Our new Maidenhead UK Cloud launches in July 2011
Here at Big Wet Fish we are pleased to announce the launch of our new Cloud Hosting service from 16 July 2011. We are excited about this launch and wanted to let you know the main features:
- Lightning fast hardware running on 1gbps switch ports for up to 100mbps for each Virtual Machine
- High Availability platform - hardware faults should result in no downtime
- Free image based backups as standard
- Onapp.com control panel to manage your Virtual Machine
- Scalable, elastic servers with on the fly upgrades (no reboot for RAM and CPU Cores)
- Manage your Virtual machine via an iPhone / Android App
- Truly fully managed service by our 24/7 support team (comprehensive best effort at all times)
- SAN network storage for data security (RAID 50)
- Just pay for what you need and upgrade in seconds
- No Burstable RAM - truly dedicated resources (we do not oversell resources)
- Self healing, automatic failover as standard
- Over 150 pre built templates available for use
If you need any information on our cloud offerings please open a support ticket at: http://bwf.co/ticket
Our Cloud Architecture in parnership with onapp.com
Is the Cloud just Hype / What are the benefits?
We are not going to pretend that the cloud will never have any downtime but the use of the architecture above that we are deploying will reduce the number of points of failure so should result in overall higher stability. We have excellent uptime records on our standard servers and the cloud should improve this even further.
Here are some examples that hopefully will help explain things:
Firstly as we write this our Server 10 has had 164 days of continuous uptime. It is not a cloud server. Today our monitoring solution indicated that there was bad RAM and we need to take the server offline to replace the RAM. This is being done at 2am with downtime of a projected 30 minutes. With the above cloud architecture there is auto failover built in. Were a Hypervisor server to develop RAM issues the Virtual Machines would automatically be 'hot migrated' to another Hypervisor on the cloud with maximum of a few seconds downtime. There will always be spare capacity on the cloud for this eventuality. It for this reason that cloud hosting will always be a little more expensive than standard hosting
Secondly as you can see from the above architecture diagram (which has been taken from onapp.com) the storage for the data on the cloud is not on the individual hypervisors and is always off server on a network SAN device. This device we are deploying has fast disks on a RAID 50 array so it is extremely unlikely that there will be any disk failure or loss of data even in the event of multiple disks failing in the SAN
Thirdly the backup device is separate again and each Virtual Machine will regularly be backed up (image based) to the backup device. This will allow for restoration should the worst happen and the SAN fail (a very unlikely situation).
Fourthly the Virtual Cloud Machines will be as good as a dedicated server in terms of performance. This is because we will absolutely not oversell our RAM or other resources on our Hypervisor servers. Therefore the RAM you pay for is 100% available to you at all times. On our old OpenVZ VPS servers the setup allowed for overselling of RAM and Burst RAM as well was permitted. This cannot happen on this platform.
Fifthly the Cloud Machines are deployed in seconds - compare that to a dedicated server that could take a few days to be built and set up.
Sixthly you can upgrade your Cloud Machines on the fly. This means we can quickly allocate resources from the 'cloud' based cluster to any server should the need arise. If you are expecting heavy traffic to your site due to a product launch but expect that traffic to drop after a week you can buy additional resources just for that week. it is very efficient in terms of cost for our clients.
Seventhly we are working with a team of highly trained technicians both from Big Wet Fish and our third party partners to support this venture. We have proven over the years we have the skills to manage servers and the staff we have at our disposal are experts in all things 'web hosting'. You can be confident in trusting us to manage your server for you.
Eighthly you can buy a Cloud Virtual Data Centre and deploy different machines in minutes. As an example we have just built a Ubuntu, CentOS and Windows 7 machine on our test platform and we used Remote Desktop to access the Windows 7 cloud machine from an iMac. The possibilities are endless with the BWF Cloud
Ninthly we are partnering with OnApp.com one of the leading providers of cloud based solutions. The platform they provide is the choice of a growing number of webhosts worldwide and the solution is a professional one. The platform has proven reliability with many initial bugs now ironed out of the platform.
And finally - when we launch there is a free trial waiting for you for 30 days! All you have to do is ask. Follow us on Twitter and look out for our announcements @bigwetfish
