The "Cloud" Buzzword: Opportunity or Vaporware?
It is 2011, and you cannot walk into a boardroom without hearing about "The Cloud." Amazon EC2 is making waves. Rackspace is shouting from the rooftops. But for a CTO in Oslo or Kiev, strictly following the hype train is a dangerous game. We need to talk about what cloud computing actually means for your bottom line and your uptime, stripping away the marketing veneer.
At its core, the shift isn't magic. It is abstraction. But how that abstraction is handled determines whether your high-traffic Magento store survives the Christmas rush or crashes and burns.
1. Virtualization: Shared Kernel vs. True Isolation
Most "Cloud" VPS providers currently flooding the market are relying on OpenVZ or Virtuozzo. This is container-based virtualization. It is cheap. It is efficient for the host. And it is a nightmare for performance consistency.
In a shared kernel environment (OpenVZ), if your neighbor decides to compile a massive kernel or gets hit by a DDoS attack, your database latency spikes. You are sharing the OS resources. This is "noisy neighbor" syndrome in its purest form.
The Pragmatic Solution:
We built the CoolVDS platform on KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine). With KVM, you get a dedicated kernel. Your memory is your memory. If the guy next door crashes his server, yours keeps humming. In 2011, relying on shared kernels for mission-critical apps is professional negligence.
Pro Tip: Check your virtualization type. Run uname -a. If you see "stab" or "virt" references in the kernel string that look like the host's version, you might be in a container. Demand KVM or Xen for serious workloads.
2. The I/O Bottleneck: Spinning Rust vs. SSD
CPU cycles are cheap. RAM is getting cheaper. Disk I/O is where servers go to die. The standard in our industry has long been 15k RPM SAS drives in RAID 10. They are reliable, but they physically cannot keep up with the random read/write patterns of a busy MySQL database.
We are seeing a paradigm shift. Solid State Drives (SSDs) are expensive, yes. But the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) difference is logarithmic. A SAS drive gives you ~180 IOPS. An Enterprise SSD gives you thousands.
War Story: Last month, we migrated a client running a high-traffic vBulletin forum from a legacy host to our SSD-backed nodes. Their iowait dropped from 25% to 0.1%. The page load time went from 3 seconds to 400ms. No code changes. Just better hardware.
3. Latency and The Patriot Act
Latency matters. Speed of light is a hard constraint. If your customers are in Norway, hosting in Virginia (US-East) adds 100ms+ to every packet round trip. That makes your application feel sluggish.
But beyond milliseconds, there is the legal reality. The USA PATRIOT Act allows US authorities to access data stored on US servers (or by US companies) without a warrant. For Norwegian businesses, this conflicts with local privacy expectations and the Personal Data Act (Personopplysningsloven).
By hosting on VPS Norway infrastructure, physically located in Oslo, you gain two things:
- Low Latency: Direct peering at NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange).
- Data Sovereignty: You answer to the Datatilsynet, not the FBI.
4. Optimizing for the Virtual Era
Simply moving to a VDS isn't enough. You must tune your stack. The default configurations in Apache and MySQL are designed for 512MB RAM servers from 2005.
If you are running MySQL 5.1 or the new 5.5 on a CoolVDS instance with 4GB RAM, do not leave innodb_buffer_pool_size at the default 8MB. That is criminal.
[mysqld]
# Allocate 60-70% of RAM to the pool if it is a dedicated DB server
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 2G
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2 # Trade a tiny bit of ACID safety for massive speed
query_cache_size = 64M
For the web server, consider putting Nginx in front of Apache as a reverse proxy. Nginx handles the static files (images, css) efficiently, while Apache handles the PHP heavy lifting. This saves RAM and prevents the "MaxClients" bottleneck.
Conclusion: Control Your Infrastructure
Cloud computing in 2011 offers scalability, but it requires a pragmatic approach to hardware selection and geography. Do not settle for oversold OpenVZ containers on spinning disks.
If you need the raw I/O of SSDs and the legal safety of Norwegian data residency, the choice is clear. Stop fighting with slow I/O and latency.
Deploy a KVM instance on CoolVDS today and see the difference a real architecture makes.