Cloud Hosting Server Questions

Forums › IT Pro and developers › Cloud Hosting Server Questions

CBSYS

133 posts

Master Geek

#198962 29-Jul-2016 15:45

Hi Guys,

Trying to make a decision about if moving the collocated physical server up to cloud.

But really not sure about a few things, if could you please help me out, it would be great appreciated.

Background: we are a company provide Cloud-Based software for NZ nation wide customers 24x7. we have an 1U physical server collocated in a data center which located in Auckland. On this server there is VMWare ESXI installed as OS and hosting 3 VMs(all running Ubuntu), Application Server (8 core CPU, 8G RAM, 100G SSD), Database Server(4 core CPU, 8G RAM, 500G SSD) and Company website hosted on (2 core CPU, 2G RAM, 20G SSD).

Questions:

1. Is it true if I move all 3 VMs onto cloud, then I don't need to worry about the server crash(like the physical one) anymore?

2. Is it true the US/EU hosted cloud server slower than Australia and NZ local hosted? How bad is it?

3. Which company are you suggesting? (AWS, VULTR, ServerPoint etc.)

Thank you very much in advance!

1 | 2

4705 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1600931 29-Jul-2016 17:04

1. Server crashes are not limited to physical gear. It can and they do happen on VM's as well. You have to remember that 'Cloud' is physical hardware running in a datacenter running bunch of VM's. You will always have some sort of server crash. You are going to have read the event logs and check what caused the crash in order to rectify the issue.

2. Yes. A server hosted outside NZ followed by Australia then to US or EU will generally be slower in response time due to the distance. If speed and data are critical, then opt for a NZ based server with NZ support. Could take a look at Azure or AWS in Australia. There are quite a few good NZ Datacentres where you can host your VM's as well. theCloud being one but you will need to go through one of their resellers.

Do whatever you want to do man.

timmmay

20580 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1600939 29-Jul-2016 17:28

1. Server stability will be similar to a physical server - I've had one small virtual server running Linux in AWS for about nine months with no issues. However you can do things like monitor and auto scale so if something goes wrong you can recover more easily, or spread the load among smaller virtual servers behind a load balancer so server issues don't take sites down.

2. AWS lets you host in Sydney, and is generally cheaper than Azure. It's a 34ms ping to New Zealand. Put CloudFront CDN (part of AWS) or CloudFlare CDN (third party) in front of it to reduce static resource latency to around 5-10ms.

3. AWS. I'm an AWS certified architect so I'm slightly biased, but I've done thorough evaluations of multiple cloud providers considering both private and government use and I recommend AWS. It's cheaper for most use cases, it's more mature than others by a mile, they have more extra features which can be handy, lots of support online (eg ServerFault), more professionals available, etc, etc.

michaelmurfy

meow
13244 posts

Uber Geek

Moderator

ID Verified

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1600943 29-Jul-2016 17:37

If you're providing services to customers in NZ I'd strongly recommend looking at Sitehost (https://sitehost.nz/). They're simply excellent.

As for the server migrations themselves:

1) Yes, whilst it is true you don't have to worry about hardware, your VPS's can still crash.
2) Look at migrating your servers fresh to either Debian 8 or Ubuntu 16.04. Debian is my own personal preference.

I have a number of servers also hosted at Linode and they're extremely good too. My blog for example is hosted on a Linode VPS and as you can see it performs very quickly. I did also have an instance where one of my projects went viral and was coping with millions of hits per day and these servers were all Linodes too.

Whilst AWS is good I don't personally like them due to their slightly complex billing structure but that is just me in general.

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
Referral Links: Quic Broadband (use R122101E7CV7Q for free setup)

Are you happy with what you get from Geekzone? Please consider supporting us by subscribing.
Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

zespri

412 posts

Ultimate Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#1600962 29-Jul-2016 18:04

I second sitehost. It's more expensive than some overseas alternatives but the customer service is outstanding.

timmmay

20580 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1600966 29-Jul-2016 18:13

AWS billing is moderately complex. You pay for everything separately: servers, bandwidth (internal and external), CDN, DNS, etc, etc. The great thing is it's all integrated. If all you need is a basic VPS then it may be overkill, but for enterprise or flexibility it's awesome. Their CDN doesn't have NZ nodes, CloudFlare does, who have free and relatively cheap business plans.

