Re: IBM i in the cloud (was social media)

I think you are drawing conclusions awfully fast. Yes it can work as
both a dev and deployment platform. How do I know? I have done it -
about 4 years ago when we (KrengelTech) first started using them for
hosting many sites.

Note that we mostly did development on our desktops and then deployed
(when doing .NET) and it was common to do development on the cloud
machine when it was PHP being used (used TextPad for much of that). I
am not recommending using a hosted Windows server to also run your
IDE, even though I have done it.

Note that we did outgrow the virtualized instance pretty fast, but it
a great way to meet our need at the time that wasn't expensive. For
Hosting.com it turned out to be a great way to grab us as a customer
and allow us to grow with them. Right now I believe we have three or
four dedicated servers with them that run about $500/month. These are
very beefy servers (Windows unfortunately) where some of them are
running 40+ websites (mostly DNN, WordPress, Joomla) and are still
trucking just fine (for the most part :-). Of course when you pay
that much per month per server you get pretty decent support from
Hosting.com which is a huge plus.

As far as MS .Net development platforms are concerned, some developers are saying they can't stand anything less than a 2.5 Ghz dual-core dedicated CPU and 8GB of RAM.  A 600 Mhz micro partition with 1 GB of RAM would simply not work as a development platform.

I am not sure why you are bringing up development platforms. Even as
it relates to the IBM i, I do 95% of my development with
RPGNextGen/RDi, and then save it to the server for production/runtime.
Sure I have different libraries for stuff waiting to move into
production, but the same can be true for any production server.

Could you really trust your business to a company like that.

Yes, you can. You keep thinking of businesses in terms of 15 years
ago - the brick an mortar type. Today I might be a small-time
software developer looking to start a business and all I need is a
place to write a few lines of PHP to host the sale/marketing of my
Android/iPhone app. In that scenario I can deal with a little down
time or bad support - you get what you pay for. Is DreamHost a
solution for everyone? No. Maybe all you use it for is a HTTP file
server. It sure is nice to have options though.

Aaron Bartell
www.MowYourLawn.com/blog
www.OpenRPGUI.com
www.SoftwareSavesLives.com



On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 7:41 PM, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From: Aaron Bartell
Here is where I got the $65 number from, which is an entirely
dedicated and virtualized OS hosted on a shared machine ...

I still fail to see the validity of the comparison.  The offer from
www.hosting.com would be totally unsuitable for hosting an integrated
development environment.  It's not a development platform.  It's actually not
even suitable as a deployment platform except for a very small number of users.
As far as MS .Net development platforms are concerned, some developers are
saying they can't stand anything less than a 2.5 Ghz dual-core dedicated CPU and

8GB of RAM.  A 600 Mhz micro partition with 1 GB of RAM would simply not work as

a development platform.  At $65/month you only get the free edition of MS SQL
Server Express, which is constrained to just 1 GB RAM, and 10 GB of DB storage.
What kind of performance could you expect from a micro partition that is forced
to run a resource intensive workload like MS .Net and SQL Server on just 600
Mhz, and 1GB of RAM?  My understanding is that the resource requirements of
aspx.net are comparable to those of JEE application servers like WAS.  How would

Java perform under those kinds of constraints?

And if you don't need an entire virtual OS then you can go with
DreamHost at $8.95/month ...

Could you really trust your business to a company like that.  Their come-on
offers are simply false.  Unlimited terabyte storage?  Unlimited terabyte
bandwidth?  100% uptime guarantee? I won't bother to repeat all the types of
"unlimited" features offered.  It's simply false advertising.  Maybe they don't
meter CPU, bandwidth, or storage but you can bet there are bottlenecks in their
capacities that constrain the actual amount of use.  There's no mention of the
number of HTTP server threads allocated to customers, for example.  It's like
advertising a genie in a bottle; perhaps a data center with enormous capacity
but you can bet there is something constraining its use.  As far as the uptime
guarantee, you can bet that your service will not be up 100% of the time.
You'll have to go through the ticket report process to get a refund measured in
pennies.  This is not a development platform either, so that comparison is not
valid either.

-Nathan



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