Question for UK List Members

I'm currently investigating a new UK hosting solution and I was hoping to pick people's brains: 1. Can anyone recommend one or two good, responsive CF hosting companies based in the UK? 2. Do people have any experiences with running CF hosting on a VM solution, how does it compare to a standalone server? 3. I tried to convince my boss that "cloud" is just another of those meaningless marketing buzz-words but he's insistent I look at "cloud-based" CF hosting. Anyone go any recommendations for that in the UK? Thanks in advance :) -= Ed

Does it *have* to be a CF host? If so, then you've got HostMediaUK and BlueThunder Internet. If you want a damn good hosting company, then I'd strongly recommend Rackspace. They won't help you one jot with ColdFusion, but they are untouched for their experience and support when it comes to infrastructure and support. We host all our sites and apps on their UK and US Cloud platform. Andy On 23 May 2012 09:31, Edward Chanter <firewall@cc.uk.com> wrote: ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

> -----Original Message----- > Does it *have* to be a CF host? If so, then you've got HostMediaUK and > BlueThunder Internet. Not required no, but I'll check those two out anyway. > If you want a damn good hosting company, then I'd strongly recommend > Rackspace. They won't help you one jot with ColdFusion, but they are > untouched for their experience and support when it comes to infrastructure > and support. We host all our sites and apps on their UK and US Cloud > platform. I'll add rackspace to my list of hosts to investigate. Thanks Andy!

I can recommend www.cfmxhosting.co.uk most of the others I have tried over the years were rubbish  or turned out of be resellers for the rubbish ones. So far these guys have been great so I stuck with them. Cloud is essentially just the same thing as a VPS, depending on your viewpoint, everyone has a different definition. But a VPS is what you will get form most hosts. If you want PROPER cloud infrastructure then you have to go to the likes of Amazon. It really depends what you actually want. A good test of any host is to contact their sales dept and ask them some technical questions and see what kind of response you get. ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

cfmxhosting / bluethunder are essentially one and the same. On 23 May 2012 09:59, Jude Blacklaw <judeblacklaw@gmail.com> wrote: ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

www.hostmedia.co.uk ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

Ed, here are a couple of good sites which I have found have reliable reviews. Don't bother to look at "host review sites" as these are a scam usually and the hosts pay to be listed/rated. Always check generic review sites instead, preferably ones without advertising. http://forta.com/cf/isp/ this has been going for years so has reviews going back many years too, although make sure you read the reviews and don't just go by the ratings as it is flawed as a host with 1 review of 5 bolts shows higher than a host with 100 good reviews if their overall rating is less than 5, so it is not weighted. www.brownbook.net is also pretty good, here is our reviews on both sites for your reference. :-) http://www.brownbook.net/business/37811877/bluethunder-internet http://forta.com/cf/isp/isp.cfm?isp_id=1050 ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----

> 2. Do people have any experiences with running CF hosting on a VM solution, > how does it compare to a standalone server? In most configurations disk I/O is a bit more unpredictable. For the rest it is the same. > 3. I tried to convince my boss that "cloud" is just another of those > meaningless marketing buzz-words The cloud is a buzzword. However, hidden behind more buzzwords (at least in the case of AWS) as "design to fail", "autoscale" and "RDS" are some sound technological concepts and offerings that make the cloud more than just a big VM environment. If you have no need for them and your application can't use them, the cloud is just a big VM environment. Jochem -- Jochem van Dieten http://jochem.vandieten.net/

We run almost all of our shared and internal web servers as VMs using VMware with no degradation in performance.  Most of them are currently using local storage of the host node. Eventually we will be moving to either a fiber channel SAN storage or multi-pathed direct attach storage to store the vm images. Currently using local storage we cannot reap the benefits of Vmotion, which handles moving vms from host to host in the advent the host goes down. It can also (based on a rule set) move vms if esx host performance begins to degrade. Nice thing is there is virtually no downtime when this occurs, you may notice a freeze for less than a second in most instances. Vmotion is where you get "cloud" like behavior. In a well desgined and configured environment you should really see no performance differences. In fact if use fiber channel san disk i/o will probably be better than local storage (with a server virtualizied or not). Then it comes down to cost, san and vmware get expensive, but you get into the very highly available arena. You have to do your homework as some hosts say vm, but may not be giving you the HA aspect, so if a host goes down you still will have down time. Although, vms in general tend to be easier to recover than doing baremetal restores or breaking raid and putting a drive in another machine. At hosting.com, they used to sell simple/vms that used nfs storage with no vmotion, now they only sell enterprise vms that use san storage and have vmotion enabled.  Difference in cost is about 3 times more because of the storage and vmotion license cost. Then vps is another virtualization technology. Its container based, as opposed to hypervisor, and has some of the same storage and HA considerations. Conatiners are nice in the way they share memory, you can actually get better capacity (more vms per node) than hypervisors, but usually want vps of smaller size (less ram and cpu cores). Depending on your budget you may want to look at vps over vms as they are usually less expensive. Might be a good stepping stone. Byron Mann Lead Engineer and Architect Hostmysite.com On May 23, 2012 4:31 AM, "Edward Chanter" <firewall@cc.uk.com> wrote: ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more -----