I’ve always been very happy with Rackspace’s service, but they haven’t yet officially “certified” RHEL 5 yet so they don’t support yet. They claim they’ll support it “near the end of the year”, but we’ll see. The lack of firm dates is a problem as it impedes planning.

The other problem is that Rackspace doesn’t really offer any customer-friendly upgrade pathways, as far as I can tell. Basically you’re looking at $$$ and downtime; for example setting up a new machine with a clean install on it, installing the drive from the old machine into the new box, and then bringing all the data over.

I spoke to INetU and they do offer nice upgrade pathways, and so that’s why I’m talking with Rackspace now to see if they can offer me the same. If Rackspace can’t deliver then I probably will switch. The prices are comparable. INetU claims that their “standard” support is roughly equivalent to Rackspace’s “Intensive” plans (ie. they can get involved at application-level support). INetU offers better hardware and more capacity for the money, the same 1-hour hardware replacement guarantee, what appears to be more extensive server monitoring, more IPs. They have also scored well in Netcraft’s hosting reliability surveys.

Specifically, as far as upgrades go, INetU’s offering includes the right to migrate to new hardware every two years at no extra cost, and you can keep the old server online for 30 days to give you plenty of time to migrate everything over in a controlled fashion, once again free of charge.

This addresses one of my main gripes with Rackspace; you sign up for a dedicated server in 2005 with hardware that is “reasonable” for that timeframe, but two years later in 2007 you’re still running the same hardware which is now decidedly underpowered compared with what’s being offered in the marketplace, but you’re still paying the same price. Basically you’re stuck on that hardware until it dies, or until you decide to migrate, incurring costs. So basically, the value for money gradually gets worse over time.

That’s another of the reason’s I’ve held back on deploying any Rails apps. If I am going to deploy a Rails app I want to do it on 2007 or 2008 hardware, not on 2005 hardware. We both know that Rails is an absolute resource hog.

Example: sudo. Second nature to you or me, but it’s not included in Solaris, it’s a 3rd party install. No idea why it’s not included.

Another: top. Again, second nature. Not included. There’s probably an alternative but honestly I’m not sure I want to start learning alternatives for perfectly good systems like this. And they’re not partitions, they’re “slices”. And it doesn’t use anything GNU which is more of a problem than it might seem. And “zones” aren’t real VMs, they’re more like FreeBSD jails. And ntp isn’t enable by default (!). ZFS is cool but .. I think I’m gonna stick with linux.

Tend to agree that RHEL5 is looking like the winner. I’m tempted to just bite the bullet, wipe and install this weekend.

Are you likely to upgrade any time soon? If so, I’d welcome some kind of mutual ssh/sftp-access agreement, as it makes it way easier to bounce files around for a copy off-copy on reinstall if you have access to another nice fast server.

http://wincent.com/a/about/wincent/weblog/archives/2007/10/thinking_about.php