On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Craig James <craig_james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Greg Smith wrote: >> >> What I'd love to have is a way to rent a fairly serious piece of dedicated >> hardware, ideally with multiple (at least 4) hard drives in a RAID >> configuration and a battery-backed write cache. The cache is negotiable. >> Linux would be preferred, FreeBSD or Solaris would also work; not Windows >> though (see "good DB performance"). > We finally bought some nice Dell servers and found a co-location site that > provides us all the infrastructure (reliable power, internet, cooling, > security...), and we're in charge of the computers. We've never looked > back. I ran this way on a Quad-processor Dell for many years, and then, after selling the business and starting a new one, decided to keep my DB on a remote-hosted machine. I have a dual-core2 with hardware RAID 5 (I know, I know) and a private network interface to the other servers (web, email, web-cache) Just today when the DB server went down (after 2 years of reliable service .... and 380 days of uptime) they gave me remote KVM access to the machine. Turns out I had messed up the fstab while fiddling with the server because I really don't know FreeBSD as well as Linux, I think remote leased-hosting works fine as long as you have a competent team on the other end and "KVM over IP" access. Many providers don't have that... and without it you can get stuck as you describe. I have used MANY providers over they years, at the peak with over 30 leased servers at 12 providers, and with many colocation situations as well. The only advantage with colocation I have seen .... is the reduced expense if you keep it going for a few years on the same box..... which is a big advantage if it lets you buy a much more powerful box to begin with. Providers I prefer for high-end machines allow me to upgrade the hardware with no monthly fees (marked-up cost of upgrade + time/labor only).... that keeps the cost down. -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance