MySQL hosting provider?

July 10, 2006 9:14 AM

Can you recommend a MySQL hosting provider?

I'm looking for a MySQL hosting provider. My main needs are that the number of processes permitted per user be higher than 15 (preferably 50 or more), that the uptime be five or six nines (99.999% or 99.9999%) per year, that there are a small number of databases per database server (say, fewer than 15), that when there are problems the database is NOT disabled without notifying me first, and, finally, support must be 24/7 via telephone. Note that Dreamhost is not an acceptable option. According to my tests, Dreamhost has reliability of about three or four nines (99.9% or 99.9%, which is unacceptable; my database there was offline all day yesterday due to some Dreamhost idiot's idea of a DNS update). Pair.com might work (and is where my site is currently hosted, but on a lesser hosting plan), but I'm hoping not to pay $250 a month for hosting by moving to one of the deluxe plans.

posted by Mo Nickels to computers & internet (14 comments total)

...99.9% or 99.99%., which is unacceptable...
posted by Mo Nickels at 9:15 AM on July 10, 2006

One of the Prohosters plans from Carpathia might be a good option. I currently use them for hosting all of my sites, and through the use of virtual servers, they basically give you root access to your server, allowing you to install anything you want and configure it how you want. Plus the support is 24/7, and the datacenter is through Equinix.
posted by fvox13 at 9:29 AM on July 10, 2006

Anyone offering service of more than 4 nines is blowing smoke. If your dreamhost account was down for an entire day, well, if you base it on a yearly sample, that's about 99.7% uptime. 99.99% uptime would mean an average of 50 minutes downtime annually. Frankly, that's going to be a hard requirement to meet for any host especially considering the bredth of things that can occur with online systems.

That's my 2 cents.

-quad
posted by quadrinary at 10:18 AM on July 10, 2006

Case in point - if Dreamhost's DNS was the issue... use a different, more reliable DNS provider. I don't use Dreamhost's DNS for any of the stuff I have with them.
posted by quadrinary at 10:27 AM on July 10, 2006

It sounds like you need to lease some colo space and hire a db admin.
posted by b1tr0t at 10:29 AM on July 10, 2006

use a different, more reliable DNS provider

I don't need a DNS provider because I don't need a web site at Dreamhost. It's just a DB so I use the provider's assigned host name. I only host the referrer-tracker database there, as a test, to see what kind of reliability they have. Besides, DNS is basic corporate computing: if a company can't master that, they don't get any more money from me.

I've considered colo but it's very expensive. Hiring a DB admin is out of the question; I can do the work, anyway. This is just a hobby site, after all, but traffic is growing faster than revenue, so I can afford neither.

Quad, you're right in your calculations. But being down for 50 minutes a year IS too long. And a day seems like a lifetime, particularly now when I am in the middle of promoting a new book, which leads many more people back to my site. So I need reliability. Asking for five or six nines from a well-known provider seems more likely to give me better service than settling for the low-rent providers who promise less.
posted by Mo Nickels at 10:41 AM on July 10, 2006

Your requirements sound like you really need a dedicated server. Pair offers a "QS-X" packaged which is cheaper than a QS-1, I've got one for $149/month. You can get a pretty big discount by pre-paying.

Alternately, ServerMatrix offers some fairly affordable dedicated servers starting around $119/month. I have one of those too, but I was able to get it when it was $99/month.

Both have been very reliable, but six nines is probably unreliastic-- you're talking at most minutes per year of downtime.
posted by justkevin at 10:47 AM on July 10, 2006

Justkevin, your information is good. I corresponded with someone at Pair this morning, just after posting here, who told me that they have a version of the QS-X that is MySQL-database-only for $75 a month. It sounds like the way I need to go. Unfortunately, there's a waiting list for QS-X servers.
posted by Mo Nickels at 11:07 AM on July 10, 2006

You can't *get* even 5 nines from a single machine.

You just can't.

That means slightly over 5 minutes a *year* of downtime, of any type.

Achieving that is almost impossible at the machine level -- it requires high-availability hardware; the sort with dual processors running the same code in lockstep.

It will take at least 2 machines to get there, and two pairs in geographically separated locations isn't unreasonable.

If you *really* need that, then $250 a month ought to be a Regular Operating Expense.

If you really need that, *and* you can't afford to pay that for it, then you have an... odd business plan.

Note, too, that if you really need honest-to-ghod 5-nines, you should plan on administering your own hardware, OS, and DBMS, not farming it out to someone. Renting slot space in a *well-engineered and operated* colo facility is as far as you should go towards outsourcing.
posted by baylink at 12:49 PM on July 10, 2006

Netcraft has a list of hosting providers that have low outages here

See also Myth of the nines on Wikipedia
posted by Sharcho at 1:39 PM on July 10, 2006

Ugh. Dreamhost is frustrating enough, but now Pair (where I'm hosting) has become dog slow on MySQL as well. Based on my experience there, as much as I like Pair, I wouldn't recommend them for what you're doing.
posted by anildash at 4:22 PM on July 10, 2006

Baylink, that's what I want. I want a farm of machines or cores running MySQL with failover, not a single machine with a charmed uptime.

I don't have a business plan. I'm not running a business. As I said above, it's a hobby site. The DB isn't even that large--only about 50MB of data. It's just hard to find reliable DB hosting.

Anil, I've used a good dozen other providers and Pair's the best so far. However, they have a max of 15 simultaneous processes per user per MySQL DB, they do not permit the installation of referrer trackers that use the DB, they have a tendency to disable databases they perceive as a problem without due diligence and without sending log files (I had to wheedle log files out of them today and was able to determine that Inktomi bots were hammering my machine--62% of IPs over the period tracked belonged to Inktomi; however, they seem to respect the Crawl-delay command in robots.txt; this is something Pair should have been able to suggest--about 30 seconds of grep figured it out), and they have a very low cap on the number of emails that can be sent via a web site at one time using a script (although they did give me a free trial-run installation of MailMan to use, with the understanding that it could become a pay service).
posted by Mo Nickels at 5:32 PM on July 10, 2006

Well... hmmm.

You might look into virtual hosting, assuming you could get one of the colo providers to give you virthosts that were *guaranteed* to stay on separate physical machines -- virthosting is relatively new; I'm not sure how up to date these people are.

Can you put your fallback *above* the MySQL layer, so you don't have to couple Master and Slave MySQL databases?

I'll be interested to see how, exactly, this shakes out for you; I have a web service in the back of my head that will fit in this general size and shape category myself....
posted by baylink at 7:10 PM on July 10, 2006

Further: This link does a better job discussing the issues than the one I posted yesterday.
posted by baylink at 11:41 AM on July 11, 2006