Softpanorama

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
Home Switchboard Unix Administration Red Hat TCP/IP Networks Neoliberalism Toxic Managers
(slightly skeptical) Educational society promoting "Back to basics" movement against IT overcomplexity and  bastardization of classic Unix

Virtual and dedicated server hosting

News WEB Hosting Recommended Links Reliability considerations Bandwidth Mathematics Cheap Web hosting with SSH access Virtual and dedicated server hosting
          Humor Etc

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.  

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:

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.

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.


Top Visited
Switchboard
Latest
Past week
Past month

NEWS CONTENTS

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

Business Plesk VPS Optimized for Linux and Windows VPS Hosting

myhosting.com