iServe's cloud servers - review
By , in
servers & hosting, posted: 26-OCT-2009 17:22
I can sum up my experience with iServe's cloud servers in two words: very impressed. If you are thinking about co-locating a dedicated server in a data-centre, or virtualising some of your current servers, you must check out this offering first.
iServe (a subsidary of ISP Orcon since May this year) has only just recently launched their cloud servers as part of their cloud computing, a name which I feel is a little misleading - to me, true cloud computing is the Amazon EC2, the Google App Engine et al. In my mind cloud computing is when you upload your application to a platform, and it's served up by a multitude of different servers in different geographic locations to your users. A more accurate name for iServe would be "Virtual Private Servers with by-the-hour billing", but from a marketing perspective, "cloud servers" is less of a mouthful.
To begin, new servers are quick and easy to provision - enter your details with a credit card and you can have a new server instance up and going within 5 minutes. If you need more than one server, you can add as many as you need through their secure (SSL encrypted) web console. The web console also provides access to other admin features for your cloud servers.
Servers are available as Windows (Server 2008) or Linux (CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, openSuSE or Mandriva), with 512Mb to 4Gb of memory, and between 1 to 8 cores. With the web console I can configure a very basic Windows Server machine with 1 core and 512MB of memory, and if I need more power, I can add more resources in real-time by dragging up the sliders (see image below). Since the billing is done by the hour, I can upgrade the server for a short period of time, and then downgrade it again once the extra grunt is no longer needed. The basic machine in my example will put you back 11¢ an hour ($79.20/month ex GST) with a 4Gb 8 core behemoth costing 0.53¢ an hour ($381.60/month ex GST).
Other resources such as additional network interfaces ($1/month per IP) can also be added and bandwidth is charged as you use it - national traffic is free, international is $1.75/GB.
If you want to use the server purely for backup or archiving purposes, and don't need it running 24/7, it can be put into standby mode, and regardless of its powered up resources, the charge is only 1.5¢ an hour ($10.80/month ex GST) per server. With the low standby fee, you could completely pre-configure web/database servers that can be quickly brought online should primary servers fail. You can also save a standard image of a server, so if you need to provision multiple copies of the same server, you don't need to setup each one from scratch.
Another useful feature in the web console is servers can be powered up and down automatically based on a timed schedule, and you can receive an email notification when your server powers up.
Security is paramount when running your own server, and the web console allows you to configure incoming and outgoing firewall rules. By default all incoming connections are dropped, and all outgoing connections are allowed. If your server has multiple network interfaces, rules can be applied to both, or specified separately for each one. Savings are made as you don't need to run another server just as a firewall, plus there is no danger of accidentally putting in rule that locks yourself out of your own server (not that I would ever admit to doing this). There is a short wait of 5 minutes after each save to allow your changes to propagate to iServe's firewalls.
Remote access is achieved through VNC (new servers default to VNC) which, through the web console, can be locked down to a specific IP address or subnet. If you prefer Remote Desktop, this can be setup on the server, and secured using the firewall rules as above.
Through a Java applet in the web console, you are able to VNC to the cloud server through your browser, a handy feature if you are on-site at a client's premises and don't have the security permissions to VNC/Remote Desktop directly and need to do some work on the server.
We are currently running the 3Bit main website off a cloud server (IIS7 and SQL Server 2008) with a handful of other test sites. I recently tested the capacity of one of our custom SMTP email relays, and to do this I created another cloud server, setup the programs I needed, and bombarded the SMTP server with 20k emails in a minute. Once I had finished, I deleted the cloud server, quickly and easily and all for a very low cost. For us as a web-hosting provider, it gives us another useful tool to add to our shared hosting and dedicated co-located servers that we are currently running out of Maxnet's data-centre.
To conclude, I've been impressed with the flexibility of the web console plus the per hour basis of the billing. We've only been running a cloud server for just three weeks, and in that time the performance has been very good, and the support I've received from Scott Quinlan, one of their lead developers, has been great. I hope that as more people begin to utilise these cloud servers that iServe continues with this same high level of service.
