General: Daily Servers?

For a long time, I've been using UK2 for my hosting and I've been pretty impressed - especially with the level of support I received. Recently, I moved to clustered.net after a recommendation on twitter. Their packages are very good for the money, but I've been plagued by server down time - from which it's difficult to say if the problem lies with us, or the server.

The biggest problem I've been having is IO throughput - a common issue with shared VPS systems. I keep getting complaints from the server admin that our IO usage is too high whilst running JournoTwit - occasionally, it snowballs and the whole system just grinds to a complete halt.

What's annoying me - is that the only figure he quotes to me is IO Wait - not IO throughput. As far as I'm concerned - they aren't the same thing. IO Wait suggests to me that there is no enough IO performance to satisfy the IO demands, not necessarily that the IO demand is too great. So the blame can lie either side.

From some of the random read tests I've done - performance is awful (below 1MB/s) - yet our admin will always return to a single burst sequential read result, which is misleading, to suggest there is no issue and therefore our usage is too high.

Needless to say, I'm on the hunt for another server - and I think I'm going to move back to a dedicated box.

Our biggest initial concern is that if the JournoTwit server goes down - it also affects our other sister business - ThinkWall - which is rather more time sensitive as it is used directly at events. 10 minutes of downtime would be very bad.

Whilst hunting around, we noticed that VPS.net/UK2 are now offering VPS nodes on a daily basis. This solves a lot of hosting concerns, as it means we can setup a specific machine for being used as a ThinkWall server on the fly. At prices starting from £1 a day - I can envision using this for other areas of my life too. Very handy to know about!