...and I have a few questions.
I'm basically working on a MySQL+PHP based webapp. Since I don't have on-demand scaling with VPS, I'm planning to move from VPS to Cloud when I hit the 1000 subscribers barrier.
I'm looking at Windows Azure but I'm ok with other suggestions. So here are my questions:
Will it really cost me a kidney?
Every subscriber needs to download around 4-5MB of static resources each day. Bandwidth is
free on the VPS but here I see costs can easily get to $800.00/mo; this makes me very insecure about the whole thing, I mean VPS is just $2,000/yr.
Do I need another VM or is PHP included in the Web Sites?
I have basic sysadmin skills, I think I can handle setting up a PHP install, but will I have to do this? If yes, what other service do I need to setup manually? What about Memcached, MySQL, etc?
What security protections does it include?
For example I have some basic protection included, like directory traversals and executable files upload; I also have CloudFlare on my other websites for DDoS protection; will I need to do the same thing here too, can it even be installed, can I edit my DNS records, etc?
How are e-mails, subdomains, add-on domains, parked domains, etc. handled?
I haven't seen any references to e-mail boxes. On the VPS I simply add them from cPanel (
[email protected] / whatever.mysite.com / ...); do I have a similar management interface here?
Do I get SSH access?
Or at least FTP, remote MySQL access and maybe some incremental back-ups or something?
Can I see my quotas and advanced traffic info?
I must mention that I really like the idea of the whole "cloud" concept, the added reliability and everything but I really need maybe a parallel to regular
hosting or something so I know what to expect.
