I am developing a hosted subscription based software service and will have a database set up for each client. I need the service to be extremely reliable and very secure. My developer is suggesting we use Rack Space cloud solution as a scaleable solution and believes that it will be both secure and reliable. My understanding is that you essentially set up virtual machines on the vendor's servers to run your systems.
http://www.rackspace.com/
My questions are:
Does anyone have experience with a cloud based third party vendor solution like this?
Does anyone have insight into the relative benefits/drawbacks of using a vendor like Rack Space as opposed to building and maintaining my own servers?
Is Rack Space the right provider if I go this route?
Am I giving up anything in reliability/ security if I go this route? If so, what exactly...
Thanks for your consideration!!!
-P
Paulo -
Just a couple brief comments, may have time for more detail later.
@EN - there is a pretty big difference between Cloud Storage (Amazon, Google, some MS products although I'm not familiar with Azure yet, etc) and what Paulo would be looking for which is full application-layer hosting.
To be honest Paulo, especially with a start-up like this, I think going with a third party vendor in your case rather than housing and administering your own farm makes a lot of monetary sense. In order to provide the type of service and redundancy that you've talked about so far you will have to fork out a ton of start-up capital just on infrastructure and the expertise to build your environment, then the ongoing capital expenses associated with administering and managing the environment including power consumption, environmental controls, hardware and software maintenance, break-fix, security, updates, virus control, on and on and on. Let a reputable company alleviate some of those costs then you can focus solely on developing your product and customer base. Should you ever outgrow Rack Space, or whoever you end up chosing, then you move to whatever solution you feel accomodates your needs later.
There are surely others out there but since you mention Rack Space...the company I work for (6000+ employees) has been using Rack Space for our hosted web services for years so I can vouch for their reliability, longevity, and their capability in this area. I would make sure there is a clear transition path should you ever choose to host the environment yourself - i.e. you want to be able to migrate easily should you ever choose. Also, being of legal mind
you will surely already be personalizing the NDA but, if not, make sure you cover that as well. They may have a legal dept that would need to approve anything like that before they agree, I don't know what their policy is around those types of agreements. Then there will likely be some back and forth when it comes to contractural negotiation, especially where issues with liability come to play, but i'm sure you have that covered as well.
I suggest you get your developer on a conference call with the Rack Space and see how the conversation goes.
If I think of anything else I'll report back
X
