SoftLayer - Our Flexible Hosting Framework

What is a hosting framework?

Our hosting company SoftLayer is not a normal dedicated server hosting company. Rather than providing servers, they provide an automated infrastructure. Most of the jobs in hosting can be done by a robot. SoftLayer has just about perfected their use of robots to run their business. If load on a server hits a big spike, I can have another server automatically provisioned and ready to go in a couple hours. Not only that but this new server is connected to my others as if they were sitting next to each other. I can automatically put any Ooperating system on the new server and/or switch operating systems at will, all without the help of a person. With this, SoftLayer becomes the most scalable, flexible hosting provider I’ve worked with.

What happens when there’s problems?

Whereas with other hosting companies, if I have a serious problem that I could fix, I still need to find someone at the hosting company to help. Those rare, serious problems often require someone onsite at the data center to go in front of the server and help you out. Not with so with SoftLayer. Through their unique infrastructure, they can basically offer me direct access to “stand in front of the server” all the time. This is done through redirecting the keyboard, screen and mouse right to my office through a secure, back channel. Since often times I know how to fix a problem, I can get most things fixed before I could even explain what’s wrong to another hosting company. But if I’m on vacation, the SL folks are very knowledgeable to help out others in the company. I really like how they set the expectation up front of paying 3 bucks per incident. Paying 3 dollars to get a problem solved takes the load off of the SL tech support in dealing with much of the mundane stuff most hosts have to. And still it’s a very reasonable change if you have a real need.

How’s the reliability?

I started off in this industry in the late 90’s hosting with RackSpace. They’ve been widely known as the best in the business. I know that the only people with more Redhat Linux engineers than RackSpace is Redhat itself. In the past couple of years I’ve been with SL though, I’ve seen more major infrastructure problems at RackSpace than there have been at SoftLayer.

Tags: Infrastructure, Web Business

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Recommedations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.