AwareIM Hosting Environments

kklosson

Dear configurators,

I would like to open a discussion thread on various hosting options and environments including the strengths and weaknesses of each option. I have read what I could find on the board and there's not a lot that's definitive.

I would like this thread to focus on:

Hosting environments, i.e., VPS, dedicated, etc.
Hosting providers - good/bad experiences
Server resources
Issues and resolutions
Other hosting related discussions

This can ultimately be a good one stop shop for all of those hosting questions that we have from time to time. Might be nice to provide a brief description of your hosting environment in your message/reply.[/list]

kklosson

I am experiencing two crashing problems on my Windows virtual server. In one mode, the server simply crashes and reboots. I have no idea why. I suppose I can look at some server logs. In the other mode, the system goes dark and I cannot remote to it or anything. The host provider seems to not be aware of it so it seems to be just related to my server and not the host machine. When this happens I need to have to provider restart the machine, and their service on this is not good - takes about 3 hours. I also have no idea why this happens. It's irregular but it happens. The server does nothing except support my AwareIM application.

Some related posts here indicate a dedicated machine may be much better and I'm interested to know why. I assume the posts refer to a dedicated machine in a host environment. It's a bit more money but I believe I can swing it if I can resolve this.

I would appreciate any insight as I think I'm going to have to relocate.

The server has 2GB RAM and 4 CPUs. The host is Triple8.net.

hpl123

Kklosson, good idea. I am still new to Aware IM and have no thoughts (yet) about hosting environment etc. (currently developing from my laptop only and i am far away from actually going live with an application) but just for your and the rest of the community´s information. I am working on an idea to create a separate system that would basically function as a developers network for Aware IM developers. This system should have several useful functions that would be useful for us developers and also beneficial for Awaresoft. One of the ideas / functions is to have a knowledgebase function, a dedicated function/space for knowledgebase information, how to articles, videos, example BSV´s etc. The hosting info would be a great article for the knowledgebase.

I am currently researching the idea and the separate modules, requirements etc. and i will soon post a suggestion in the forum. This is a system that would need help/assistance from the community and also from Awaresoft to keep this system actually functioning (more on that in my upcoming post).

Also for information (related). I wrote about this in another post recently about kickstart functionality:

I am working on an idea i got from the discussions over recent time that would be beneficial for developers (and Awaresoft) e.g. kickstart functionality, community like features, feature votes etc.

It is only a thought/idea at this point but if the user/developer community and Awaresoft thinks it´s a good idea there will be a seperate system for e.g. group funding projects. Will post a outline of the idea when i have researched some of the parts a bit more.

Another thing, this is as i´ve also written before only an idea for the time being but an idea i think is worth pursuing. The developers that read this post can take the idea in and think about it and we can at a later stage when i post my actual suggestion discuss it, pros and cons etc. Thanks

rocketman

Hi Kklosson,

I had an old style vp's and ended up with all sorts of problems particularly with AwareIM apps freezing for no apparent reason. I changed to a dedicated and have had over 12 months of trouble free running.

I'm not an expert but the way it was explained to me was

1) 2 gb guaranteed Ram doesn't mean you always have 2gb it just means it is there when you want it. However, the time the physical server takes to release ram to you might cause timeout issues.

2) you have no control over other users on the node who might suddenly decide to run processor hungry program's which again will stuff you. If you get war gamers own your node - forget it.

I've been having conversations myself recently regarding dedicated versus Cloud Servers - which are different to the old style vps. Cloud servers (virtualised machines) give you (apparently) a guaranteed slice of the processors and the memoryntheynquote is all yours. Another big advantage (apparently) is that if the physical machine hosting youvirtual machine goes down and the data centre switch you to different hardware, the new virtual machine should retain the original machine ID and your AwareIm license key should still work. Support may be able to confirm or deny that point.

I had a bad experience with my old vps when - overnight - the data centre switched my hardware without telling me. (Which they were not contractually obliged to do. I had to make some frantic calls to AwareIM to get a new license key before my customers woke up.

With this in mind - a Modern cloud server may actually be better than a dedicated. With my ISP, there's not much difference in price but gives me the advantage of being able to increas ram and storage without having to change contracts.

PS -- 2gb really isn't enough on a windows machine. My suggestion would 4gb mon. If money is tight, I would go for memory over cores any time

GaryBartlett

Hi Folks,

I'm keen to hear what the latest is on the various hosting options.

My first application is a working prototype of a fairly small production management system for a small client, so traffic and disk space are small, but demands will grow over time as I get other clients and launch my own applications. I'm happy to start small.

