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	<title>Paul Maunders &#124; Web log &#187; cloud hosting</title>
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		<title>Cloud Hosting Providers</title>
		<link>http://www.pyrosoft.co.uk/blog/2009/02/15/cloud-hosting-providers/</link>
		<comments>http://www.pyrosoft.co.uk/blog/2009/02/15/cloud-hosting-providers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:11:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Paul Maunders</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud hosting]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.pyrosoft.co.uk/blog/?p=786</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Over the past year or so there has been a massive surge in the amount of companies offering Cloud Hosting services. In this post I&#8217;m going to outline the key players. Go Grid  Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, and CloudFront) Google App Engine Mosso Slice Host Media Temple Flexiscale Joyent There are also some Cloud [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Over the past year or so there has been a massive surge in the amount of companies offering Cloud Hosting services. In this post I&#8217;m going to outline the key players.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.gogrid.com">Go Grid</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://aws.amazon.com/">Amazon Web Services</a> (EC2, S3, and CloudFront)</li>
<li><a href="http://code.google.com/appengine/">Google App Engine</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mosso.com/">Mosso</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.slicehost.com/">Slice Host</a></li>
<li><a href="http://mediatemple.net/">Media Temple</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.flexiscale.com/">Flexiscale</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.joyent.com/">Joyent</a></li>
</ul>
<p>There are also some Cloud Management Platform providers, who generally offer tools to help you work with other Cloud Hosting services, these include:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.rightscale.com/">Rightscale</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://www.3tera.com/">3tera</a></li>
</ul>
<p>And there are even some open source projects to help you build your own cloud:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/">Eucalyptus</a> - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems &#8211; is an open-source software project for implementing &#8220;cloud computing&#8221; on clusters. Essentially a vendor neutral, EC2 compatible cloud platform.</li>
<li><a href="http://workspace.globus.org/">Nimbus</a> &#8211; An open source toolkit that allows you to turn your cluster into an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud.</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Go Grid</h2>
<p>Go Grid allows you to deploy and manage your own virtual servers from their control panel. The servers can be of 4 main types: Load Balancer, Web / App Server, Database Server and, Cloud Storage.</p>
<p>The site doesn&#8217;t give a lot of detail about what happens once you&#8217;ve created your servers, apart from to say they are Real servers with Full Access. Presumably you would then need to configure the software (Apache, IIS etc..) on each server individually.</p>
<h3>Billing Model</h3>
<p>GoGrid charges based on Server Ram Hours and outbound data transfer. CPUs and Storage are fixed relative to the RAM chosen for each vserver.  </p>
<p>CPU&#8217;s are guaranteed at a minimum ratio of 1 Xeon Core per 4 GB of Ram, therefore if you create a server with 1GB of RAM, it will have 1/4 of Xeon Core reserved for it&#8217;s use.</p>
<table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Server RAM</th>
<th>Core Guaranteed <br />
(P4 2.0 GHz equivalent)</th>
<th>Core Burst</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>512 MB</td>
<td>1/8</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1 GB</td>
<td>1/4</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2 GB</td>
<td>1/2</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4 GB</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>8 GB*</td>
<td>6</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Storage is also determined by the amount of RAM chosen for each vserver, however additional storage can be made available through the Cloud Storage system.</p>
<table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Server RAM</th>
<th>Storage</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>512 MB</td>
<td>30 GB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1 GB</td>
<td>60 GB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2 GB</td>
<td>120 GB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4 GB</td>
<td>240 GB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>8 GB</td>
<td>480 GB</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>1 x 1GB RAM x 24 hours x 30 days = 720 Server RAM/hours.</p>
<p>Prices start from $0.19 per Server Ram hour, therefore a 1 GB / 0.25 Xeon Core machine would cost $136.80 per month. However this would drop as low as $57.60 on their Enterprise plan, with a minimum commitment of $2499.99 a month. Bandwidth charges would be on top of this, and they start from $0.50 per Gigabyte dropping to $0.17 per Gigabyte if you commit to 6 TBs a month ($999.99).</p>
<h3>Summary</h3>
<p>Go Grid is currently very much a &#8220;build your own cloud&#8221; solution. The system will not scale automatically to adjust to spikes in demand, you would need to anticipate them and create spare capacity in advance.</p>
<h2>Amazon Web Services</h2>
<p>Amazon Web Services consists of 3 main products:</p>
<ul>
<li>Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) &#8211; A xen-based virtual server hosting platform. You can upload machine images to their platform, and then run them as virtual servers. </li>
<li>Simple Storage Service (S3) &#8211; A cloud storage solution. Let&#8217;s you store files safely and reliably in the cloud.</li>
<li>CloudFront &#8211; A content delivery network enhancement to S3 that copies your files to a global network of edge servers. Requests for files are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.  </li>
</ul>
<h3>Billing Model</h3>
<p>CPU power is measured in EC2 Compute Units. One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. There are 5 main instance types, each providing a different level of processing power, storage and memory.</p>
<p>Prices for EC2 Unix / Linux instances hosted in the United States are as follows:</p>
<table border="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Standard Instances</th>
<th>Price</th>
<th>CPU</th>
<th>Memory (GB)</th>
<th>Storage (GB)</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Small (Default)</td>
<td>$0.10 per hour</td>
<td>1</td>
<td>1.7</td>
<td>160</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Large</td>
<td>$0.40 per hour</td>
<td>4</td>
<td>7.5</td>
<td>850</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Extra Large</td>
<td>$0.80 per hour</td>
<td>8</td>
<td>15</td>
<td>1690</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th colspan="5">High CPU Instances</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Medium</td>
<td>$0.20 per hour</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>1.7</td>
<td>350</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Extra Large</td>
<td>$0.80 per hour</td>
<td>20</td>
<td>7</td>
<td>1690</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>A small instance running continuously would therefore cost approximately 0.10 x 24 x 30 = $72 per month.</p>
<p>Bandwidth is charged on top of this at the following rates:</p>
<table class="tan-table" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="350">
<tbody>
<tr bgcolor="#EEEECC">
<td width="250"><strong>Data Transfer In</strong></td>
<td width="100"> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>All Data Transfer</td>
<td width="100">$0.10 per GB</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table class="tan-table" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="350">
<tbody>
<tr bgcolor="#EEEECC">
<td width="250"><strong>Data Transfer Out</strong></td>
<td width="100"> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="250">First 10 TB per Month</td>
<td width="100">$0.17 per GB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="250">Next 40 TB per Month</td>
<td width="100">$0.13 per GB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="250">Next 100TB per Month</td>
<td width="100">$0.11 per GB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="250">Over 150 TB per Month</td>
<td width="100">$0.10 per GB</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3>Summary</h3>
<p>Amazon web services is a very competitively priced platform that offers a great deal of flexibility, however it also requires a fair amount of technical expertise to get up and running and it doesn&#8217;t come with any load balancing system, so you would have to build your own.</p>
<p>To address these problems, some third party companies have emerged who offer control panel and management systems for AWS. Examples of such companies include <a href="http://www.rightscale.com">RightScale</a> and <a href="http://www.3tera.com/">3tera</a>. Their products are sometimes referred to as Virtual Private Data Centres, or Cloud Management Platforms. </p>
<p>Rightscale offer <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/products/website_edition.php">Website Edition</a> package, which comes with all the tools and images you need to deploy a load balanced web / database cluster on AWS. For $500 a month, it will let you manage up to around 20 servers.</p>
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