We've recently begun to move our entire infrastructure to external providers (vps and cloud) because we felt that we couldn't guarantee a sufficiently high level of quality and had to devote too much time and money to operations.
In over four months we've probably already had more downtime than in the past 5 years. Despite paying quite a lot for "redundant", clustered offerings. There was one nasty bug in the hypervisor that killed the entirety of one of our providers' vps infrastructure - for over a day.
Our experience with "the cloud" was a little bit better, but we aren't entirely satisfied.
I don't know, maybe we should just order services from three different providers mirror our applications ourselves as a fail-over mechanism.
He implied that Heroku is not his sole provider. I'm skeptical of that figure, too, as it's probably something on the Heroku sales site (99.7% to the 30-byte health check!), or it's manually updated, in which case it's probably rounded.
Yes. I recommend having a look at either ProxMox (proxmox.com) which can simultaneously do OpenVZ and KVM; or, XCP for Xen-based stuff - see http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.html
http://AppFog.com has ruby, python and node, multiple regions today: Ireland, Singapore and US, adding Rackspace and HP soon. All free and backed by CloudFoundry
In over four months we've probably already had more downtime than in the past 5 years. Despite paying quite a lot for "redundant", clustered offerings. There was one nasty bug in the hypervisor that killed the entirety of one of our providers' vps infrastructure - for over a day.
Our experience with "the cloud" was a little bit better, but we aren't entirely satisfied.
I don't know, maybe we should just order services from three different providers mirror our applications ourselves as a fail-over mechanism.