Domino Hosting: Need your input: What are my options ?
Posted by Theo Heselmans on June 16th, 2010
For almost 10 years now, I've bought my own servers (with Domino on it), and hosted them at my home office. What do I use it for:
- running my own business (some notes apps, website, blog, traveler, imap)
- development and test server (I know, I should use a different server, but that's expensive)
- running apps and websites for a couple of small customers, who can't or won't afford their own server, but pay me a small hosting fee
- running BLUG (website, apps)
- running websites for e.g. some wine-clubs
I bought a Windows server (every 3 years), a UPS, a backup device; invested in a fixed IP internet connection for which I pay 75 EUR a month, with average bandwidth.
When I was on holiday in Egypt my server was down for over 6 days (partly due to my extended stay because of the volcanic ashes). No wonder my customers (and other users) where a bit upset, and I was feeling miserable too. There was nothing I could do remotely. What happened was that the UPS software decided it was time for a complete check: it ran empty and the server just shut down :-( !
Time for another approach !
I'm not a networking guy; I'm a basic Domino administrator. I just want a stable, highly available, good speed solution for my needs, that allows me to run my own Domino server.
So what are my options (note that I'm not familiar with 'hosting' terminology):
- Keep doing what I do now, maybe invest in a secondary clustered/failover server
- Invest in a Foundation server (I just fear I don't have enough control), and keep hosting it myself
- 'Rent' a physical server in a data center (this is what someone proposed, about 100 EUR per month)
- Rent a Virtual server (where?)
- Go for Amazon EC2 (I have no idea if this allows me enough freedom)
What would you suggest ? I need to make a decision soon.
Category: Lotus Notes Domino | 
Technorati: Lotus, Notes, Domino
Comments (7)
Hi Theo,
I'm currently moving a few servers to Amazon EC2. Works fine for me, billing is on a fair priced pay-per-use base, performance is outstanding and all is very "elastic". You need a new server for a little bit of testing? Use a snapshot and you'll be running in a few minutes.
One suggestion above all: use linux to save licensing for Windows servers. Even Traveler will run on Linux from 8.5.2.
If you need any help, please give me a ring.
Regards
Martin
Hi Theo,
I have an EC2 server running, all of the details are here
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If EC2 were not an "interesting project" I were doing it again I would probably go for one of these
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as suggested by Henning in the comments to the above.
It is quite a bit cheaper and with those specs you could run a series of virtualised servers on top.
The only virtualised server I would go for is EC2, it is just a virtualised server but with a lot more polish and functionality around the infrastructure that goes with it. It has just as much freedom as any other server, perhaps even more in terms of how quickly you can remap IP addresses etc.. ( these comments are based on a self install not an IBM image- I haven't tried that yet )
Foundations is impressive but I don't think it will add anything and my impression is that you will lose a lot in terms of flexibility. If you wanted to try it perhaps you could run it as a virtual machine on the physical server suggested above.
If you have zero linux skills you will need to invest in reading some blog posts but really only the domino centric ones.
Hope this helps, you can sype me ( sean.cull.focul ) or drop me a line. I can show you the EC2 on a screen share if you want.
Sean
p.s. in my experience it is not the hardware that is the weak point but the newtwork. I also run a VPS with a very good hosting outfit in the UK. They are very very open about the issues that they have and it is usually DOS attacks on their customers that cause the issues for other customers - usually only twice a year though.
Everytime i price up the EC2 option, it simply end up being too expensive for an 'always-on' server.
I use RapidSwitch to host a number of servers, some dedicated servers they've provided, and others that we own. Their quad-cpu, 2GB server is just £60pm (~€50pm) with pretty much unlimited bandwidth and full control of the server.
On that spec, I run about 4 partitioned Domino servers on Linux and it works well.
Without try to do a sales pitch.... we do sell hosting of all types ;-)
If I were you though, I'd go for a *new* dedicated 1U server hosted somewhere in a datacenter, running ESXi and some Domino partitions. It's the best bang per buck, certainly if you need multiple servers. Make network and power somebody else's problem!
If that's not an option because you can't support it (and I've been there), I'd look at renting a virtual server from someone. That way all the hardware is someone else' problem and you can concentrate on the OS (hint: Linux) and the Domino parts. Linux for Domino really isn't that hard, because you can ignore most things anyway!
Oh, and for BLUG, you should email me :-)
Stuart the conversion is the other way around. £60 is ~€72. Although I wish you were right :)
Thanks for the feedback. I'll certainly look into it.
Just one remark: I only have 1 domino server running. Even my customers, I do hosting for, use the same domino server. I register their (few) users in my domain.
Don't know if that makes a difference regarding my best option ?