Hosting - meeting the demands of a website

On The Ball (OTB) has been a passion of mine for over 7 years now and there has been many challenges faced and overcome making it the game it is today. One of the prominent decisions that has hinged its success is finding a reliable host who caters for the technologies OTB utilizes.

OTB is built in PHP, and is powered by a Postgresql database. Matches & Training are simulated by Java applications that are scheduled to run periodically by cron. Half the battle of finding a host that allows these specific technologies is very difficult. The majority of hosting companies today really only caters for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP) environments.

The obvious solution to hosting OTB is for a dedicated server solution where full control of the server is handed over to me, this is / was a very expensive thing to do until now. OTB has a platinum subscription that basically allows me to receive monetary contributions for the many years of blood sweet and tears poured into the game. It has now come to a point where based on the number of 2009 subscriptions the additional cost of server will be covered without me putting my hand into my pocket.

Rackspace Cloud are a company doing some very exciting things! They have some incredible products and all at a very competitive and reasonable price. OTB will be very proud to be hosted on their infrastructure and there is no doubt this change will be another leap forward for the game.

So what will Rackspace Cloud do? Well, they have two products that will be utilized; CloudServers & CloudFiles

The CloudServer will run the game and everything that it entails, from serving the website, database and running the java applications. CloudFiles will store specific data that is not needed to be stored locally to the game. Mainly the plethora of match logs will be served from this service taking a substantial load of the main server.