A couple months ago I was thrilled when I read a posting on [tag]TechCrunch[/tag] about the Amazon Elastic Cloud solution. Having worked in the tech industry for over a decade, I had hear rumblings about this type of idea for years. The principal, even to a layman were fascinating; a bunch of computers hooked in as one. Instead of a dedicated server, you would just use part of a huge gird of machines. If one machine has a failure, the other pick up the slack. When one of the applications requires more power, it pulls it from another part of the machine. If more power is needed, just add more machines.

This seems like a simple concept, and the results would provide solutions for some of the biggest problems for creating a website or application.

The biggest solution is with scalability. When [tag]USWeb[/tag] build a web application, we obviously like to believe that it?s going to become popular and that we will need to handle high loads of traffic. But if we put 5 load balanced servers to every application we built, we would be near bankruptcy. The truth is most of our applications are not wildly successful, and we don?t need more than 1 server to host them. But then we have the occasional hit, which then requires more servers and load balancing. And in those situations, you are in a race to get more servers up before you start to have issues with traffic.

I had the chance to hear Ryan Carson, the founder of [tag]DropSend[/tag] speak a little about this issue. He agrees that you shouldn?t need more than 1 server to start a project, but then you have to scale quickly. This is the main problem Media Temple solves with their Grid Server hosting solution.

Here is what they offer:

1. 100 gigs of storage space

2. 1 Terabyte of bandwidth

3. Up to 100 domains

4. The most amazing control console I have ever seen

5. 1-Click install for applications like WordPress, ZneCart and Drupal

6. Built in Urchin tracking

7. Great AJAX webmail client

All this for $20 per month or $200 per year!

USWeb maintained over 30 servers in 4 different locations. Our total bill for bandwidth and storage came to over $7,000 per month. Since we have started using Media Temple?s Grid Server solution, we have consolidated 17 servers on to the Grid Server. By the end of the month, we will have consolidated everything. Because of our need for SSL certs on a few sites, (they only allow one custom cert per account) we needed to get extra account set up with Media Temple. So with total consolidation, and extra accounts, USWeb will be paying about $100 per month for hosting.

USWeb will be bringing their hosting expenses from $7,450 per month to $100!

That seems to good to be true, so you might be wondering about performance issues. Well?it?s pretty rock solid. I have noticed a few phantom issues pop up that are hard to say anything about. I once noticed that all our WordPress blogs on the grid showed some WordPress error page, but I refreshed and they were gone. We have had some apps run slow, but that might be more of a programming issue that we were working on. So, I can?t really point to any stability issues with the grid server.

I do think there is always room for improvement. Here are a couple suggestions I would make to Media Temple.

1. Allow more SSL certs on each account, even if you have to charge extra.

2. Add the following items to 1-Click Install (even if you have to charge for them)

a. Expression Engine
b. SugarCRM
c. Zimbra
d. A hosted IP PBX
e. Flash Communication Server
f. Mint

3. Add a shared forum to the control console for all users to communicate. I don?t like calling support when I don?t have to

That?s a pretty short list of suggestions for something so new. I think that means that Media Temple really nailed it.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 4:29 pmand is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.