Do a price comparison using their calculator. Suggest you price up both on demand (no mimumim, good to start with) and also using one year reserved instances with no up front pricing (ie you commit for a discount). You might find that you get more server for your money, more features, but it's more complex to manage and latency is a bit higher. Also, AWS support costs money, a monthly fee which depends on the tier, so if you need support that should be considered.

deadlyllama

1263 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1601101 29-Jul-2016 22:30

What sort of SLA do you provide to your customers? What do you do for backups? Why have you sliced that server up with ESXi? Are you based in the same city as the server?

What's the budget for hosting, and how much time can you afford to spend on moving?

Cloud/VPS can remove the hardware as a single point of failure. It's not a magic bullet

CBSYS

133 posts

Master Geek

#1601138 29-Jul-2016 23:09

deadlyllama: What sort of SLA do you provide to your customers? (It should be 99% uptime) What do you do for backups?(locally and off site as well) Why have you sliced that server up with ESXi?(I do need 3 VMs) Are you based in the same city as the server?(Yes, I am)

What's the budget for hosting($300/mth), and how much time can you afford to spend on moving?(4 hours in the weekend)

Cloud/VPS can remove the hardware as a single point of failure. It's not a magic bullet

Lenovo

Shop now for Lenovo laptops and other devices (affiliate link).

CBSYS

133 posts

Master Geek

#1601223 30-Jul-2016 09:50

Thank you all heaps for your help.

I think I'm going move my servers on cloud anyway.

It comes down to AWS and Vultr, they both have data centre in Sydney.

How do I compare these two please?

Cheers,

timmmay

20580 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1601249 30-Jul-2016 10:48

You consider your requirements, probably rated must, should and could, preferably quantified. Put them in a spreadsheet and match them against your options. Work out pricing. Give each factor a weight. Multiply out to get a decision. Requirements can include cost, complexity, flexibility, and any specific features you need.

AWS is super flexible, massive ecosystem, but complex. Vultr looks to have direct attached storage, AWS is typically network storage, so a bit more latency - but it works fine.

Or just pick one. Both will likely work.

deadlyllama

1263 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1601284 30-Jul-2016 11:50

CBSYS:

deadlyllama: What sort of SLA do you provide to your customers? (It should be 99% uptime) What do you do for backups?(locally and off site as well) Why have you sliced that server up with ESXi?(I do need 3 VMs) Are you based in the same city as the server?(Yes, I am)

What's the budget for hosting($300/mth), and how much time can you afford to spend on moving?(4 hours in the weekend)

Cloud/VPS can remove the hardware as a single point of failure. It's not a magic bullet

99% -- is that per month, week, day, year? 99% per year means it's within SLA to have your service down for 3 days a year. Could your customers cope with 3 days of downtime at their most inconvenient part of the year? How often do you take backups and how hard is it to restore from them?

For time spent on moving, I meant more how much of your time can you allocate to this project, not the downtime for the move.

We host some stuff with Vultr in Sydney. They're good and cheap. AWS will eat up that NZ$300/month budget very quickly -- the cheap servers are slow.

What I'd recommend is building a new environment on your chosen provider (e.g. Vultr) and restoring from your backups there -- i.e. doing a DR exercise. Then once you're happy, move your live data over.

deadlyllama

1263 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1601347 30-Jul-2016 13:43

Another note -- whoever you go with, provider wise, you'll want to do some load testing to ensure that the virtual server sizes you choose will be able to handle your peak load. Any of the cloud providers will let you upgrade, but if you're trying to keep within budget you don't want to move to a provider and then discover that you have to upgrade way past your hosting budget to handle the load you get. This becomes more of a risk the more expensive the provider is.

mattwnz

20157 posts

Uber Geek

#1601365 30-Jul-2016 14:51

I am wondering what the op is trying to achieve? Are they hoping it will result in less maintenance and work for them or cost?

CBSYS

133 posts

Master Geek

#1601369 30-Jul-2016 15:12

@deadlyllama thank you very much, that's a great idea to load back up first then move live data until we are happy. Cheers,

jnimmo

1097 posts

Uber Geek

#1601408 30-Jul-2016 17:50

Also would recommend seeing if you're able to do some load balancing on your VMs.

i.e. can you split your application server into two, giving you more resilience if there is an issue with the physical host server hopefully the other VM is on another host and may be able to keep running

I have had a few outages with Vultr, certainly AWS would be more reliable but also more expensive.

You can get $20 free credit with Vultr with my link http://www.vultr.com/?ref=6811736

I also like WheresMyServer (NZ Based) http://www.wheresmyserver.com/about/about-wms

and of course, who could go past SiteHost

timmmay

20580 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1601416 30-Jul-2016 18:56

AWS has massive scale, their prices are pretty good, especially reserved instances.

1 | 2