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I am looking at hosting applications for clients in the cloud. What is the best service to use?
I am currently hosting some accounting and erp applications for small clients on my in-house servers, and growing out of capacity. I want to move them to a virtual server in the cloud, so that I can provision new servers and expand them as needed. I am looking at services like Amazon AWS, Rackspace and utilities like Turnkey Linux and Bitnami. What is is the best service to use for this type of thing?
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7 Answers
The first question to ask yourself is whether you actually want cloud or just hosting. It sounds like your use case is fairly static - you aren't going to be rapidly scaling up or down, which is where clouds are best. You also need good security for ERP and accounting apps, which is where IaaS-type clouds are not as strong. They can be made secure, but it takes more work than it does to secure a dedicated server from a hosting provider. You need to make sure you encrypt everything in a public cloud, and that's not something that most public cloud vendors are going to help you do.
The good news is that if you look at Rackspace, Terremark, Opsource, or Savvis, you can get your choice of usage-based on-demand cloud services or dedicated servers billed monthly. Amazon doesn't have that second option. If you need dedicated network stuff tied to the cloud (your own configurable firewall, for instance) Opsource has a strong offering.
Be sure to check out Softlayer (www.softlayer.com) and Media Temple (www.mediatemple.com).
I can recommend you Rackspace Cloud. I have tested it for one of my clients with have load and everything goes well. They have a great API and you can manage your Cloud servers remotely.
//Bogo
Why not host them on-site at your client? They'd get better performance for a start.
This is a fairly complex question given that we know so little about your applications. I would recommend giving Rackspace and Amazon a very close look. They both have strong solutions, but also both have their caveats and quirks. My most recent analysis (based on actual usage data rather than theoretic data) was that Amazon is substantially more affordable than Rackspace and several of their recent advancements and additions have made the offering yet more attractive, that said there is a whole host of knowledge to use Amazon AWS most effectively and understand important things such as the differences between instance store, EBS, S3, Amazon's IP addressing, or their load balancers.
The good news maybe is that Amazon will let you basically try one out with their "free" micro instance so you can get a feel for it before making a strategic move.
Hi Fred,
Have you looked at Atum Corporation? We provide Cloud services and VPS solutions. What we can offer is comparable to what you might be looking at with Amazon EC2 - except we do not pool resources, we offer dedicated VPS.
It might also make a difference to you that Atum is a totally Canadian provider based in Toronto. Many clients have had to deal with the Patriot Act and therefore are looking to host their clients and their data in Canada (make sure you research that too!)
Hosting ERP means that you'll need to ask questions about security, uptime guarantees etc. VPS would be a great asset to you because it is easily scalable and dedicated to the resources you require.
Take a look around, but check out www.atum.com in your search.
Fred,
The important point to remember about this is that each hosting environment will have it's own advantages and constraints. You need to consider the services that you may need to support this application, such as firewalls, intrusion detections, monitoring, etc. Just turning on a VM in a hosted facility does not an application make. You need to look at your client's application storage requirements and network bandwidth requirements to see that the level of service is provided from the hosting provider.
-JPM
http://about.me/jpmorgenthal
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