lifebsideben

We are hosted at ev1servers.net, and generally I’ve been a really happy customer these past few years. However, we added a 2nd box for mysql, and got their private network (10.) set up between them, and had nothing but problems. Slow connection (typically 6mbit/sec, kind of lame for private network!) and lately, lots of dropped connections/routing problems/loss of connectivity. Bad news. You hate to see mysql queries doing “writing to net” for 5 minutes…! We’ve finally ditched using the private network and are going direct to the external IP on the 2nd box, which is much much faster and more reliable (that’s sad). (Setting this up safely of course involved lots of firewall rules…!) Anyhow, it’s working, but the one thing I’m worried about is that in theory we’re limited to X amount (1T I think) of traffic a month on the frontend interfaces (on both boxes). I don’t want to pay for overages because they can’t manage to get their private networking stuff to work reliably. The nagios graphs of uptime aren’t pretty

Between prince.org and a couple of the other sites we host, we do a decent amount of traffic, and it seems like it’d be a ton easier to just get some rack space and throw some machines at the problem, especially as we’re considering buying (renting) yet another machine… which would really start making the buy vs. rent situation look less viable. One of my big issues is that ev1 is super expensive to get a high-end machine (for example, for a DB server), especially with a lot of RAM. I want a big box to support fulltext searching in mysql, which requires oodles of RAM (the dataset is over 1G), but that is a fortune to rent. I’m going to price (again) local SF hosting providers that are flexible and dig helping out semi-nonprofits like us. And maybe price out an Opteron with 8G of RAM for the database… mmmm that’d be tasty…!

If anyone’s got suggestions about providers (I’m talking about up to 8U and maybe .5T/month transfer, and I’d really like 24/7 access but that’s not a dealkiller if not), let me know!