I am going with 4GB RAM minimum and preferring Windows 12 (because I'm more familiar with installing Aware IM on Windows and my first client is an MS shop), but happy to go with LAMP (as I have a number of other hosted Linux sites).

Digital Ocean - Cloud (LAMP) 2x 4GB $40pm (https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing) - fast and pretty good service, apparently
Linode - Dedicated (LAMP) 4x 4GB RAM $80pm (https://www.linode.com/) - excellent service and very robust, apparently
Triple 8 - VPS (Win 12) 2x 4GB RAM $80 (http://www.triple8.net/servers/vps.cfm) - recommended, above
1&1 - Dedicated (Win 12) 8x2,6 8GB RAM $88.89pm (http://www.1and1.com/server-dedicated) - recommended, above; surprised that the pricing is better than dynamic cloud - might be missing something
1&1 Dynamic Cloud (Win 12) 4GB RAM $100.80pm (http://www.1and1.com/dynamic-cloud-server)
UK2.NET - Dedicated (Win 8 ) 4x2.66 i7 8GB RAM $143pm (http://www.uk2.net/dedicated-servers/windows-dedicated-hosting/)

I've arrange them in ascending order by price, but there's obviously more to it than price and there are other distinctions between them, including disk type, bandwidth and included services like back-up etc.

I need to get it up and running quickly - with minimum fuss and effort, so I'm about to email each of these hosting providers to ask if they have users running Aware IM, to ensure that there aren't any gotchas.

My questions are:

Do you have something better to suggest?
Do you have current or recent experience of any of these services?
Which do you recommend?

I suspect that I would go with 1&1 Dedicated (Win 12) if no specific advice was forthcoming.

Thanks very much!

Gary

kklosson

I am currently hosting in AWS. Two servers, one database and one application. My app runs trouble-free and I sleep well. This is a fairly expensive setup - $400 - $500/ mo. But I have easily upgraded my servers as needed and I have snapshots every 6 hours. The AWS console is magnificent. The whole setup is a bit complex because a VLAN has to be established and some other stuff that I don't understand. Might not be for everybody but I like it.

GaryBartlett

Thanks, KKlosson - I thought that AWS would be ideal - especially when I launch my SAAS application - but given the low demands, at the start, will avoid the configuration time and monthly cost for the moment!

Gary

rocketman

Hi garry,

I have a 1&1 dedicated. Been with them about 5 years. No issues. £59 uk per month.

It's a no frills service so the uptime SLA is only 99%

Management is by standard ms Remote Desktop.

GaryBartlett

I've had a look at the the installation guide for Linux and it seems pretty straightforward, so I may go that root instead. My only concern would be Aware IM support (which I understand is stronger in Win than Linux) - but then again, not sure how much support I'm likely to need!

I've sent emails off to the 4 best-option companies: curious to see the quality of replies I get....

rocketman

If you install Virtualbox on your windows PC, you could set up a virtual Linux machine to try out the awareIM installation. I think there is a pre-configured Ubuntu VM on the Oracle site.

I don't think data merging into Word documents is possible on a Linux host because you won't be ae to install a Word engine. Could've wrong on that one

GaryBartlett

Thanks, Rocketman: good to know, on both counts!

customaware

Reading the posts above I am wondering if any of the hosting providers also provide the MS-SQL (2008 R2 or later) as part of the hosting package and if they do, what does it add to the monthly costs and what data backup options do they provide?

RentProperty

Amazon recently launched a new range called T2 which is DIRT cheap and works like a charm.

We run a dual server setup (Application & DB) with Windows Server 2012 R2 on both VM's for about $60.

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2014/07/01/introducing-t2-the-new-low-cost-general-purpose-instance-type-for-amazon-ec2/

Check it out. We launched our new application on this platform 2 weeks ago and have had Zero problems so far. Accept for the incoming email poller which stops once or twice a week but this has nothing to do with the platform.

This platform is perfect for a small system and can easily be scaled if necessary. We are on the T2 tiny so once volume pics up we'll move up to the next tier.

Neway, just thought I'd Share the link.

Have a good weekend.

