Monday, February 1, 2010

Is there a cloud for my software?

Our new SAAS product Hyperconversion is going into beta soon. It helps people to Create, Manage and Host Landing pages. We've been at it for a while now and its a beautiful implementation of the point-and-click school of thought.

I have an interesting dilemma. Was wondering if someone reading this can give me an idea or two.

The system is developed in ROR and designed with a share-nothing architecture. Each client gets his own snapshot of the full application. We designed it this way so that we could run thousands of applications on Amazon AWS or Rackspace cloud.

Here is the problem: Amazon does not update the image of a running virtual machine. So if the image crashes, we lose everything. When we figured this out, we found RackspaceCloud.com which is a lot cheaper and solves the running image problem. But the problem with rackspace is that they don't have elastic IPs. If a server image goes down, and you end up creating a new one, you get a randomly assigned IP address. There is no way to get a block of IPs.

We need persistent IPs because our system depends on DNS to client's domain names to the correct landing pages.

Does anyone out there know of a cloud solution which leases IP blocks and also saves the running images?

Will appreciate your thoughts. We cannot run dedicated servers. It has to be a cloud based solution.

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