Looking at the Cloud
It seems we are constantly being told of the benefits of "the cloud" so like any respectable developer, I have been keeping an eye on things, especially the big players like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. But I was fairly happy with my existing web hosting provider: they are cheap and any support queries I had were dealt with quickly.
I was using "shared hosting": so basically they cram on as many customer's sites/applications onto a physical server as possible and give you a web-based control panel to administer your applications.
The one thing that I wasn't entirely happy with though, was the performance. Which was OK really, as it is a cheap plan you get, as they say, what you pay for. My main gripe was that the application was frequently starting up - perhaps it's just that the Idle Time-out setting was quite short, but had the affect that a user's first page they'd hit would take (noticeably) longer.
The Trigger
Then came the "incident". For some reason the shared server was rebooted: probably just some routine patching or some such thing. Then my application could no longer resolve DNS names - so my application which was calling out to other web services such as open-id, Akismet, etc… were failing. Unfortunately, in the case of Akismet, if the web service fails for whatever reason, the comment is allowed. This had the unfortunate effect of suddenly allowing through quite a large amount of spam, which took constant managing.
It took about 5 or 6 days for the hosting provider to finally resolve the issue. Not the end of the world, but enough of a pain to make me look at the alternatives, and as it turned out, move to one of them…