Hein

ACDC

Unless you are expecting 1000's of users to log into your application a dedicated high spec server with 16- 32GB is the answer. There are offerings out there that provide Windows Server R2012 machine for around 60$ - 100$ per month depending on the configuration. This way you are in absolute control of your servers and also using Window Server's Hyper V that comes with R2012 lets you configure multiple VM's on your servers if the need arises

Also network latency is something that has to be considered and your datacenters location in relation to your users is vey important

rocketman

RentProperty .... Good call. following your post I signed up for a T2.micro which is the free tier within certain limits. (windows server 2012 R2)

Downloaded Mysql 5.6. something (latest stable release) super fast
Downloaded AwareIM eval copy - super fast

initial speed tests using sample ProjectManagement app. promising. Now going to load up my flagship app with a full dataset for further comparisons

Amazing what you can do with 1Gb core when freed from that God awful Plesk and IIS that came bundled with my current ISP's offering.

According to their (admittedly Beta) price checker, when I punch in my real world number it worked out to US$39 with daily snapshots as opposed to around UK£60 with current provider. So I'm hoping the tests over the next few days are going to tick all the boxes because that's a MASSIVE saving

kklosson

Thanks for this contribution. I'm spending quite a bit more at AWS and getting more, but it's great to know that I can rapidly stand up a low cost host for other demo projects or those that are just getting out of the gate.

hpl123

kklosson wrote
I am currently hosting in AWS. Two servers, one database and one application. My app runs trouble-free and I sleep well. This is a fairly expensive setup - $400 - $500/ mo. But I have easily upgraded my servers as needed and I have snapshots every 6 hours. The AWS console is magnificent. The whole setup is a bit complex because a VLAN has to be established and some other stuff that I don't understand. Might not be for everybody but I like it.

Kklosson,
Currently trying out AWS for another system (non Aware IM) and the AWS solution seems really good and I was wondering regarding their autoscale up and down features. Are you using these to automatically scale the resources needed for your Aware IM app (s) at peeks or how does your setup look? (NB: Don´t know that much yet about AWS so If I ask something stupid you know why 🙂 ). If so do you use it for the various instances I assume you have e.g. application instance, database instance etc.? Another thing, do you RDP into your application instance for development or how do you usually develop etc.?

Also, related to another recent discussion where you had problems with your app hanging when you had many concurrent users. I thought autoscale would almost entirely remove all these potential errors when app is overloaded etc.? (i.e AWS would automatically allocate more resources when needed) OR is the recent error you had possible not related to resource overload?

PS: Is anyone else using AWS for Aware IM applications?

Thanks

customaware

Hi Henrik,

I originally was trying Mochahost and it was ok but I was really only experimenting.

Now that I am getting more serious about putting my SaaS app out there I was more concerned about reliability.

With AWS it seemed very confusing and a lot more work and the lack of docs that I could understand put me off a bit (please note... plenty of docs... as I said...
any that I could understand was the issue)

Anyway, I read a article which recommended just trialling an Instance and get and idea of cost.

Well, did that and have to say..... I am delighted...

Here is a screenshot of my costs so far for March.
The Instance is up running Windows Server 2012 R2
My Domain is being hosted
1 Elastic IP
Am running Aware IM on it with MySQL and hMailServer
and it is all running fine.

I initially started out with 50Gb hard disk space but upgraded it pretty quickly to 100 Gb.

Seems to be this is great for upgrading your configuration as your requirements change.

I just hope my app gets to needing the upscaling that Kingsley is talking about.

Here is my total cost for March so far.... 🙂

I am sure it will increase as my system grows.

No doubt we can discuss further, exchange ideas and gain a better understanding at the Conference as Kingsley is coming.

kklosson

Mark,

Sounds like you are running AIM and MySQL on same machine, which is fine for most things. I run MySQL on a different EC2 machine. It's a bit more complicated and I have a guy who set up the inter-workings. Obviously, not optimal to run DB and app servers on same machine for both security and performance - so you judge your needs. My next move is to put my DB on AWS RDS - the DB is my biggest sweat and it's about 50GB so it's getting tough to handle from a backup standpoint.

Here's my billing. Note that I'm half way through the cycle and my normal monthly is $500-600 depending on activity. With more activity comes more data transfer. And note again that this is two EC2 servers (app and db) getting about 400 logins per day.

hpl123

Yeah, AWS sounds good and I am pleased so far (only testing the free tier out). Seems it can get a bit expensive though and even more expensive than having 2 hosted dedicated servers (not cloud server but real dedicated servers). Having everything in one place, control and the scaling options is what makes it worth it I guess.

Anyone else have a setup where they use multiple server like in kklossons case 1 application server and 1 database server, what do you pay and how is your solution set up?

PS: I am a bit sceptical to use VPS or cloud servers, I had some issues with a VPS when I was starting out and have also read a number of comments in the forums that dedicated servers are the best working option. Should I / we maybe change mindset about this i.e. VPS and cloud servers are just as good working solutions today or what do you think?