On 18 April 2011 23:07, JD <jd1...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 04/18/2011 02:57 PM, Joe Zeff wrote: >> On 04/18/2011 02:46 PM, JD wrote: >>> "good ones" as in "$$$$$$" per year? :) >> You may not always get what you pay for, but you almost never get what >> you don't pay for. Going with the cheapest possible hosting service >> means that you get little if any support included and (as we see here) >> you may get stuck with an obsolete OS because keeping current costs >> money (If nothing else, it takes time and bandwidth to download, burn >> and test new install DVDs. It also takes having somebody who's job >> description includes watching for new releases.) and a low-end hosting >> company is going to cut costs any and every way it can. > Guys, I do not mean to say that the hosting copanies > that "are good" are NOT worth the cost. I only meant > you have to shell out what they ask. > > However, I will stick to my guns that negotiating with > the hosting company to provide at least two drives > that will let you do your own remote installation and > boot the drive you want from the grub menu. > You can always install on the second drive, and still > be able to boot from the default driver and select the > new installation from the grub menu. This is an > excellent solution to a rather simple problem. > Sure, they will ask for a one time charge for the drive > and the installation thereof. But to these hosting companies, > all those drives are virtual anyhow - they are allocated > from a large pool of storage servers, so adding one more > drive to a hosted machine (which is probably also virtual) > should not be such a big deal.
Slicehost and RS Cloud don't give you that option. It's not a blocker to installing a new OS (I upgraded my slices from F12 to F13, before they offered it, remotely) but it's a Xen VM. The kernel actually lives outside the VM and with Slicehost you can select the boot kernel as an option, with RS Cloud you can't. The issue is that while the disks are backed up elsewhere, the storage often lives locally on your particular hypervisor and the sales are on the basis that a particular sized machine will also have a particular sized disk - as you can't overcommit memory in a Xen VM, the ratio of the disk sizes you get for each slice vs total disk is also the same ratio as the memory allocated vs the memory installed. So for example to get a 256MB slice with two disks, you'd have to go with 2 x 5GB disks vs the current 10GB disk to make it economical for the hosting company. I could bore you to death on the economics, but I won't ;o) If you move into "Managed Hosting" dedicated server then the disks allocated are what is physically installed in the machine you are renting. Some companies grant OOB access so you can see the Grub prompt and hence if you paid for 2 sets of disks, you could have this option, not all companies do that. Mine for example could, but it would mean that every physical machine wasted an extra IP for OOB management that 95% of people wouldn't use... ARIN/RIPE/APNIC wouldn't like that, expecially right now ;o) -- Sam -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
