Acquaintance with cloud hosting Slidebar.ru

I happened to test the slidebar.ru cloud hosting service. In this post I will tell you what it looks like to work with, how to configure and manage the service. I will not touch upon the issue of cost of service and compare this offer for hosting with others. Firstly, because I do not have enough experience and data to compare, and secondly, the purpose of the note is to show what the flexible offer slidebar.ru is about the configuration of your virtual machines.

To start working with the service, go to http://slidebar.ru/ and select for yourself the desired configuration of the virtual machine where your product will spin.
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The service allows very flexible configuration:

• target operating system: Windows Web Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2003, Linux / BSD;
• RAM size from 512 MB to 8 GB in 256 MB increments;
• one, two (not available in the Linux version) or four (not available in the Linux and Win2003 versions) processor cores;
• available processor power in percent in increments of 10%;
• storage from 20 (linux, for windows at least 40 GB) to 200 GB in increments of 20 GB.

As the parameters change, the price tag on the right changes. I selected the following settings:



Please note that the price is calculated for hourly use. This allows you to flexibly rate the use of resources in the planned change of parameters, about which below.

After the purchase of the service comes a letter confirming the acquisition of the tariff and with a link to the management console. The console is of the following form:



In addition, in the second letter comes the password on the RDP for the virtual machine. In the console is what is the main feature of the service: the ability to flexibly set the current parameters of the system: you are allowed to configure the amount of memory, processors, power, storage capacity. This allows you to urgently respond to changes in the operation of your service: with increasing load to increase resources, with decreasing - to reduce.

After installing my web product on the server using RDP, I tried to make changes to the service by increasing the processor capacity and storage:



After clicking “Make changes” the following window appears:



At the same time, the RDP working session with the server opened at this moment was forcibly ended.

One minus of service appears here: during the processing of an application, there is no access to the management console, even if you have several virtual machines installed there and only one is configured, you don’t get access to the second, you will be transferred to this window with the request processing.

The processing time of the application was small - after about 10-15 minutes access to the console appeared and after another 5 minutes the opportunity to access the server via RDP appeared. Also, you receive a letter with the confirmation of the tariff and the data that you specified in the configuration.

Additional disk space will be unallocated and you will have to partition it yourself:



It is also necessary to pay attention to the fact that the increased disk space cannot be reduced:



So, you need to plan the size of the storage wisely and bearing in mind that it will be impossible to abandon the extra volume within one virtual machine.

So, in 15 minutes I significantly improved the characteristics of my resource. At the same time I did not have to do anything except the indication of parameters. I did not need to deal with the migration, all the files, parameters and settings of the system remained inviolable.

Let's see what the slidebar service has to offer.

Another interesting feature that slidebar.ru has is the ability to schedule a configuration change for a specific date and time:



Due to the fact that my testing was limited in time, I did not experience this opportunity, but it seems to me extremely useful. Knowing the temporary areas with low attendance and the load on your resource, you have the opportunity to reduce costs for this period by planning to change the characteristics in advance. And vice versa, you can predict in advance the influx of visitors and order at this moment a more advanced configuration of your virtual machine.

The slidebar.ru console allows you to track changes in the configuration of your system:



Slidebar.ru allows you to create multiple virtual machines. To create a new one, follow the link in the letter that comes to you when creating the first tariff in the system.



Creating a new car is almost the same as creating the first tariff. You also select system parameters. The exception is that here you need to select an operating system image from the list provided, or make a selection “without an operating system”:



For my own case, I chose the option with the pre-installed free Web Platform Installer, which allows you to deploy any of the many web projects in two clicks. By the way, it is worth noting that in this case you will receive another pre-installed SQL Server 2008 Express.

An additional optional choice may be an order of the administration service, more about the service here .

After selecting the parameters of the new virtual machine, you expect it to be created within 10-30 minutes. Here again, I stumbled upon the shortcoming already described: during the creation of a new virtual machine, the entire console is inaccessible. After creating the machine, you will receive a letter with a password for the RDP, IP address and links to instructions for remote access to the virtual machine.

In the slidebar.ru console there are several other possibilities for administering your machines. Consider them in order:



Ability to restart the server and configure the boot order: DVD, HDD.



The ability to set a ready-made image for a DVD virtual machine with the subsequent ability to boot the system from it. Variants of the images are shown in the picture.

From the console, you can configure DNS and mail:





Another interesting administration tool that slidebar offers is access to the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 console:



Login and password for access to this console are laid out in the slidebar console, so it will be difficult to forget them. After login you are greeted by the standard System Center interface. In it, you can start, pause and completely disconnect virtual machines, connect to them via RDP.



At this point I would like to complete the review of the cloud hosting service from slidebar.ru.

Personal impressions of the service remained positive: I liked the flexibility to configure and change the configuration of the tariff plan. Service prices are probably higher than offers of classic VDS hosting. But hourly rates and the ability to schedule configuration changes and resources used will reduce the gap slightly. The service itself is convenient, works well, offers a set of necessary tools for managing virtual machines.

It remains to add that anyone can test the service - when you start a server without payment, you are given 50 rubles and the opportunity to feel everything with your own hands.