Virtual and dedicated server hosting

Virtual private server (VPS) is a marketing term used by Internet hosting providers to refer to a virtual machine for use exclusively by a  customer. Getting virtual machine means getting ssh access to it so this class of hosting is a natural update from shared hosting. And it costs more.  Benchmark price for 2012 is $30 per month for 1G of RAM, 1.2 GHZ of CPU, 30 GB of storage and 300 GB bandwidth.

Due to competition ISPs are tremendously squeezed and that  creates difficulties with using virtual machines, even lightweight (jails) as they consume a lot of additional memory. Honest providers provide the memory size they guarantee in light-virtual partitions.  I thing that minimum is around 256M.  You need to run at least Apache, cron, and syslogd (sshd and ftp should be run via xnetd/ident to save memory). Without tuning Apache 2 processes consumes several hundreds Mbytes. See  SOLVING APACHE MEMORY BOTTLENECK

So Apache is your No.1 memory hog. If you rely on scripting you also need a copy of interpret in memory. That's also memory hungry applications. And if you use Java you are stuck -- you need much more memory.  Those factors explain that this is a  difficult segment of hosting business and those plans require high premiums. A server with 8 cores and 32G of memory is around $2.5K. Assuming 32 customers and 3 years amortization you need  approximately $4-$5 just for the amortization of server cost and electricity.  You need at least another  $7 a month  just to compensate for staff, electricity bills, rent and pay for bandwidth that means you need more then triple the number of users per server.  That means that to provide light-weight  virtualization with at least 512M of memory you need at least to double the costs of access in comparison with account with SSH access and that means that a reasonable range is around  $12-$30 a month.

Still there are many ISPs that provide such services but very few provide them cheaply enough to make sense to use them in comparison with connecting to cable company business internet service.  

• Westhost is one of the few ISPs which uses this approach and for advanced users this is probably the most flexible low cost solution of the market. They use Red Hat 4.
  • $7 per month for two years +$20 setup or $9 per quarter + $20 setup.  (Personal starter plan)
• GoDaddy provides 1GB memory for $25 a month with one year contract.
• Solaris zones hosting. Solaris zones are very efficient, but suffer from the problem of "Solaris is not Linux" and such hosing never take off. There used to be several Solaris-based offering were you can get your own zone. See Solaris Hosting.

  Astahost  provides free Web hosting on Solaris 10 (actually not completely free ;-)

   Gridzones.com used to provides reasonable pricing (they discontinued it):

  • 2GB Disk Space +10GB Bandwidth +64MB RAM  $10/mo
  • 5GB Disk Space +50GB Bandwidth +128MB RAM  $20/mo
  • 10GB Disk Space  +100GB Bandwidth +256MB RAM   $35/mo
  • 20GB Disk Space + 150GB Bandwidth +512MB RAM $60/mo
  • 50GB Disk Space + 400GB Bandwidth + 1GB RAM $100/mo

Wikipedia distinguishes VPS from "cloud server":

A VPS which is dynamic (that is, it can be changed at runtime) is often referred to as a cloud server. Key attributes for this are:

• Additional hardware resources can be added at runtime (CPU, RAM)
• Server can be moved to other hardware while the server is running (automatically according to load in some cases)

See Cloud computing for more information.

Server hosting

For sites with limited traffic but high processing requirements an attractive solution is to use cable company business Internet connection.

•   Optimum online business provides connection for $55 a month with guaranteed 5Mbps uplink.

• • Five Static IP addresses
  • Ports 25 and 80 available
  • Reverse DNS for your domain
  • Website and email server hosting
  • Internet speeds up to 30 Mbps down/5 Mbps up

• Phone company which provide fiber connections (for example Verizon FiOS) also provide this service. Without fiber bandwidth provided is very low.

As you see those three types of services differ in costs with approximately doubling it on each upgrade.

Some providers have reasonable prices for physical servers. For example basic server from GoDaddy  is $64 a month. Parameters resemble an old desktop that you can buy on EBay for $100 or less. Still this configuration allows 500 GB traffic and permits running pretty complex web sites with information stored in databases.

• OS: Linux CentOS
• CPU: Intel® Pentium 4 - 3.0 GHz
• RAM: 2 GB
• Storage: 2 x 120 GB hard drives
• Bandwidth: 500 GB per month

NEWS CONTENTS

• 20120302 : Virtual Dedicated Servers - Highly Configurable Plans Low Prices ( Virtual Dedicated Servers - Highly Configurable Plans Low Prices, Mar 02, 2012 )
• 20120302 : Linode - Xen VPS Hosting ( Linode - Xen VPS Hosting, Mar 02, 2012 )

Old News ;-)

[Mar 02, 2012] Virtual Dedicated Servers - Highly Configurable Plans Low Prices

Linux CentOS
• RAM: 1 GB
• Storage: 20 GB‡‡
• Bandwidth: 500 GB/mo

Choose Your Term: 1 mo: $29.99/mo, 6 mos: $29.99/mo, 12 mos: $26.99/mo, 24 mos: $23.99/mo

[Mar 02, 2012] Linode - Xen VPS Hosting

$30 Xen hosting 768M/30GB/300GB

Linode Galloway, NJ 609 593 7103

DreamHost Virtual Private Server, VPS Hosting, Unlimited Bandwidth, Unlimited Storage, Linux Vserver, Best Virtual Servers, Bes

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