Cloud computing provider GoGrid has announced that they have reached the 1,000 paying customers milestone. GoGrid launched a public-beta in March 2008, and has been growing rapidly since then with their on-demand solution. GoGrid, a division of Servepath, is attempting to make their mark on the cloud computing world against some major competition, namely Amazon’s EC2, Mosso, Linode, RightScale, and Joyent.
GoGrid claims that it is a cheaper and easier alternative to EC2. While EC2 charges 10 cents per gigabyte-hour, GoGrid is 8 cents per gigabyte-hour. It also has a GUI-based control panel, simplifying the process of setting up your network of machines with load balancers, web servers and database servers in either Linux flavors or Windows. GoGrid claim that they have yet to experience a single minute of system-wide outage, and claim that they are well-prepared to handle accelerating demand (as their parent company is a large-scale managed hosting provider).
We setup a quick network on GoGrid consisting of a load balancer, two web servers running Linux and a larger database server running Linux and MySQL. In all, it took a few minutes and the instances were live within 15-20 minutes. We were then able to login and configure the virtual hosts and have a simple blog running within another 10-15 minutes – so the control panel and feedback interface has a definite advantage.
