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What would you suggest as hosting (RAM, HDD Space, Bandwidth) etc.. and what providers? one option was hosted applications on Rackspace.

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You're at just over one page load per second there. Ten year old hardware could easily handle that. – EEAA Jun 22 '12 at 0:14

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To be honest, I would buy a Rackspace 1024MB Cloud Server, install Centos 6.2, VirtualMin with PHP as Fast-CGI with 4 workers respawning every 500 requests, MySQL for 512MB RAM and SELinux for caging and this is it, I think this costs something like $500 per year + traffic. With this you are safe enough, I use 8 Cloud and VPS providers and the Rackspace London datacentre so far the best. On Amazon EC2, you would need to make a pre-payment around $500 and you would get 2GB machine with 2 cores for another £30 per month or something (high-cpu medium machine). Eventually you might want two machines in high availability - one in Rackspace and one in Amazon EC2 - this is really one of the best options. On Amazon EC2 you got port @1GBps, and on Rackspace you got something like 160MBits. But because of this Rackspace is more stable service. If you dont want to pay for bandwidth, you just buy a dedicated server (1xXeon) or two VPS servers - e.g. VPS.NET in U.S.

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Rackspace is more stable because they use 160Mbit uplinks? That makes zero sense. – EEAA Jun 22 '12 at 0:18
Yes, because if you have 160Mbit you have it guaranteed on the first hop, if you have 1Gbps you do not. Have a read about XEN and KVM clouds. – Andrew Smith Jun 22 '12 at 1:13
Sorry Andrew, that has zero bearing on stability. Zero, nada, zilch. How do you know that 10G uplinks aren't in use? – EEAA Jun 22 '12 at 1:19
IO of the internet is a great way to limit also other I/O, so this way, it's better load balancing. E.g. if I dont download and save files @1GBps, but at 160MBps, it's easier to actually make a faster, more responsive service, which is more stable the way, it doesnt locks up. Also, if I have 32 core machine, and I sell 32 machines 1 core each, I can give up to 300MBps for each customer, and not 1GBps, because one would eventually experience a slow-downs. And it doesnt mean that there are various usage patterns, actually for QoS of your service you need to expect the worst, which happens often. – Andrew Smith Jun 22 '12 at 9:36
So simply, I can see Rackspace is throttling bandwidth, their disk I/O is the fastest of all cloud providers, and the network is the most stable and overall it's very reliable to run real-time video applications like monitoring. While at Amazon EC2 I enjoy 1GBps, it sometimes it is freezing and on I/O, CPU etc and there are no limits for bursts. So Rackspace has better limits - they dont allow burts, but the real-time apps work much better, which is way much more stable service, e.g. real-time messaging works well, so I know how much time takes to deliver 100 emails. – Andrew Smith Jun 22 '12 at 9:39

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