[rarestnews]

Are you sure you REQUIRE a cloud? Phrase "Amazon is too expensive" suggests that it might be not the solution you're looking for.

Maybe you could be a little more clear on what you need, because it's hard to imagine what are your requirements that fall in-between of "Google App engine is too limited" and "Amazon is too expensive"?

Also the phrase "I'm not much of an admin" makes it all sound really confusing... Rarely the cloud is the solution for one person's needs. Typically something like dedicated server or vps should be the answer. VPSes can be 6$/m including server's control panel so that you dont have to be "an admin".

[Tichy]

I was assuming that operating with virtual images would already count as "moving into the cloud". At the moment, I am experimenting with several small projects and technologies. For example, I consider prototyping a CouchDB project, but I don't think I can install CouchDB on my existing root server in addition to the services it is already running (it is very old).

I don't have a scaling problem atm, but if publishing things to the cloud is easier than going the traditional "set up a server" route, I thought it might be worthwhile to use "clouds" from the beginning (also to feel safe about potential traffic spikes). For example, using Heroku recently was pure bliss, because I really don't want to bother with configuring web servers, databases, firewalls, backups and so on for each of my projects. I would probably manage somehow, but admin stuff is not my main skill. Unfortunately Heroku does not do everything I need in other projects (ie more frequent cron jobs, other tech than Rails).

I suppose having a virtual image for every project would be perfect.

Edit: Re "Amazon is expensive": my projects don't earn money yet, so I am trying to save. My existing root server costs 20€/month, I think Amazon would cost quite a bit more, so it feels expensive. But of course my root server is old and can not handle much more modern stuff atm.

[davidw]

Ah, ok, then what you want is linode (or slicehost, although it's more expensive). You get images that you can expand or contract (in terms of memory, disk, cpu) as you need. That won't take you into the territory of horizontal scaling, but it should be good enough to get started without spending too much.

[Tichy]

That sounds perfect, thanks!

[tzury]

Where do you get VPS for $6/m?

Those are usually shared once, aren't they?

[listic]

http://www.prgmr.com/xen/, it's run by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lsc

or, you can pick something on http://www.lowendbox.com/, but be careful - their primary concern is price i.e. they list hosting services that are cheap, but not all of them are reliable.

[tzury]

thanks allot, although, too cheap is a bit risky.

[lsc]

if I may defend myself, I find price is often a poor indicator of quality. (not to say prgmr.com is high-end; our interface does, well, kindof suck. )

[rarestnews]

Firstvds.ru (they have US branch at minivds.com). VPSes are never "shared", but they are on "shared" server. I.e. you have root access to your own VPS as root, nobody has access to it (1), but there are many VPSes on one physical server.

(1) ...except for the provider, but even Amazon has access to your files on EC2... (Tin-foil hat time.)

[olegp]

Looking at the Russian version of the site, you can get the same type of VPS for $4.44 a month instead of $6, although you get 25GB of traffic instead of 30.

Cloudkick should support this provider.

[listic]

The more the merier, but I would vote for http://www.prgmr.com/xen/ The guy has been doing this thing since 2005, writes here and on his blog about how he is going about setting up his servers (http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/archives.html) and writes a book about Xen (http://nostarch.com/xen.htm). The FirstVDS/MiniVDS on the other hand, go very dry official on their site, I'm not sure which virtualization technology they use and whether or not they are going out of business real soon (miniVDS forums are a ghost town).

[rarestnews]

Can't be very sure, but I think they aren't going out of business. They are very big in Russia (I have a few VPSes with them, the numbers are sequential and my IDs are around 20 000).

[listic]

But mostly I'm just excited about the coming of technologies like cloudkick which will help push cloud providers (i.e. EC2, VPS'es) into being a commodity.

[lsc]

yes. this is the way of the future... (I mean, APIs that make it easy to move from one provider to another.) without that, well, the 'cloud' will quickly become uncompetitive with dedicated servers.

Lock-in is bad for customers; long-term, lock-in can kill industries.

[rarestnews]

Not really an option for US citizens to use Russian version, I think, since all of panels will be in Russian and also you would have to pay in roubles :) /Also you do have to sign a contract in Russian with them and send it back to far east of Russia/

[listic]

I wonder what kind of virtualization technology are they using? They don't advertise it anywhere on the site. I would speculate that they use different virtualization technology for Linux and FreeBSD, because on 'BSD installed software doesn't count towards disk quota: http://minivds.com/technology/software/index.html

  Pre-installed FreeBSD OS will not occupy your VDS disk space. Our experts will update all the pre-installed software regulary.

  Pre-installed Linux OS takes up disk space allocated to your VDS. And we will not update the software - you will have to do it yourself.

[olefoo]

It sounds like jails for freebsd and either UML or some homebrew chroot system on linux.

[listic]

What are the peculiarities (if any) of this technology over virtualization like Xen or OpenVZ that most similar providers use nowadays?

[olefoo]

Jails are actually very efficient, and well understood and have been tested extensively by the freebsd project. User Mode Linux or handbuilt chroot 'jails' under linux are less efficient (binaries have to be in the chroot and cannot be run from the host filesystem). User Mode Linux is effectively a kernel and userland running under a users UID; it's one of the least efficient forms of virtualisation. Both of these solutions would fall under the class of pseudo-virtualisation, since they depend on a host filesystem and processor, and usually it's less easy to partition memory and harder to guarantee process isolation.

Xen, VMWare and Parallels are all examples of para-virtualisation, where multiple OS's share the underlying hardware, but have their own resource limits in terms of disk and memory access. And the hypervisor exists to manage the timesharing and access control, but the guest OS's are executing directly on the hardware.

From a hosting company point of view, jails on a BSD system are the most tractable and resource efficient, followed closely by any of the paravirtualisation solutions. UML as a hosting solution is kind of cheesy (it's great for networking simulations though). From a customer standpoint, a paravirtualisation solution offers more flexibility and power.