Grid Hosting by FlexiScale
I’m trying out the wonderful buzz-word friendly world of Grid hosting (aka Cloud Computing) thanks to Flexiscale.com. What better way to test it than with my own website, stressing the 512MB of RAM and the single virtual CPU core.
Flexiscale.com operate a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) billing model where you can set up a virtual server appliance to your liking (mine is 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD, 1 CPU running CentOS 5) and pay for what you use (i.e. CPU time at £0.05 per hour). You can change those settings any time you like and scale it up or down, without having to worry about buying memory or moving your files.
The minimum amount you need to charge your account with is £10 and I’ll be looking forward to seeing how long that will last me. All I’m running on the Virtual Server is Webmin (control panel), Apache2 with PHP5 including xCache and Zend to improve performance. My site runs on WordPress CMS which receives on average 150 unique visits a month, generating just about 700 page views. That’s according to Google Analytics anyway and is by no means the whole picture.
So far I’m impressed by how easy and fast the server grid performs. Compared to the cheap VPS the site ran on before, I feel like it has gotten a lot quicker.
Setting up your virtual grid appliance or virtual server is very straight-forward: Just pick a name, an operating system template (i.e. CentOS), add RAM and suitable hard disk space. Then tell the cloud grid system to start your server and lean back waiting for those worker processes to get it done.
All in all it way quick and pain-free. It took just a couple of minutes for the server to be ready. Thanks to a local YUM repo mirror updates and software installs were fast too.
I’ll keep you updated on how my grid hosted virtual server will perform and more importantly how much it’s going to cost. Stay tuned and watch this space.
Axel says:
December 4th, 2008 at 17:17
Actually I have to say I’m quite disappointed. My initial balance dissolved very quickly indeed, leaving only £1.65 in my account.
A nice, convenient idea but way to expensive when compared with other alternatives.