Nathan,
You make a lot of great points in this post. Firstly, these VPS plans are
meant for small personal use. As you said, you can't expect a .Net
applications supporting more than a few users to be able to run on the
lowest setting. As far as Unlimited plans go that almost EVERY hosting
provider advertises the devil is in the details. If you read the TOS the
use of the unlimited plan is VERY restrictive. Most all are bound by CPU
and the hosts "discretion" of the idea that your site is negatively
impacting the other sites on that server. I could go on a lot more about
things I have learned about hosting in the last year (considering I'm a
shared hosting reseller) but its not really pertinant to the discussion.
The IBM i is a business platform. Its not a consumer platform. It never
has been, and I don't believe it ever will be. What needs to happen is
that IBM needs to come up with a pricing structure that will allow its
software vendors the ability to market hosted solutions running on the IBM
i to small businesses. This is much less profitable than the current on
site licensing model right now.
What if the small companies the hire out their IBM i administration to
consultants could have their applications and data hosted as well? Instead
of worrying about all the software licensing, hardware ordering, having
the consultants in to do work on the machines, etc, etc... these
businesses could totally outsoure thier IT. There is a definite market.
And this would allow more businesses to buy and "application" not a
platform. They want something stable, secure, and affordable. They don't
care if its Linux, Microsoft, or IBM i. And they'd rather not worry about
it. If IBM would get on this bus they would see their IBM i machine sales
climb because vendors would be buying them. Someone would definitely jump
into this space and make a heck of a run at it.
Thanks
Bryce Martin
Programmer/Analyst I
570-546-4777
Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
11/14/2010 08:41 PM
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Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Subject
Re: [WEB400] IBM i in the cloud (was social media)
From: Aaron Bartell
Here is where I got the $65 number from, which is an entirely
dedicated and virtualized OS hosted on a shared machine ...
I still fail to see the validity of the comparison. The offer from
www.hosting.com would be totally unsuitable for hosting an integrated
development environment. It's not a development platform. It's actually
not
even suitable as a deployment platform except for a very small number of
users.
As far as MS .Net development platforms are concerned, some developers are
saying they can't stand anything less than a 2.5 Ghz dual-core dedicated
CPU and
8GB of RAM. A 600 Mhz micro partition with 1 GB of RAM would simply not
work as
a development platform. At $65/month you only get the free edition of MS
SQL
Server Express, which is constrained to just 1 GB RAM, and 10 GB of DB
storage.
What kind of performance could you expect from a micro partition that is
forced
to run a resource intensive workload like MS .Net and SQL Server on just
600
Mhz, and 1GB of RAM? My understanding is that the resource requirements
of
aspx.net are comparable to those of JEE application servers like WAS. How
would
Java perform under those kinds of constraints?
And if you don't need an entire virtual OS then you can go with
DreamHost at $8.95/month ...
Could you really trust your business to a company like that. Their
come-on
offers are simply false. Unlimited terabyte storage? Unlimited terabyte
bandwidth? 100% uptime guarantee? I won't bother to repeat all the types
of
"unlimited" features offered. It's simply false advertising. Maybe they
don't
meter CPU, bandwidth, or storage but you can bet there are bottlenecks in
their
capacities that constrain the actual amount of use. There's no mention of
the
number of HTTP server threads allocated to customers, for example. It's
like
advertising a genie in a bottle; perhaps a data center with enormous
capacity
but you can bet there is something constraining its use. As far as the
uptime
guarantee, you can bet that your service will not be up 100% of the time.
You'll have to go through the ticket report process to get a refund
measured in
pennies. This is not a development platform either, so that comparison is
not
valid either.
-Nathan
midrange.com
