Understanding IaaS, CaaS, DaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Elastic hosting platforms

Artashes

Artashes

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Staff member
I suddenly feel like a grandpa in the world of smartphones.

What is up with the explosion of cloud services built on top of one another? There seems to be a specialty service now build for everything: Container as a Service (Caas), Database as a Service (DaaS), Software as a Software (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)... I am not going to define them for the sake of not being repetitive (description of each is easily available through simple search).

However, some things sounded so new that even I had to look up what these acronyms stood for.

In spite of them being so new to web hosting industry, I've noticed we have members who have either already invested and expanded into that space, or have plans to do so. I don't presume this is a little investment, so the question is:

Do you think this "everything-as-a-service" trend to continue or is there going to be 1-2 main classes of new infrastructure that will eventually stick as mainstream?

Which one of these cloud computing stacks will actually turn up to be the next big thing?
 
There sure is a lot of them. I'm liking the look of ElasticSites.com and I'll no doubt be looking to make use of that, though not so sure about any of the others with us being fairly small.
 
Well, these services are aimed at very different use cases. So it all depends on how mainstream you mean.

For example, take your average mom and pop store looking to get online. They won't touch most of these services, a standard $10 shared provider should fit their needs just fine.

But lets say that mom and pop store opt for a SaaS (already mainstream) eCommerce platform. Now that eCommerce platform would be a better fit for these types of services in order to provide a reliable, scalable SaaS app.
 
But at the same time, a lot of those services are overrated and gimmicky and don't guarantee to offer better uptime than typical shared/web hosting. I'm oldskool and would just go Web -- > VPS -->> Dedicated -- >> Cloud

I think a lot of people switch to the fancy services just because of buzz hype. Local SSD is faster than all those fancy Cloud. Even AWS failed recently.

PS your chat looks interesting :thumbup:
 
ElasticSites are a good product, we have a number of customers using them for their Magento/Prestashop Stores. (It helps that we use LiteSpeed with LiteMage).
They can purchase more resources for the holidays like Christmas and Easter, depending on what they sell. We have a chocolatier that does that. They will do doubt be upgrading again soon and downgrading after the bank holiday.

We have a few using them for popular WordPress sites.

We've recently upgraded all of our servers to 32Cores to accommodate them expanding.

But what is an elastic site?

Think shared hosting, but as stable as a VPS, with the security/isolation of a VPS and the resources of a VPS, but the customer is paying for all those resources, not for just sharing them.

i.e. As a host you're not getting angry when customers are using 100% CPU all of the time, because they're paying for 100% CPU, if they're using it all of the time, maybe they need 2 or 3 CPUs? They can just pay and they will receive them...
As a customer you're are getting the resources you need and don't have to move your site to a VPS where you won't have the time or knowledge to manage one, as your busy running your business, and no software licenses to buy/rent.


Of course cusomers get ALL of the benefits of shared-hosting.
The host does the security, the backups & general server management.

On our ElasticSites offering customers get LiteSpeed (with litemage) a high-performance web server, rs1soft backups (self-restorable), patchman (keeps software vulnerabilities patched), softaculous (1 click installer), Site Builder, StatusCake (3rd party) Monitoring and of course a well-known C'Panel.
We ensure an ElasticSite has it's own IP address, so you are not blacklisted by your neighbour.

When you compare the cost of ElasticSite to the equivalent VPS, you realise this is great value.

ElasticSites is a kind of CaaS offering (loosely based).
 
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I think it's fine ughosting as long as you're charging accordingly for TRUE 100% dedicated resources. Can't say ElasticSites setup is better but then when the customers host websites that use their full amount of resources 24/7 to say they're using too many resources and they need to upgrade. That is then no different to Web/Reseller.

We offer 2 GB MEM, 2 CPUs on all Web/Reseller plans by default and all customers can burst to that amount 24/7 providing it's for real website usage (of course that is possible due to the usual overselling and knowing that not all customers will use 100% of their resources). But we did have some signup just to host crappy poorly coded scripts deliberately just to use 100% of their server resources on purpose for various pointless reasons (trying to kill the drives no doubt, SSD don't last forever :rolleyes2). Of course, we told them to host the scripts somewhere else as they were intentionally using lots of resources unnecessarily (just hosting some heavily coded WordPress sites with no useful content/information).

I think if someone needs more than 2 GB MEM and 2 CPUs for their sites then a VPS is the way to go. But now there is ElasticSites I'll no doubt offer that in the future for those who would prefer more resources than the 2 GB MEM, 2 CPUs we offer on our Web/Reseller plans but don't want to upgrade to a VPS. I'll fill up our current servers first before getting some beefy servers to offer ElasticSites. :thumbup:
 
All I'm saying is, if you are using all of your resources, then your site is suffering due to the limited resources.

Say you have a site that uses 300% CPU all day long, well each customer will be getting a slower site than if you were using 4,5 or 6 CPUs.

The customer decides whether they want to be slow or pay more.

The host should not be the person to say you MUST upgrade.
I've had this discussion offline with others, autoscaling is not for elastic-sites, it's a user decision carried out immediately by the billing system. When you pay, you're upgraded. When you downgrade, you are recredited the extra cash (pro rata).
 
Sounds good ughosting.

PS I noticed you use OVH DDoS protection. What do you do about Layer 7 attacks? How do you go about protecting your customers/server against those types of attacks? Or do you use OVH Game Servers which include L7 protection?

Oh I see you use bitninja which should help with L7.
 
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