continuous uptime with our cloud. Please show me where? Fact of the matter is - we have over 5 9's of uptime with our cloud over a 16-17 month sample. Fact2 is I never mentioned our cloud until you did. Fact3 is you keep discussing our one brief outage in 18 months like its bad thing when its clearly a good thing... I have nothing against you - I tried to have an intelligent conversation about different infrastructure. It appears to me like you are a VPS provider without a cloud and are a little defensive about it. I guess that is fine, but, trust me when I tell you - we have been doing this for a long long time. A VPS has its advantages (primarily heavy IO as disk is handled on the backplane vs the network) - but, a VPS can NEVER - EVER - EVER offer the advantages of a cloud - no matter how much you wish it would. The truth of the matter is - you need to use the right infrastructure for the right job. You cannot say that VPS servers are the right solution or that cloud servers are the right solution - the simple truth is that different infrastructure is better for different services - and you should use the right infrastructure for the right service no hard feelings on my end - I did appreciate this discussion - and I hope you feel the same way.. cheers
Posted by QuickWeb-Roel, 06-29-2011, 02:43 AM
Ok i will make it clear for you.... You said " There have been many clouds in production for over a year without a single second of downtime." Of course some observer may assume you maybe included as you cannot say it directly because that maybe tantamount to self promotion which is not allowed, so i went ahead and investigate if you are one of them as you did not name who is who, I found out you have outage last Nov 2010 which is 9 months since you have launched. Now if you did not get the point case close for me and if you have 18 months uptime then good on you as you seems to be doing the right ingredient to make cloud work as it should. Don't tell me you are trying to be nice because that would only mean you are not.
Posted by Raenk, 06-29-2011, 04:09 AM
Interesting discussion. Now, what about a VPSs cluster ? Could I get HA and disk performance with a VPSs cluster ? (I would think).
Posted by tchen, 06-29-2011, 03:51 PM
Depends. HA isn't owned by clouds despite marketing claims. The rub is that you do need the technical know-how to setup one, instead of just relying on a provider's SAN-backed cloud image. Frankly, the SAN is a cheap and simple form of HA and as an end-user, should be mostly transparent to you. It's not the best HA solution as there is the migration time of a few minutes as your image is relocated during failures, but that is usually fine for most people. If you're going for real heavy duty HA, your main obstacle will be getting your hands on a reroutable IP that you can swap between multiple load balancers. If you don't mind LB failures, or if your tolerance is similar to that of the SAN recovery times, then you can get away with any off the shelf VPS and just rely on plain old DNS routing.
Posted by oker, 06-29-2011, 04:37 PM
For me cloud IaaS is a subset of VPS. Every cloud can server VPS role, but not every VPS can be a cloud provider. They both use the same technology - virtualization - to provide servers. But cloud ones gives you full flexibility in deploying and undeploying servers. And they will charge you for what you actually used, while with VPS you need to declare and pay upfront. But the division is very blurry.
Posted by Question Everything, 06-30-2011, 01:04 AM
Please do. I'm curious if such clouds exist, or if that's what you've been told by the people selling you cloud software. I know rackspace, AWS, and google aren't in that category. So who might be? Softlayer? Voxel? Name names, please.
Posted by jweeb, 06-30-2011, 02:26 AM
I would put Voxel in the list. We have servers with them, and have not experienced any downtime from Day 0. Besides, they have an aggressive 100% Uptime SLA.
Posted by boskone, 06-30-2011, 06:15 AM
It's also important to realise that the 'cloud' isn't a single device. Two customers on the same cloud , one might have an outage, one might not, one might have 100% uptime for two years, one might have 5 days since the last reboot. Cloud is far from homogenous - you still need to plan your own solutions for uptime, failover, etc, from an application and service point of view. All cloud does, really, is abstract hardware, networking, storage - and give you that cheaply and well. The rest is still up to you (talking IAAS here)
Posted by Stratogen, 06-30-2011, 06:28 AM
Add most of the VMware providers to that list, although it's hard to say whether the providers have invested more in a proper hardware platform or that the VMware hypervisor is particularly fault tolerant.
Posted by danmaz74, 07-01-2011, 02:41 AM
The moment "cloud" became the main marketing buzzword in the hosting market, almost everybody started claiming that their solution is "cloud". So, where do you mark the line between "cloud" and "premium VPS"? In my very humble opinion, a REAL cloud service is when you can scale beyond the capacity of a single physical node without even noticing it, as it is for example with google app engine. But of course then you have very severe limitations as to what you can do and how, you can't just adapt your usual VPS setup to that kind of systems. If you just compare "cloud" VPS and "premium" VPS, I don't think there are substantial differences: They are just different flavors and marketing names of the same concepts. You really have to look into the details of the solutions.

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