[Catalyst] OT: Recommendations for big-time hosting

[Joe Landman]

Hi Brian:

Brian Kirkbride wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'd be interested in hearing opinions from the Catalyst community on the 
> best managed hosting.  We run a Catalyst-based web service and are 
> currently on several self-managed dedicated hosts at SoftLayer.  I can't 
> praise SoftLayer enough, but in the interest of sanity we'd like to move 
> to a fully, Fully, *FULLY* managed setup so that we can focus on our App 
> instead of routine sysadmin stuff.

[...]

> Searching the list archives for "hosting" comes up with a lot of links 
> to the best shared or VPS plans under $50/month.  We're talking more 
> like $1000+/month for our needs.  At this point, it's all about the 
> quality and reliability of service - not price.

Hmmm....  be careful saying this aloud, as some will happily put 
lipstick on a pig and call it something else.

> So what's you recommendation for absolutely bullet-proof hosting that 
> let's you sleep at night?  I'm talking pro-active monitoring, upgrades, 
> patches, backups, redundancy setup, architecture planning and growth.  
> Everything you might need.  Staff that understands why you'd need Nginx 
> or Lighttpd in front and what FastCGI is.  People that can handle tuning 
> Postgres instead of just slapping MySQL with a stock config on your box.

Well, on the hardware side, this is generally not hard, though 
enterprise class folks will charge you significantly for this.  We were 
looking to host linux clusters for some of our customers (with our 
Catalyst app atop it), and simply wanted good monitoring/support.  Local 
to us (Midwest USA) is Secure-24 (www.secure-24.com).  I met their CEO 
and toured their facility.  Haven't seen them in support action, and we 
haven't placed anything at their site yet, but it does look promising, 
and we are pointing some of our customers to them.

On the software side, there are lots of folks who do take the "easy" way 
out.  I am not sure most of the companies will grasp the whats/whys of 
this.  As long as you lay out your plan, and give them sensible marching 
orders, they don't have to drink the koolaid, just pour it for you, and 
make sure it keeps flowing.

-- 
Joe Landman
landman at scalableinformatics.com
http://scalableinformatics.com