GoGrid and Joyent

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#1 Tue, 03/24/2009 - 10:40
kenlyle

GoGrid and Joyent

There was not a single post about GoGrid, until now.

I am looking for a VPS platform for Virtualmin hosting.

Joe has mentioned Joyent, and a few others, consistently. Joyent looks solid, and I personally like the idea of supporting Sun in some small way by hosting on their gear.

It looks like both GoGrid and Joyent offer a 1 GB machine/"Accelerator" for about $100 a month.

It seems a little odd to me that Joyent doesn't appear to offer a 512 MB VPS, jumping from 256 to 1 GB.

So, for about $100 a month, GoGrid offers a failover setup of two 512 VPS, http://www.gogrid.com/pricing/plans.php with automatic load balancing, which seems better than one 1GB machine, at least theoretically.

And, it looks like their CentOS images have most of the prerequisites that Joe listed, ProcMail, SpamAssassin, and dovecot, leaving only postfix and clam to be added.

However, the support techs seem to have no clue about Virtualmin.

I am interested in some more informed opinions.

Best, Ken

Tue, 03/24/2009 - 18:26
andreychek

Hi Ken,

Hopefully, some folks will share their experiences here.

However, I just thought I'd offer that it doesn't actually matter what prerequisites are provided.

If you have a CentOS install (or any other supported distro_, Virtualmin's install.sh will pull down and setup all the prerequisites.

Also, don't underestimate the importance of RAM. 512MB will work if your system isn't that heavily used, but I'd definitely make sure you're able to enable swap on your VPS.
-Eric

Wed, 03/25/2009 - 08:08
Joe
Joe's picture

We know Joyent because they've (originally as TextDrive, which was acquired by Joyent a few years ago) been offering Virtualmin for almost as long as Virtualmin has existed. And, we like them because we very rarely hear from customers who have a really bad experience with them, and often hear good experiences. There's probably nobody better equipped to support Virtualmin on a VPS than Joyent, at this point, but we'd love for there to be more options.

So, thanks for asking the GoGrid folks about us! It always helps when hosts are hearing about Virtualmin from customers. ;-)

<div class='quote'>And, it looks like their CentOS images have most of the prerequisites that Joe listed, ProcMail, SpamAssassin, and dovecot, leaving only postfix and clam to be added.</div>

Less is usually more. Hopefully they're using the stock CentOS packages for these things...or you'd need to clean up some before running the Virtualmin install. The nicest experience will nearly always be starting with a fresh OS install, rather than having a bunch of stuff preconfigured (unless, of course, they do the installation and configuration of Virtualmin for you, as is the case with Joyent).

<div class='quote'>So, for about $100 a month, GoGrid offers a failover setup of two 512 VPS, http://www.gogrid.com/pricing/plans.php with automatic load balancing, which seems better than one 1GB machine, at least theoretically.</div>

Why would this be better? Load balancing is the simplest part of the scaling problem...the real question is: can you make your applications work across multiple servers?

I'd probably choose one reliable 1GB machine over two 512MB machines with a load balancer for pretty much any situation. In fact, I can't think of any case where I'd prefer the latter. Thinking of it in raw numbers, you lose twice the memory to your OS in the latter case, so you're actually getting only about 512MB of usable memory versus 768MB in the 1GB case (assuming the OS and services for the full web hosting stack takes about 256MB). And from a performance standpoint, more memory is dramatically more important than additional processing time.

Reliability-wise, there can be a case made for multiple servers...but, I suspect reliability of the GoGrid instances is quite high, by default. And, unless they provide a guarantee of different networks and physical machines for each virtual instance, you're not really gaining significant reliability assurances.

Just some thoughts.

We can't tell you what the best choice is for you. We like that there are lots of options, and new cloud hosting providers spring into existence every day, it seems.

One more option you might want to consider is RimuHosting. They've been big Webmin users for many years, and they signed on as a Virtualmin Pro reseller a few months ago. They're really savvy folks, as well, and have some pretty good pricing on their VPS products. They've been doing VPS products for many years (they were among the very first to offer such products many, many years ago), as well, so I suspect they're also pretty good at it.

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Wed, 03/25/2009 - 08:39 (Reply to #3)
kenlyle

Thanks, Joe...that's the kind of information I was looking for. Your point on the one machine vs. two is excellent, and I was *assuming* that when they propose a &quot;Business Cloud&quot; of several VMs, that they would automagically make sure that the two instances are as isolated from a single point of failure as possible, and would only offer something like that if there were some rational application of some kind of thought process along those lines. But assumptions are a bad way to do business, so I will likely ask.

Thanks again for the info.

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