Another day, another outage with my current hosts...
The only thing stopping me switching to a new host is being confident
that I can do what I want elsewhere.
I currently host at DSVR with a dedicated machine, split into a number
of virtual machines (a few of which I have sold on to my customers as
complete virtual servers, the rest we use to host sites on). Each
virtual machine has a web admin thing (which is crap but workable) for
adding new virtual hosts etc. DSVR handle all the OS patches etc and
they're they only ones with root access. We have an "admin" log-on with
privileges to do almost anything which doesn't compromise DSVR's ability
to handle OS updates. We can, for example, install applications from source.
I'm looking for something which provides me with a similarly high level
of functionality with a similarly low level of responsibility.
Everywhere I look I seem to get the option of either a web front end
only (eg Plesk), or full root access. I don't want root access (or,
rather, I don't want the responsibility for testing and installing
patches and maintaining the security of the system). I need a number of
virtual hosts ranging from a few hundred MB to a few GB in size, all of
which are currently adequately handled by our existing dual Xeon 2.4
system with (I think) 1GB RAM.
NB: The reason we have a dedicated server rather than a collection of
virtual machines is that we previously had problems with others on the
shared host causing us problems, despite that not theoretically being
possible. If that's no longer an issue I'd probably prefer them just as
normal virtual machines spread across multiple hosts - at least that way
one dead PC doesn't mean all my clients ring me! We've never (touch
wood!) had a server outage yet; the problems have all been
infrastructure (today's being 9 hrs down due to a power outage), but
silly things like having both our name servers on the same network
bother me a lot.
OS-wise: DSVR only let us have their bastardised version of RedHat (RH9
I think), but I'm not too bothered about that. They use their own
virtualisation but Xen or vmware would suit me. It's really only the
need for a reliable host who manages the virtual servers without leaving
me at a web front end for all config that I'm particularly fussy about.
--
Mark Rogers
More Solutions Ltd :: 0845 45 89 555