[HCoop-Discuss] VPS hosting for HCoop

[Ron Senykoff]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Philip Neustrom <philipn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > There is also the philosophical angle to consider, whether a co-op
> > should move down one tier closer to retail and feed the for-profit
> > world. From running all VPSes, it's only one more step to mass
> > purchasing a web hosting package from a commercial provider with a group
> > discount, and so outsourcing tech support and software configuration. It
> > would be more in keeping with the cooperative approach to move UP a
> > level and provide its own rackspace. This is not exactly trivial though.
>
> Yeah, this is the point I was trying to make about ownership of infrastructure.
>
> -philip

At what level does it make sense to take ownership? We certainly
aren't going to buy the Internet. We get benefits by sharing in the
cost of the Internet with other users. The sacrifice? Restrictions on
protocols would be one. But nobody complains about this because it is
considered acceptable.

So my question is: Are the sacrifices we would be making in order to
share in the cost structure of a VPS environment acceptable? Let's
look at the use cases our user base has, and see if the use cases
would work in this environment.

For my usage, I run a couple of CMS solutions backed by MySQL (Joomla!
and Wordpress). I may be incorrect as I haven't researched the
problem, but it appears that sometimes I get poor performance out of
the database. Since the DB is relatively static I have suspected it to
be a disk i/o issue. My guess is the VPS is hooked up to a SAN. The
hosting provider should be able to provide some level of expectation
on disk i/o. Does this exceed our current setup? If so, we are getting
a benefit.

I would like to see more discussion focusing on quantifiable benefits
/ drawbacks. I care about the 1s and 0s, not where they came from
(within reason... no soylent green powered VPS's, please).

jm2c,
-Ron