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I plan to open a subscription based website that will be video and image heavy. I have the video and image hosting sorted using Amazons S3 and CDN. now, I will still need a main server to host php/html files and the mysql database.
My question is, is there a scalable solution (that has redundancy incase of spikes) to replace my main server so that I can still server my php and sql processes, but have it's resources increase on demand like the Amazon S3 service does for static files?
Thank you!
Yes, they are called VPS; virtual private servers. At our company, HostGator's VPS serve us well, and they're cheaper than alternatives.
http://www.hostgator.com/vps-hosting/
Edit: You can change resources on demand, increasing and decreasing, without any modification from your part.
Oh, and by the way, if you need a really good service, there's Rackspace Cloud Servers. They're not exactly cheap though ;). However, if you can afford them, you won't regret this.
VPSes aren't going to scale in the same way that you're thinking of (hand-off). VPSes are just virtualized servers... you still have to manage them like any other server.
If you want a managed server, those are expensive, but will be more hands-off.
I recommend you evaluate this service though: http://phpfog.com/. If you've heard of Heroku in the Ruby webapps world, it's like that but for PHP.
On AWS you can also find scalable cloud hosting solutions. But on such a IaaS (Infastructure as a Service) provider you have to take care of some sysadmin stuff yourself. You might be better advised with a PaaS (Platform as a Service). This is a kind of abstraction layer on top of cloud technology – simplifying things for you.
We are currently developing such a service for developers in Europe ourselves. We have just posted a comparison of different providers here:
