GoGrid Blog

8.27.08 - Note: Facebook and MySpace-enabled servers are currently unavailable on GoGrid. However, we have added other server images since the writing of this article. The table below has been slightly modified to reflect some changes. For a comparison of GoGrid to Amazon’s EC2, please see this page.

With the Facebook QuickStart Servers available now on GoGrid, we have received questions as to how the GoGrid service compares with others in the cloud computing and Facebook space. While this is not the “end-all” comparison, it does provide a point of reference between GoGrid, Amazon EC2 and Joyent.

Chart updated on 8/27/08.

*Pricing based on GoGrid Advanced Cloud and Transfer 200 GB plans

With GoGrid there are other choices as well for RAM and Storage allotments (1GB RAM servers have 60 GB disks and 2 GB RAM servers have 125GB disks). Key differentiators are the FREE support and Load Balancing offered by GoGrid as well as support for both Windows and Linux servers (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and CentOS 4.4.) More OS images are added on a regular basis so check back regularly.

Being your humble servant, I have a special discount available to all of my readers. Contact me directly for a discount on your first GoGrid account! (Limited time only!). So what are you waiting for? Get a new GoGrid account now!

Attendees of the inaugural meeting of StartUp SF, a new meetup for technologists, developers, entrepreneurs and startups in the San Francisco Bay Area, were given a great GoGrid gift, $100 off their first GoGrid account. But the value went further than just that including a valuable CD-ROM from Orrick containing helpful document templates useful in launching your own startup. Attendees also learned some important tips on how move their company “from concept to company” as delivered in a presentation by Jonathan Cobb, CTO and Founder of Kiptronic.

StartUp SF is an event that is co-hosted by Orrick and ServePath designed to help “kick-start your startup” by providing a venue, topics and experts, as well as food and drink to facilitate the process.

More details on yesterday’s event can be found here and here. We were even lucky enough to get Pete Cashmore (of Mashable) to pose with Paul Lancaster (of ServePath) in one of our stylish GoGrid hats.

More photos can be found on our Flickr photostream and the StartUp SF Facebook group. Don’t forget that GoGrid now really helps you get your Facebook app up and running FAST with the Facebook QuickStart Server Images for Windows and Linux!

With the bubble-wrap just coming off of the public beta of GoGrid, we were able to get a last-minute booth at the upcoming Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Those of you going to the Web 2.0 Expo are encouraged to come by our table located in the Long Tail Pavilion (table 22). (If you are heading to get food, we are right on your way to get there.)

At our table, we will be doing product demonstrations of GoGrid, answering questions, and giving away $$$ towards a GoGrid account. Come loaded with your questions and ideas on how you can use GoGrid to better your business. Also learn about the new GoGrid QuickStart Facebook Servers that are now a hot template within your GoGrid server deployment UI.

Web 2.0 Expo runs from April 22 through April 25 at Moscone West located at 747 Howard Street in San Francisco. The Exhibit Hall is open: Weds 10:30am - 4:00pm, Thursday 10:30am - 6:00pm and Friday 10:30am - 3:00pm.

If you…

• …have ever wondered how to get your application on the Facebook network quickly…
• …need to rapidly scale a server environment…
• …want a sandbox, QA or demo environment that you can turn on and off at will…
• …are tired of paying for dedicated or shared hosting…
• …want to deploy real Windows servers in minutes…
• …are a LAMP or Ruby-on-Rails or Linux developer and a looking for a hosting provider…
• …want to experience an extremely slick and elegant web-based UI used for deploying and load balancing servers…

…then you should definitely come by our table and/or give GoGrid a try!

See you at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo!

With the additions of new GoGrid server templates, especially the Facebook-ready ones, we know that you will really want to understand what is contained within each image, down to the version numbers. We have made this as easy as possible to get to. When you install a Server using one of the pre-defined Operating System templates, you now have an icon that looks like an “i” next to the OS and Template selections. Clicking on that icon will launch the new GoGrid Wiki that contains useful details on GoGrid.

The GoGrid Wiki provides information around the:

• Supported Operating Systems
• Template Images
• Billing Model
• User Interface
• Network Devices

As more functionality is added to GoGrid, this information will expand.

You can drill down through each of the sections. Below is the Operating Systems expanded.

And within each Operating system, you can view details of what the current different templates are. All new templates are flagged with the icon.

Clicking on the CentOS 4.4 Facebook image, for example, provides the following information:

• Install Notes - basically an output of “uname -a;“
• Security - how the iptables is set up, for example
• Image Details - see the software packages and associated version contained within the default GoGrid template. You can see this by running the Linux command: “rpm -qa;“

We encourage you to peruse the new Wiki as many of your version question can be answered there. Also, you can get additional details on Load Balancing, the UI and Billing. If there is something that is not covered within the Wiki or this blog, drop me a note.

Our second round of new GoGrid templates have been released today, bringing some great new functionality: Ruby-on-Rails and Facebook! As mentioned previously, we are rapidly compiling and releasing new server OS templates with pre-configured useful application sets.

Today we released the following 3 new templates:

Web/Application Servers:

• CentOS 4.4 (32-bit) - Facebook-ready
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) - Facebook-ready
• CentOS 4.5 (32-bit) with Ruby on Rails

We have some other templates queued up for release early next week:

Web/Application Servers:

• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) - Facebook-ready
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) with Ruby on Rails

Next week we will be explaining what exactly we mean by “Facebook-ready” and “Facebook Accelerators” but essentially, if are a Facebook developer and have an application that you want to quickly get on the Facebook network, just get a Facebook-enabled GoGrid server. These servers come pre-configured in order get your application in front of Facebook users with little configuration. While you have been suffering through the application development part, we have been taking all of the pain out of the hosting part! More later about Facebook.

We have made a few changes to the GoGrid website as well including a quick comparison between GoGrid, Dedicated Hosting and Amazon’s EC2. But don’t just take our word for it, give GoGrid a try by signing up for a Trial (Pay-as-you-go) account.

It is pretty obvious that the interest is high with GoGrid. And to that end, you have plenty of questions. We have been listening and hope that this first set of answers will help you in choosing GoGrid as your next hosting solution.

General

Question: Do I have full root access to each machine I’m running?

Answer:
Yes. All Linux machines have “root” access. All Windows machines have “administrator” access.

Question: Do I have to add new machines manually?

Answer:
Yes. Currently all new machines must be added via the GoGrid web interface.

Question: Can I set up a rule to have my GoGrid server scale automatically with demand?

Answer:
Not currently. However this is a feature that is on the product roadmap.

Question: Am I charged when my GoGrid server is in a stopped state and if so, how much?

Answer:
Servers in a “stopped” or “shut down” state will still count against your server RAM hour allotment and will still incur charges. This is because a stopped server still occupies RAM on our grid as well as “reserves” the resources for your server should you need to restart it quickly. At this time the only way to stop being billed for a server is to “Delete” the server, and in this case your server will be deleted forever and any data will not be recoverable. We are working on developing a solution so that stopped servers do not incur charges since we understand this is not an optimal solution for some of our customers.

Server Images

Question: Will you support Windows Server 2008?

Answer:
Yes, we will support Windows Server 2008 in the July time-frame.

Question: Can I use my own server image?

Answer:
Not initially. However this functionality will be supported in the future. And, as you have root and administrator access to your servers, you can customize your instances as you see fit (with the exception of modifying the kernel on Linux instances).

Question: Will GoGrid offer a scalable environment to support Facebook applications?

Answer:
GoGrid currently offers scalable servers for Facebook and other applications. Simply create new servers and load balance as needed. There will be a Facebook-ready server template (Facebook accelerators) added shortly.

Question: If I do set up an environment and I add another server, I would like to be able to clone my existing server as a new server. Is this possible?

Answer:
While server cloning is not available in the beta launch, it will be available soon as this is a popular request. Other customers of GoGrid have had success using some OpenSource tools to clone their servers across multiple instances.

Question: I want Windows, but I have no interest in IIS or MS SQL. I suppose I could get either server type and just turn off the services I don’t need, and install what I want (PostgreSQL, Java, etc.).

Answer:
Yes, you have full Administrator access to your Windows server which means that you can enable or disable the services that you want, as well as install other Third Party applications.

Technical Specifications

Question: Can I have more than just 1GB of RAM per server?

Answer:
GoGrid servers can be added with 512MB, 1GB, or 2GB of RAM today. We plan on increasing the maximum deployable amount of RAM to 4GB and 8GB very shortly.

Question: What load balancer do you use?

Answer:
F5 Networks LTM (http://www.f5.com/products/big-ip/). Our load balancers are configured in active-standby clustered pairs to prevent outages caused by hardware failures. These load balancers are included with each GoGrid account free of charge.

Question. Can I modify the type of load balancing or the persistence of my F5 load balancer?

Answer:
Yes. We give you the option to choose one of the following two load balancing types: “round robin” or “least connection,” and also provide the following persistence options: “SSL sticky” or “source address.”

Question: How much CPU do I get with every server?

Answer:
GoGrid is built upon a Grid of servers (nodes), managed by a hardware virtualization layer (Xen-based hypervisor) which allows several guest operating systems (virtual servers) to be executed on the same computer hardware at the same time. Our nodes are custom built multi-processor, Intel-based computers. In order for GoGrid to guarantee a minimum CPU to a virtual server, we will always maintain a ratio of 1 Xeon core (equivalent to a P4 2.0 chip) to 4 GB of RAM across our entire grid.

The maximum CPU utilization per virtual server is equivalent to the amount of cores assigned to that virtual server, per the below table.

The Xen CPU scheduler allows us to control CPU priorities per virtual server so that adjacent virtual servers cannot “steal” your CPU resources. The table below illustrates the current breakdown in CPU allocations and burst-ability by server-RAM configuration:

Server RAM	Core Guaranteed (P4 2.0 GHz equivalent)	Core Burst
512 MB	1/8	1
1 GB	1/4	1
2 GB	1/2	1

Note: you will soon be able to add 4GB & 8GB virtual servers.

Question: Can my GoGrid server support more than 1 Xeon processor if I’m running Windows OS?

Answer:
Not at this time. When we implement the 4GB and 8GB server options, that server will be guaranteed 1 full core and 2 full cores on both Windows and Linux respectively.

Question: Is my RAM dedicated to my server?

Answer:
Yes. The Xen hypervisor guarantees that the RAM is allocated to only your server.

Question: How much Storage can I have?

Answer:
In GoGrid, server storage is tied to the amount of RAM in your server.

Server RAM	Storage
512 MB	30 GB
1 GB	60 GB
2 GB	125 GB

Question: Can I add additional Storage?

Answer:
You cannot add additional storage to a server at this time.

Question: Why am I seeing a load above 1.0 when I do ‘top’ on my Linux server? This is happening even when my server is completely idle.

Answer:
The Xen hypervisor will report the load baseline as the number of cores assigned to your GoGrid server. This means that if your system has 1 core assigned to it, ‘top’ will report a baseline load of 1.0. To ascertain your actual load, subtract the number of cores assigned to your server from the load reported by ‘top’, in order to get the actual load of your server.

Question: What happens if there is a failure of a physical server node?

Answer:
The GoGrid resource scheduler ensures that your GoGrid servers are spread across as many different physical nodes as possible. This is to minimize the impact of an unlikely hardware failure to as few GoGrid servers as possible. Please also note that GoGrid hardware nodes are enterprise-grade machines with dual-power supplies connected to two different UPS systems, and RAID protected storage volumes. All nodes are proactively monitored by the GoGrid Network Operations Center (NOC).

More FAQs are in the works. Keep your questions coming!