So you find someone.  How do you know if they're any good?  Guess what.  You don't.  Bwahahahahaha!  But if they support IPV6 today plus Xen, their inherent cluefullness is higher from the outset.

But that's what this post is about.  I've tested a bunch of them, having accounts on them, asking questions, using their networks, etc.  It's also interesting to see how they handle their own outages and issues, and how well they keep their clients informed when things are going weird.

I started my startup journey about 4 years back, right around the time Amazon introduced AWS. We started with a VPS and eventually moved to dedicated servers for Muziboo, completely skipping the cloud wave. We are doing the same for SupportBee. We do use S3 but we never used EC2 for hosting. However, I have worked as a consultant a couple of times in the last few years and I have worked with EC2 on client projects. I understand the benefits of cloud hosting but I don’t think that cloud is the right solution for every company. Traditional dedicated server hosting still makes a lot sense for majority of companies out there. However, before I get to that, let’s first quickly go over the benefits of cloud hosting

PHP Cloud Hosting Platform As A Service

Integrate deployment into your existing workflow, directly from your source code repository. Autoscale up and down without any fuss. Spend more time coding, less time on sysadmin.

Is it a good idea to deploy your database into the cloud? It depends. I have seen it work well many times, and cause trouble at other times. In this blog post I want to examine cloud-based I/O. I/O matters a lot when a) the database’s working set is bigger than the server’s memory, or b) the workload is write-heavy. If this is the case, how expensive is it to get good performance, relative to what you get with physical hardware? Specifically, how does it compare to commodity solid-state drives? Let’s put them in the ring and let them duke it out.
I could do benchmarks, but that would not be interesting — we already know that benchmarks are unrealistic, and we know that SSDs would win. I’d rather look at real systems and see how they behave. Are the theoretical advantages of SSDs really a big advantage in practice? I will show the performance of two real customer systems running web applications.

Aegir Mini VPS is FAST – 256MB burstable to 4GB RAM, 4 core 2GHz CPU, MariaDB with XtraDB, Pressflow Drupal core, Memcached and Redis fast caches. SSH and FTP access. Standard and custom palettes possible. Boost compatible. 8 sites. 1 GB storage. 80 GB transfer/m. Aegir UI simplified for beginners, with how-to in an easy to follow screenshots. Self Managed – a dream tool for Drupal hosting startups and design studios, easy to use and expand. 100% white-label. One our Apache Solr Search Core included free when paid yearly.

SiteCloud is an up-and-coming player in the field of low-cost cloud hosting. From the outside, they look a lot like your average host: For $8/month, they promise to provide you with unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, shell access, and good old cPanel. Yes, the popular point-and-click site management tool is now available in the cloud.

But what exactly is "the cloud" and why should you care? SiteCloud uses load-balanced server clusters, which they claim provide "more scalability, reliability and performance" than regular web hosting. By pooling the resources of multiple computers, they should theoretically be able to outperform traditional hosts like AN Hosting (who also offer unlimited storage, bandwidth, shell access, and cPanel for $8/month).