Cloud computing in New Zealand

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › Cloud computing in New Zealand

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23 posts

Geek

#52252 2-Dec-2009 23:58

Does any one know of any well priced cloud computing hosts in NZ???

I have been using Amazon Web Services (EC2 and S3) for the last year and it is amazing in terms of scalability, reliability and is very cost effective - You can boot a server up for $0.085 US an hour, and store data in S3 for $0.15 US / GB a month and it gets cheaper the more you use.

I had a look at Iserve (Orcon) Cloud computing and cloud files but there pricing is way out of whack. The server pricing doesnt look too bad but the cloud files ends up costing $3.60 per GB per month ... 100GB storage is going to cost $360 a month at Iserve or $15 US a month with Amazon .... Hard to justify using Iserve when Iserve is 18 times more expensive than Amazon, Maybe twice as dear being the fact its NZ would be acceptable not 18 times !!!!

Seems like plenty of oppurtunity in this space it will be interesting to watch ....

[Mod (N8): Fixed subject]

8d52797c436

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#278941 3-Dec-2009 09:03

Any particular reason you are wanting to switch to an NZ cloud instead of Amazon? From what research I have done they look to be the best out there at the moment in terms of price and features.

I'm also not impressed with Iserve, as I spoke to someone there who promised to send me some pricing for my work that I could show the boss and I never heard from them again.

sideshow

23 posts

Geek

#278943 3-Dec-2009 09:10

Thanks for the reply. I just want a local mirror of the data and want to be able to serve static files off the NZ servers to speed up pages in NZ. Most the heavy work will be done in Amazon as i have found it to be perfect for my needs.

I also have had bad experience with iserve. After a long wait spoke to someone who couldnt answer *any* of my questions and tried to fudge his answers instead of saying "i dont know what im talking about - ill get someone". I think if they want this service to be taken seriously they need to provide a whole lot more information and adjust their prices to be feasible.

Ragnor

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#279028 3-Dec-2009 13:57

In my experience co-locating two servers of your own, in a tier 1 data centre (Orcon, Maxnet, Iconz etc) will give you more space and be cheaper (over the long run), especially if you need significant space.

nate

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#279053 3-Dec-2009 15:14

Ragnor: In my experience co-locating two servers of your own, in a tier 1 data centre (Orcon, Maxnet, Iconz etc) will give you more space and be cheaper (over the long run), especially if you need significant space.

+1.

VPS/standard web hosting is always much more expensive here than a US equivalent.

sideshow

23 posts

Geek

#279178 3-Dec-2009 22:16

Ragnor: In my experience co-locating two servers of your own, in a tier 1 data centre (Orcon, Maxnet, Iconz etc) will give you more space and be cheaper (over the long run), especially if you need significant space.

I ran a co-lo server with Iconz for a year but moved to the cloud because i found i could easily set up extra servers as and when i needed them and shut them down just as quick. Whilst iconz was fast nationally they were quite expensive for a 1U and because i had a few hardware problems it meant a few days down time. I would much prefer to leave the hardware up to others and not worry about it. I dont have the resources to have spare servers/parts and or time if any thing goes wrong with the hardware and also am limited to the capacity of the slots i buy.

Also nate i wouldnt mind if they were more expensive...just not 18 times more expensive - I just want to pay for hosting not someones BMW :)

nate

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#279182 3-Dec-2009 22:37

sideshow: Also nate i wouldnt mind if they were more expensive...just not 18 times more expensive - I just want to pay for hosting not someones BMW :)

Fair call.

I don't think you are going to find anything local in your price range, I did a lot of searching around before we settled on iServe.

Could you look at something hosted in Australia possibly?

Falconz

67 posts

Master Geek

#279394 4-Dec-2009 17:41

Yeah it will always be more expensive in new zealand due to bandwidth costs. depending where you go you may expect to spend ~$100nz a month for 1u of rackspace with 100megabit of national +the cost of your own server. at least thats what we pay (unlimited national)

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sideshow

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Geek

#280812 9-Dec-2009 14:11

3bit - awsome idea i will investigate aussie
Falconz - do you mind telling me where you are colo-ed for $100 a month with bandwidth.
- I was originally with ICONZ for $150/1u and paid them 1 year in advance. about 3 months in to it they invented a national transit fee of $18 per month, which they claimed telecom were charging them to peer and they were charging for every 1/u slot. thats say 100 racks * 42 * $18 = $75,600 per month (just under $1 million a year) ...hmmmm? and if that wasnt enough at the end of the term whilst every other host in NZ was lowering their cost of rack space ICONZ decided they wanted $50 per month extra

