CLOUD Server - advice please

[hoping this is the correct forum for this service request]

Hi all,

Im looking to move 3 - 4 large Joomla/VM stores, a busy VB forum and about 200 WP sites over to a very, very fast cloud server. Ive been in touch with Rackspace, and they're ok, but a pain to deal with, as they won't send me a written quote, just lots of phone waffle.

Im looking to get this resolved before Monday to switch hosting. Can someone recommend a reputable company who can offer a great service and dedicated managed hosting for maximum uptime.

Thanks

what country?

UK or USA. Currently hosted in USA.

I like using cloudnext.com for cloud servers here in the UK.

Thanks, I shall contact them.

Check out www.myserverexpert.com , i have 2 servers at them, pretty good so far

I've been using rackspace for years, and do a lot with both cloud sites and cloud servers. The reason you aren't getting quotes from them is the nature of cloud services - rather than RAM you are paying for computing cycles. With your description, it would be a serious challenge to come up with a price. For example - you want all your WP sites on one cloud server, or do you want to spread them across several (and get several IP addresses!!).

That said - My experience with them is that its been pretty cheap, rock-solid service, only one serious outage (more than 30 minutes) in the past two years, and with the ability to replicate my servers easily a serious time-saver. It takes a bit of tweaking re: caching (they use varnish) but it certainly is no a bad mistake.

I'd recommend you try several - through all your WP sites on one for example.

The only 2 cloud providers I've heard that are "true cloud services" are RackSpace and Storm on Demand. I've heard beyond these 2 (and Amazon's services obviously) there are not really any proper cloud providers.

#1 choice would be rackspace
#2 choice would be Softsys

Go for Softlayer.com, they are the best (also know as ThePlanet)

I have sent u a pm there !!

You might want to check out Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) service. I use it and find it to be outstanding. They have support for pretty much anything you need to do - load balancing, failover, monitoring, storage, geo based content delivery, etc.

--Ma