Comments on: Dedicated Hosting or Grid Server: What Should I Choose?

By: tom

tom — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:20:26 +0000

We have found the Grid Layer hosting program from Layered tech to be very unreliable. Lots of crashes and down time.

By: John P.

John P. — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 09:09:45 +0000

No John, unfortunatly I don’t believe that at all. Grid hosting provides one main benefit – redundancy. This should not be confused with scalability.

Redundance is what you need when one physical server has an outage. It enables your content to be served from another physical server while the original is being repaired. This way your site stays online.

Scalability is what you need when you have a sudden increase in demand. It requires complex load balancing in order to distributed requests to multiple machines in order to share the load among many servers.

Grid computing systems could theoretically do this, though it would come at a much higher price tag, because the host would not be able to over-subscribe the machines in the same way. Your best bet is just to buy a larger server and make sure that you are using caching plugins such as WP Super Cache, etc.

Cheers,

John P.

By: John Engle

John Engle — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:06:55 +0000

When I moved my blog over to a grid server recently with GoDaddy, they explained it to me by telling me that my site would be on 8 different servers at once. If there was a demand for services from websites that are on the shared plan, the resources could come from any one of the 8 servers, so as to not load a single server… does this sound right?

John

By: Umesh

Umesh — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 23:51:59 +0000

I am also having problem regarding hosting my site. I hosted my site on shared godaddy account. As it grows naturally, having hard time to load website. Please let us know what is good solution for better price. :)

By: Answering Hosting Questions. « Wsmithdesign's Blog

Answering Hosting Questions. « Wsmithdesign's Blog — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:41:52 +0000

[...] Grid Hosting or content distribution network (CDN) would in many cases be the highest performance type of hosting. [...]

By: Arun

Arun — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 08:18:23 +0000

For $50, MT hosting is cool especially if you want to resell some hosting space to your clients. But interesting thing is most of the cloud are some kind of special VPS solution (Not saying about Google App Engine and Amazon EC2). So my preference goes like this if I want hosting

1) Cloud VPS (MT, Slicehost)
2) VPS (RapidVPS)
3) Dedicated Server (I don’t use it anymore)

By: Aaron Hall

Aaron Hall — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:17:39 +0000

Amit, I understand what you are saying, but I think the idea behind a grid server is you pay for what you use. That is, a grid server can grow with you from infancy (when a dedicated server is unnecessary) to magnitude (when a dedicated server might not be enough). But maybe I am missing something.

By: Amit Patel

Amit Patel — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 04:12:14 +0000

Hi, i would recommend you to go for dedicated servers because i have rented 3 servers from different companies and they are the best, we need to signup with server support companies for best services and highest uptime.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:43:01 +0000

Thanks for the insight John, I was actually discussing the hosting options with a friend yesterday for an upcoming project and will certainly drop you a line when it’s time to move on it.

Jeremy

By: Jacques Snyman

Jacques Snyman — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:37:57 +0000

The hosting issue is one that constantly pops up. Is the idea of a computing grid is similar to the setups search engines use?

By: Aaron Hall

Aaron Hall — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:01:13 +0000

I have considered grid hosting with other companies but decided against it for two reasons: Limited Resources and Costs.

Limited Resources. Grid hosting companies often use their own technology, which can be limiting for some users. That is, are there any types of people who would not benefit from a grid server plan due to grid server limitations? For example, would a grid server plan work well for (1) people who need a lot of MySQL databases, (2) people who need very large MySQL databases, (3) people with thousands of infrequently visited domains, etc.? I ask because I had trouble finding a host that could meet all my needs, so I have hosting accounts with two companies.

Costs. Does a person pay more for grid hosting? That is, it seemed like grid hosting was more expensive in a side-by-side comparison with traditional hosting companies when I looked at them. (Media Temple was the company I considered.)

I could be wrong on these. Thanks for considering these questions.