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'VPS Is dead' - Page 2
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'VPS Is dead'

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Comments

  • RensRens Member
    edited November 2011

    @DanielM: SLA has nothing to do with Cloud, we also have SLA's for dedicated servers and many other services. Please keep the discussion about cloud in general and not about our services. LET visitors can make up their own mind about what it means for them and where they want to buy services.

    Could you please elaborate on the ripoff part?

  • To me, anything that's a true cloud is going to consist of at least 2 datacenters. If one goes down, the other picks up the slack. Clouds in just one datacenter are going to fail with no real fallback.

  • @Rens said: SLA has nothing to do with Cloud, we also have SLA's for dedicated servers and many other services.

    its a rip-off extra though..

  • I can tell you from using the Amazon S3 download service, that there are times when you are downloading a file from the "S3 cloud" and the download freezes, when you come back (on a new socket) and ask for the file again you get resolution to a new IP address. I've seen this happen sometimes a couple of times a day.

    So the "cloud" doesn't prevent a failed download, it just provides server fallback when the server you were assigned goes down (for whatever reason).

    That's better than only one server, as you can open a new connection to the newly resolved server and still get your data, but anyone that tells you that having files on the cloud means you'll never get an error doesn't understand how distributed servers work.

  • The idea of "cloud computing" is quite old but hardware and web (and mobile) technologies today are more affordable and more flexible to handle "cloud" compared to a decade ago. I think it's a matter of convenience why cloud technology costs more. Plus everyone is just so into innovations and new terminologies, and that servers riding on the popularity bandwagon helps increase the value of the product, which in turn increases its price (for awhile). Wait until the some marketing firm breaks away with the idea of "green" cloud computing, then you'll probably see a dollar more on the technology.

    As for saying VPS is dead, is just ironic. I think the idea of having a VPS is more on the level of control and management of a technology (hardware, hosting, bandwidth, security, etc), as well as the cost, more than anything else.

  • When you think about it, where does the term "cloud" come from? From those network topology diagram I believe, to represent the Internet, or "the network you don't care/don't want to know about". Cloud is a concept pretty much from the end's perspective. For example,

    • You are reading an email from Gmail. You might connect to a web server on mail.google.com, but how the mails are stored, indexed, forwarded, archived, etc -- you have no idea and don't care about.

    • You are downloading a file from Amazon S3 over CloudFront. Geo DNS gives you an end point of CDN, where your HTTP transaction starts. However how the CDN get the original data from S3, how and where that file was stored and backed up onto a physical hardware -- you have no idea and don't care about.

    When it comes to VPS. Take EC2 for example, with an API you can programmatically instantiate a virtual server with specific size somewhere, instantly. You can even get it to bootup with a specific image from S3 to perform a designated task. You can then turn that VPS off when the task is done, and you are only charged for the time your VPS is instantiated, rounded up to the hour. No human intervention. Everything automated. Virtual servers and their processing powers are just utility, and most of the time you don't need to care about the network topology, routing, location of the servers, replacing hardware etc. You have no idea what usually gets inside, and you don't really care about it anyway.

    Most low end VPS providers are still working towards that. At least none of them allow me to fire up 200 instances to do number crunching for 12 hours at the same time, and shut all of them down, yet. But still, the virtual servers I got is just an IP address on the Internet where I can connect to. I have no idea where it really is on the rack.

    I guess the marketing term "cloud computing" is mainly to sell to the enterprise, who traditionally would rack up a server room for all their internal needs + paying network engineers, system admins, etc. I worked with this kind of companies before, where a team of op guys running between internal server rooms and data centers, racking up servers, making sure dead hard drives are replaced, etc. 300-400 Dell servers in my case (lucky I was a software dev and no need to do any of these crap). "Cloud Computing" gives the IT/IS department the dream of firing half of their IT/IS staffs and pay only the resources they need (when you know how much server under-utilisation there is in a corporate environment).

    I guess it's just not very relevant to those of us who sign up VPS for less than $7/month to run our precious Minecraft servers...

  • @LowEndAdmin said: I guess it's just not very relevant to those of us who sign up VPS for less than $7/month to run our precious Minecraft servers...

    i have yet to try minecraft..

  • That's a nice way to put it, LEA. Good insight as always. Regarding your point on the IT/IS workforce "slash-downs" that is one thing that we're going to be seeing more and more often as technology marches forward. The internet is a double-edged sword for software engineers and IT/IS people everywhere, especially with the rise of cheaper outsource IT manpower and server hardware technologies from countries like Japan, China, Singapore, South Korea, Saudi Arabia as well as India.

    In short, let's not worry about VPS and Cloud, because as long as businesses can get money from them, they're going to stay around for a very long time. As IT/IS people, we may need to worry how to stay relevant.

  • @DanielM said: i have yet to try minecraft

    Neither have I. Just trying to point out that the average Minecraft-playing LowEndBox'ers probably won't care about how cloud is being marketed in the enterprise world :)

    @Paul said: As IT/IS people, we may need to worry how to stay relevant

    Indeed. I am a software guy so it's completely different. Many webhosting companies have only just transit from doing just cPanel shared hosting to SolusVM OpenVZ hosting. This business is also something a lot of teens can easily get into. However the IT guys here should step ahead and think a bit more.

    The past threads have asked about career choices, getting into university, etc. And people might need to understand that the bulk of money is actually NOT in public-facing shared/VPS hosting catered for soccer moms. Enterprise projects in big corporations. Government projects. Those are big mammoths moving slowly but got lots of funding (at least won't argue with you over $10 PayPal transactions). IT/IS is a "cost" to them and with a good strategy, many of them would be willing to spend tens of $mil so they can save hundreds of $mil for the next 10 years.

    Good luck guys! Virtualization and cloud is where the $$$ is at the moment so don't diss it too quickly (or at least just keep it to yourself and on LowEndTalk :)

  • vivithemagevivithemage Member, Host Rep

    That's a rather long video with horrible audio, can anyone cliffnote it?

  • The man's voice is terrifying :)

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