Automation and Selecting Web Hosts

One of the biggest challenges with selecting a web host is that it’s very difficult to determine the quality of a provider without actually setting everything up and seeing how it goes for a while. Generally that means that you either wind up avoiding the very low cost providers out of fear they won’t be reliable and possibly paying too much, or spending a lot of time and effort setting up with a provider only to then discover they’re unreliable or the performance isn’t as good as you expected.

Virtual private servers are a particular problem because hosting providers advertise specs like CPU cores and RAM, but don’t advertise whether those CPUs are oversubscribed or what the contention on disk access is.

Fortunately, now that tools like puppet and chef have appeared and matured, its quite easy to automate the setup and configuration of a server so you can easily switch hosts if needed. Even more so with web hosting companies more and more becoming cloud providers – the difference primarily being per-hour pricing.

Which is a round about way of saying – welcome to the new symphonious, completely re-homed and rebuilt using automated scripts. Hopefully you didn’t notice the difference. The move saves me about $20/month and because the entire build was automated if I have issues here or find a better deal elsewhere I can now move effortlessly.