Over the weekend I went away for a few days and halfway through the mini-holiday the web server decided to stop working, resulting in a couple of days downtime until I returned to Wellington. After this little incident I decided it was best to bite the bullet, pay the extra money and rent a hosted server. I had heard of Media Temple's GS product from a TechCrunch posting and it sounded very interesting. Rather than purchasing space on a server or operating a dedicated box your money bought you processing cycles on a grid-based server farm. This means that if things start to get busy the website does not stop, which can happen on a shared host environment if one site gets Dugg or Slashdotted.
The GS Administration interface (click to enlarge)
The service costs US$200 per year and for that money you get practically unlimited bandwidth (1TB), 100Gig of storage space, MySQL and Postgres databases, FTP and SSH access plus email (which currently I am not using). All this is controlled through a very intelligent administration interface and for the really nasty tasks you can always SSH into the server and perform a wide range of shell-based tasks (the Grid appears to be running Debian 3.1). Overall setup and migration was smooth and I am pleased with the sites performance and the flexibility of the solution, I was particularly impressed by the single click backup tool provided. Hopefully this will mean the site is up 99.99% of the time and operating at a nice speed for anyone using it.
The easy to use backup tool (click to enlarge)