If we're starting from scratch, any reason to stay? It is more exhausting moving across the state instead of down the hall, but we will have to pick up everything and find its place in the new digs, and I suspect we will have to pay them for any help they give us.

Mostly I blanch at the change of address part of the metaphor.

I agree with Tom.

Although the iStrata guys were really good when I rented my server seven or eight years ago, they haven't kept up with the times. There's no reason to get an actual physical server these days when a virtual server could easily handle the board's load.

We might even be able to run the entire thing out of the Amazon EC2 free tier for a year.

[link]

If not, the Linode guys are highly regarded.

You agree with me too, right? Validate meeeeeeeee.......

Just kidding.

I'd rather not go with Amazon for reasons I have no right to impose on the board, so only if it's perfectly reasonable and equally viable.

Popping something up in the cloud sounds like a good and safe option. We shouldn't be in the OS administration business. Just keeping the php running and not php itself. Not even the mySQL, if we can avoid it. But certainly not Linux.

I feel like one of Gary Larson's dogs.

I agree with ita on the Amazon for Reasons.

I also agree with Tom & Rob.

I am pretty agreeable at the moment. But yeah, if you're going to have to cut bait anyway, I'd say move. This is the second time, and I see no reason why there won't continue to be additional times, unless iStrata gets more current. And the next time, it may not be so innocuous.

However, I am not the we doing the work, so you guys should do as you see fit.

There's this: [link]

I've done tiny little test Rails apps on Heroku and it works like magic.

What can we do to predict our usage in their cute terminology so we can have an idea of how much these new paradigms actually cost?

I was going to say: that looks like it can get very pricey very quickly.

PHP on Heroku sounds like a kinda weird choice to me (and looks fiddly, from the instructions) -- on the other hand, a lot of Ruby devs I know seriously love them for the easy cloud not-managing-the-linux environment. While I've never used them, I gather PHPFog and PHPCloud do the same kind of service without having to retrofit quite as much to get the basic environment set up.

Okay, I vote for the minimum retrofitting at the minimum cost.

The clouds I'm familiar with doesn't take tweaking on the app side, like, at all. But then again, it's being sold to a corporation light on admins, not to individuals with duct tape and wire.

What can we realistically expect?