I highly recommend you sign-up and try out a cloud server for yourself.
iServe (a subsidary of ISP Orcon since May this year) has only just recently launched their cloud servers as part of their cloud computing, a name which I feel is a little misleading - to me, true cloud computing is the Amazon EC2, the Google App Engine et al. In my mind cloud computing is when you upload your application to a platform, and it's served up by a multitude of different servers in different geographic locations to your users. A more accurate name for iServe would be "Virtual Private Servers with by-the-hour billing", but from a marketing perspective, "cloud servers" is less of a mouthful.
To begin, new servers are quick and easy to provision - enter your details with a credit card and you can have a new server instance up and going within 5 minutes. If you need more than one server, you can add as many as you need through their secure (SSL encrypted) web console. The web console also provides access to other admin features for your cloud servers.
Servers are available as Windows (Server 2008) or Linux (CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, openSuSE or Mandriva), with 512Mb to 4Gb of memory, and between 1 to 8 cores. With the web console I can configure a very basic Windows Server machine with 1 core and 512MB of memory, and if I need more power, I can add more resources in real-time by dragging up the sliders (see image below). Since the billing is done by the hour, I can upgrade the server for a short period of time, and then downgrade it again once the extra grunt is no longer needed. The basic machine in my example will put you back 11¢ an hour ($79.20/month ex GST) with a 4Gb 8 core behemoth costing 0.53¢ an hour ($381.60/month ex GST).
Other resources such as additional network interfaces ($1/month per IP) can also be added and bandwidth is charged as you use it - national traffic is free, international is $1.75/GB.
If you want to use the server purely for backup or archiving purposes, and don't need it running 24/7, it can be put into standby mode, and regardless of its powered up resources, the charge is only 1.5¢ an hour ($10.80/month ex GST) per server. With the low standby fee, you could completely pre-configure web/database servers that can be quickly brought online should primary servers fail. You can also save a standard image of a server, so if you need to provision multiple copies of the same server, you don't need to setup each one from scratch.
Another useful feature in the web console is servers can be powered up and down automatically based on a timed schedule, and you can receive an email notification when your server powers up.
Security is paramount when running your own server, and the web console allows you to configure incoming and outgoing firewall rules. By default all incoming connections are dropped, and all outgoing connections are allowed. If your server has multiple network interfaces, rules can be applied to both, or specified separately for each one. Savings are made as you don't need to run another server just as a firewall, plus there is no danger of accidentally putting in rule that locks yourself out of your own server (not that I would ever admit to doing this). There is a short wait of 5 minutes after each save to allow your changes to propagate to iServe's firewalls.
Remote access is achieved through VNC (new servers default to VNC) which, through the web console, can be locked down to a specific IP address or subnet. If you prefer Remote Desktop, this can be setup on the server, and secured using the firewall rules as above.
Through a Java applet in the web console, you are able to VNC to the cloud server through your browser, a handy feature if you are on-site at a client's premises and don't have the security permissions to VNC/Remote Desktop directly and need to do some work on the server.
We are currently running the 3Bit main website off a cloud server (IIS7 and SQL Server 2008) with a handful of other test sites. I recently tested the capacity of one of our custom SMTP email relays, and to do this I created another cloud server, setup the programs I needed, and bombarded the SMTP server with 20k emails in a minute. Once I had finished, I deleted the cloud server, quickly and easily and all for a very low cost. For us as a web-hosting provider, it gives us another useful tool to add to our shared hosting and dedicated co-located servers that we are currently running out of Maxnet's data-centre.
To conclude, I've been impressed with the flexibility of the web console plus the per hour basis of the billing. We've only been running a cloud server for just three weeks, and in that time the performance has been very good, and the support I've received from Scott Quinlan, one of their lead developers, has been great. I hope that as more people begin to utilise these cloud servers that iServe continues with this same high level of service.
I highly recommend you sign-up and try out a cloud server for yourself.
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Comment by freitasm, on 26-OCT-2009 17:54
Aren't you worried that at $1.75/GB your bill could get quite big if your site comes under a DDoS for instance?