A hosting conundrum
Its time to upgrade my hosting but the options are many and confusing. I currently have a single-core Pentium 4 dedicated server which hosts everything. I can either split up the services I currently host myself and hand them off to third parties, or keep them all together. Then there's the question of Virtual or Dedicated.
My current server hosts several small sites, several private SVN repos and one large site responsible for using most of the server's resources. None of it is backed up, which is a Big Deal.
Moving the large site to its own host could cost as much as the entire current server. Alone it requires 2GB ram, 700GB of bandwidth a month and constant MySQL processes. I'd still have to find hosting for all the other sites and services too.
SVN repos could be moved to a third party host. The SVN solution is probably my single biggest need as none of the other sites would be running if their source code was lost.
That still leaves the websites. Do I host them together or separately? The latter would be costly but it would be more flexible if any one (or group) of those sites required more resources. Similarly a Dedicated server gives rise to flexibility issues; a Virtual solution would mean I could throw in RAM, processors and disk space whenever necessary, but then a Dedicated server would have more burstable, stable resources to allocate quicker, even if they're limited and inflexible.
After all that, I still need a backup solution capable of storing 50GB+.
I like the idea of a Virtual, cloud solution. Being able to keep my websites' source on a cloud device and change the OS and hardware around it as I see fit is definitely appealing. However the cost of such a solution is no less than I'm paying at the moment and I'd still not have a backup solution. My paranoia of losing data is growing and I feel backup or movable storage is more important than the speed of a larger but Dedicated machine.
Balancing cost and resource demand is complex