Embrace Constraints To Evolve

New Infrastructure for InDefero Hosting

After one year of InDefero Hosting and the future launch of new services, it is time to upgrade the infrastructure. I have been evaluating several options, including moving to a pure cloud offer. But at the end, my current provider is still providing the best value.

Céondo is going to operate its own cloud. At the end it will be way cheaper and way safer. With the latest changes in the backup system I performed in November, giving you near real time backup of the database and daily backup of your repositories, I am slowly moving to a pair structure for the system.

This means that at anytime, a hot spare will be ready to jump in and replace the current master with minimal downtime and data loss.

Ok, now, we can calculate the cost of such basic pair infrastructure on Amazon EC2. Basically we need 2 large instances with 500GB outbound transfer and about 100GB inbound transfer per month. Using the handy EC2 calculator one gets:

2 large instances: $556.32/month
Bandwidth: $85.00/month
Total EC2: $641.32/month

Now with OVH, using OpenVZ for the virtualization:

2 EG dedicated server (8GB RAM): $230/month
Bandwidth: $0/month
Total OVH: $230/month

EC2 is at the end nearly 3 times more expensive. Even if I am adding the extra backup in another datacenter operated by another provider (OVH already includes a default 100GB backup space for each server in another datacenter than the server itself for each server), EC2 cannot compete. If you add on top of that the latest EC2 latency problems, I know that I am doing the right choice.

What does it means for you?

you keep getting the good value I get from OVH transfered to you with high quality code hosting for a fair price;
you will have a bit of downtime with the virtualization of the infrastructure, but be happy, the power of the servers will increase at the same time;
you will have an even better security of your data with real time backup (ok, 5 minutes maybe).

This work will be completed by early February, you can expect a series of small downtime, I will announce them here on this blog.

Loïc d'Anterroches,
Jan 14, 2010