Falconz

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#280816 9-Dec-2009 14:14

we colo with iconz, I think it was initially $100 per u for 5u's then yeah I remember they did put up there prices for extra/telecom links. The difference being with iconz instead of the usual pearing that everyone else does iconz put in a dedicated fiber link to telecom

nathan

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#280838 9-Dec-2009 15:00

hard when comparing apples with oranges

local providers are never ever going to be able to compete with the economies of scale that an Amazon / Microsoft / Google will be able to achieve

so they won't be able to compete on price

bandwidth here is at least 3 times the price of overseas, so hard to compete on that angle, unless you have specific requirements for low latency and are prepared to pay for it

I'm not super familiar with Amazon AWS, Force, Google offerings in that regard but strangely enough I know a little about Windows Azure. I know that Azure you can piggyback on their CDN and for NZ you can get the files as close as Sydney

Service/Support? It doesn't sound like you've had a great experience there.

I know that Microsoft announced last month at the PDC 2009 event that they will be offering VM hosting shortly, alongside the processing and storage they sell today

Falconz

67 posts

Master Geek

#280844 9-Dec-2009 15:06

yeah, we have a dedicated server int he stats that we try get our us content on.

Im going to be investigating CDN stuff shortly. the new microsoft one sounds kind of interesting, hopefully there might be some more incentives for certified partners.

exportgoldman

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#281171 10-Dec-2009 11:54

nate:
Ragnor: In my experience co-locating two servers of your own, in a tier 1 data centre (Orcon, Maxnet, Iconz etc) will give you more space and be cheaper (over the long run), especially if you need significant space.

+1.

VPS/standard web hosting is always much more expensive here than a US equivalent.

Latency!

We have evaluated the EC2 service and it was fantastic apart from the Latency which was sitting on average at around 250ms, too slow for any latency sensitive applications, and secondly bandwidth to New Zealand was not very hot, 1-2Megabits from a virtual machine but from memory 100-200 Megabits to the internet in the US, I think you could get more by having multiple streams but it was not impressive.

iServe is more expensive but much cheaper than other providers in NZ, and the speeds are quick, I am getting 50 Megabits to Auckland and 400 Megabits to Wellington. Unlimited National traffic.

nate is right that putting your own gear in is cheaper, but when you weigh up the hassles of hardware failures, and management and your website being offline for a hardware failure, and then factoring in two boxes and the hostings costs etc then the figures can look a lot different.

The answer is, it all depends :)

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Falconz

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#281172 10-Dec-2009 12:04

yeah deffinitly all depends hehe.

things like VPS (virtual private server) or dedicated server, where you place it it can sometimes need a degree just to figure that stuff out.

Everything will always be cheaper in the states or another large country as the hosting provider will have more buying power due to the volumes of customers. and not needing to pay for international bandwidth in the way NZ does.

I quite like the VPS option as its usually cheaper but it doesnt provide the speed a decent dedicated server can provide but most times you dont need a dedicated machine as it sits at 2-3% cpu usage mostly.

What usually wins me over is the support. If there is someone you can call to get your issue resolved thats worth far more to you than anything else. Our US colo is with theplanet, one night our server stoped working, they fixed it before we even detected the issue.

We have seen clients who go with a cheap host and there site goes down and the help on the other end is anything but helpfull.

Sometimes its better to just pay that extra bit more. whats an extra $50 a month more when it could save you thousands in downtime costs.

insane

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#281258 10-Dec-2009 17:42

Falconz: yeah deffinitly all depends hehe.

I quite like the VPS option as its usually cheaper but it doesnt provide the speed a decent dedicated server can provide but most times you dont need a dedicated machine as it sits at 2-3% cpu usage mostly.

Sometimes its better to just pay that extra bit more. whats an extra $50 a month more when it could save you thousands in downtime costs.

I think the problem is that there are a lot of people selling VPSs which are not built on enterprise hardware or managed corerctly. Its quite easy to buy a bunch of servers for your vm hosts and a cheap SAN or two but a lot of the performance issues people see come down to people not fully understanding what they have bought or where the bottle necks will occur.

I'm fortunate or maybe unfortunate to see many people installing SAN's with many of them being daisy chained iSCSI ones with missmatching front and back end connectivity which will bite you in the butt when you start to place some very load on it.

So your second statement it spot on, I know people who'd be loosing $50,000 for every 10 minutes of downtiem they have so I can just imagine what a company like Air New Zealand lost when they had their 6 hour outage not so long ago.