Shawn on the net

So quite a while ago I released a review of a couple different cloud providers.  It’s been a few months so I thought I’d give an updated picture.  Like last time I still use Amazon, GoGrid and Rackspace cloud.  Also like last time Rackspace cloud is still my least used though unlike last time Amazon is a very close second.

During my last post I believe I mentioned how important latency was to me.  Specifically latency to a number of services on the west coast in the bay area.  GoGrid still is the best of the providers in this regard and due to it I’ve now moved almost all of my services over to GoGrid.  There is some backups on Rackspace cloud and some applications that are just too painful to move on Amazon still but in general 95% of my servers are now with GoGrid.

I’ll start with Amazon.  They still really are the ones setting the bar in this space and they haven’t slowed down.  I get constant new feature updates from them.  I still use scalr instead of their own console though I have gone in there to play around a few times and it seems pretty nice.  My only real complaint with Amazon is their location and latency to the west coast that I need to be talking to.  The prices on their reserved servers are also nice but I would prefer GoGrids monthly prepay option here as well.  Almost forgot support.  A few months back something went wrong at amazon causing a number of EBS volumes to fail.  Just as I was about to go on vacation no less.  It happened to take down our primary DB which isn’t fun when you’re only stopping into the office to waste time before a flight.  Trying to get any information out of their support was like pulling teeth and their outage page was rarely updated with no set pattern or frequency.  It was also wrong for half of the outage.  They didn’t even admit there was a problem for the first while.  I had to go to twitter to see a lot of other posts about it before being convinced it wasn’t just my systems breaking.  Thats the only time I’ve had to use support with Amazon which is a good sign but the support I received deserves a D-.

Rackspace cloud we use as an offsite backup so it doesn’t get much use but the interface is awesome from what little I’ve used it with all the important information easily found.  Nothing much really to complain about here but alternatively I haven’t used them enough to give me much specifically to praise either.   I’ll leave this one to someone else.

That leaves only GoGrid who took a lot of harsh criticism in my last update.  I’m now using them almost exclusively and a lot.  They still have some problems but I’ve found a lot of good since then so in the interest of saving the best for last I’ll start with the bad.

The first problem for me is their lack of different server images still.  Still only CentOS and RHEL for the linux side.  The ability to have debian or ubuntu based distros has been promised for a long time but no apparent update given.

This leads directly to my second biggest problem with GoGrid is their schedules for releasing features are consistently sliding back.  I work in development so I understand schedules slide but you can compensate for this by adding time to what the developers say.  If they always say next month and always ends up being 3 months just say 3 months and save the hassle of having to explain to me why it’s 2 months late(instead of early if they do actually get it done in a month).  This happened with MyGSI which was pushed back repeatedly and then released with a number of missing features and it’s happened with the release of new server images.

My last gripe is the interface.  It looks cool but has a number of bugs in firefox that make it difficult to work with.  The lack of scrollbars on the main page has ment that multiple times while working on my laptop away from my desk I’ve been unable to see all my servers in the list.  This also effects my ip lists with me unable to see all my ip blocks if the billing side box is open.  They are ment to resize apparently but this has never worked for me.  Maybe a minimalistic interface option?

Lastly is forms.  I understand forms are sometimes needed for things.  But every time I want another block of ip addresses I end up filling out the ip request form 2-3 times for different support people.  Same with the SMTP unblocking form which was resolved when I was able to better explain in an email to support what I needed mail for.

Ok thats it for complaints now onto the good things I’ve found with go grid.  First is support.  They have awesome support.  I work in Australia so I mostly hit their night crew and they are all very helpful and quick too.  Their upstream support is also pretty quick to fix problems at these times as well.

Servers launch fine and fast and once you get past the annoyance of requesting new ip blocks all the time they do actually provision them near immediately.

MyGSI has it’s bugs still but I’ve tried it this week and despite some confusion in the documentation about how I needed to configure the cloud storage first it seemed to work well.

The API comes in handy for a lot of what we do now having so many servers going.

Lastly is the ability to link up to servepath dedicated servers using a private vland.  We haven’t fully utilized this but will be doing so in the near future for their load balancing solutions.

My end result for GoGrid is that it still has a ways to go but has come a long way and the terrific support makes up for a lot of the short comings I’ve found.

As for recommendations.  If you need a west coast setup or you want to utilize their hybrid hosting go with GoGrid.  Otherwise AWS is still the way to go.

Let me know if you have any questions about AWS or GoGrid as I’ve certainly had my fair share of experience on both now and I’ll try to update this again Q1 2010.