Hello everyone,
I’ve got a Rails app that’s going to replace an in-house application,
where the customers are used to having to deal with maintaining their
own servers and data. As these are non-IT customers, maintaining
servers and data is a long way from their core business and thus quite
costly for them. I’m hoping to slice their costs by removing the
requirement for them to maintain their own systems, by hosting it on a
Web server somewhere and having someone else deal with the operational
aspects.
The app needs to be hosted with the following characteristics:
- data security is very important to these customers, with all
database content being encrypted and all traffic between browser and
Web server encrypted. A big concern is operator access to stored
data; this has to be minimised - backup/restore has to be reliable; it’s not a big deal to lose (say)
the last day’s data, but it would be a huge disaster to lose
significantly more than that because of bad backups or operator error - downtime / restore time is a big concern; the app has to be highly
available. We’re not talking 5 9’s uptime, but something like 99.9%
with a guarantee is what I’m after - cost will be an issue
Not having great experience with hosting providers, I’m not really
sure how vendors such as Dreamhost would fit these requirements. How
reliable are their backups? What security arrangements are there
around online and backed up data ? What do they offer in terms of
uptime guarantees? Do they provide failover hardware as part of their
“regular” offerings, or is that available as an option? Do they have
some sort of ISO or other accreditation saying that their processes
are documented/reliable/…?
I’ve tried to find this info at the Web sites of several companies,
but their information tends to be long on terms like “minimal
downtime” and “hassle-free nightly backups” and short on terms like
“99.9% uptime guaranteed”. There’s no visibility of e.g. how their
backups are stored - whether they’re offsite at a secured facility
somewhere, or a bunch of discs bouncing around in an operator’s car
every night. At this point, my impression is that hosting companies
in general are focused on reducing costs as far as possible and
catering to the lowest common denominator customer base, whereas I’m
looking to pay a bit more and get some solid service guarantees for my
money.
As cost will be a factor, I’d ideally like to start with a low cost
solution and then be able to scale up if/when the application usage
grows to justify the additional expense. I know this is vague, but
what I’m after is some sort of sliding scale of service level vs. cost
that I could move up/down to different levels based on my changing
requirements.
Is it actually feasible to expect all this from a hosting company, or
should I just be biting the bullet and putting dedicated host/s on the
floor somewhere and building in security and redundancy myself? I
know the type of service guarantees I’m after have traditionally been
the domain of the likes of IBM Global Services and EDS; do any hosting
providers work in the same space in terms of their offerings, or are
they all focused on making things as cheap as possible? I’ve got a
lot of operations experience, and I know how to do this stuff
properly, but in this case I’d prefer someone else did it if I was
comfortable they knew what they were doing. I know this isn’t a
“yes/no” question, and that there will be degrees of
security/failover/etc. provided by all hosting companies, but I can’t
see how you can compare hosting companies’ offerings on these terms
based on the lack of information they each make available.
Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions
Dave M.