Decent VPS providers?

[inniAccounts]

I've used Rapid Switch before - they offer VPS for as little as £7.95/m (384MB, but only 15GB), choice of distros.

I've also used Media Temple. For non critical apps the GS is good value - 100GB of storage for for $20/m. VPS from these guys are $50/m list for 512MB/20GB. If it's just for personal projects I can recommend GS (not reliable enough for serious apps). If you google you should find plenty of voucher codes to get this cost down.

[NickFitz]

I did take a quick look but I don't fully understand the system yet. It seemed that paying for a server with them was not that cheap. At $.012/hr that's $86.40/month which is considerably more than other VPS... though you do seem to get a lot more RAM/HD space if I am reading it right.

EBS I haven't looked at yet. My main question with AWS is does it make any difference that it's all in this 'cloud' thing? Or are my instances just the same as using any other VPS, where I can remote desktop in and treat it like a real PC?

I wouldn't know about the Windows instance charges as I'm only running Linux instances. Typical cost for December, covering one small instance running constantly with a fixed external IP address and 20GB EBS was around $64 ex VAT. If you're willing to pay for a year up front, reserved instances make things quite a bit cheaper, and even more so if you commit to three years.

From what I remember of the documentation for Windows instances you do indeed go in via Remote Desktop.

The fact that it's in "the cloud" offers advantages when it comes to clustering, scaling up and down to meet demand, failover, DB mirroring, backup to S3, and so forth. With the new(ish) load balancing and autoscaling facilities it's comparatively easy to get a resilient server farm set up, though this is obviously overkill if you only want one server. The monitoring facilities from CloudWatch are useful if you need to keep an eye on performance and demand on your application, and Virtual Private Cloud allows you to integrate EC2-based servers with existing infrastructure using VPN.

If you just want a single server and don't want to have to configure and manage loads of stuff yourself, though, it's probably better to go with a managed hosting provider.

[CalmEddie]

Any recommendations? Ones that won't charge a massive amount for backup, and provide decent disk-space are preferred. It's amazing how little space they seem to offer - many offer only $10Gb with 512Mb Ram... disk space is so cheap I just don't see why they charge a premium. I expected to see 100Gb as a minimum, picturing a single PC with a 1TB drive running 10 VPS.

If I want to host SVN and stuff, space will soon fill up I reckon.

I use bluehost.com for web hosting. Been using them for over 18 months now with only one outage on the box I share. They are very cheap at $6.95 a month and for that you get unlimited storage and bandwidth, server backups are performed in the price. But they state that their servers are not designed to replace off-site backup storage (but I guess that's not what you need).

I don't use them for SVN, but a few people have:
http://www.bluehostreview.org/blueho...ersion-and-cvs

[voodooflux]

Can highly recommend Register1 - I have a dedicated box with them, and their customer support is brilliant. They can also be flexible on spec and pricing from my experience.

[d000hg]

You could consider Amazon EC2. Using Elastic Block Store for the disky side of things you pay $0.10/GB/month plus $0.10/million IO requests, and it's trivial to back things up to Amazon S3 snapshots of your running volumes.

I did take a quick look but I don't fully understand the system yet. It seemed that paying for a server with them was not that cheap. At $.012/hr that's $86.40/month which is considerably more than other VPS... though you do seem to get a lot more RAM/HD space if I am reading it right.

EBS I haven't looked at yet. My main question with AWS is does it make any difference that it's all in this 'cloud' thing? Or are my instances just the same as using any other VPS, where I can remote desktop in and treat it like a real PC?

[NickFitz]

You could consider Amazon EC2. Using Elastic Block Store for the disky side of things you pay $0.10/GB/month plus $0.10/million IO requests, and it's trivial to back things up to Amazon S3 snapshots of your running volumes.

[AtW]

Well 100 is a lot, but the point I was making is disks are so cheap, I can't see why the default amount offered is so small. Why do I pay $10-20/month extra for 10Gb more, when the hard disk is one of the cheapest bits of a PC?

HDDs are the most unreliable bits of PC, worse than PSUs.

Hoster needs to back up the disk, but more importantly they don't (generally) want the kind of customers who want a lot of disk space: the people who do that are usually people who have very heavy bandwidth requirements, often illegal tulip.

Why do you need so much space for SVN anyway? If you have got so much valuable stuff then you should not host with cheap hosters.

We are moving to nearly complete dedicated hosting now - rented whole rack for SKA, 2nd one at that...

[d000hg]

Well 100 is a lot, but the point I was making is disks are so cheap, I can't see why the default amount offered is so small. Why do I pay $10-20/month extra for 10Gb more, when the hard disk is one of the cheapest bits of a PC?

[AtW]

Try www.eukhost.com - we started using them for SKA about a year ago. They ain't that cheap but they are good: if you want too cheap go for shared hosting and you will get the tulip that comes with it.

We are switching now to our own dedicated servers though.

Your high storage requirement is a bit odd - 100 GB is a pretty large amount of disk size (we use many terabytes but that's on our own dedicated servers) that they'd need to back up, it's unlikely you'll find decent place (that does not over subscribe servers) that will offer you that much.

[d000hg]

Any recommendations? Ones that won't charge a massive amount for backup, and provide decent disk-space are preferred. It's amazing how little space they seem to offer - many offer only $10Gb with 512Mb Ram... disk space is so cheap I just don't see why they charge a premium. I expected to see 100Gb as a minimum, picturing a single PC with a 1TB drive running 10 VPS.

If I want to host SVN and stuff, space will soon fill up I reckon.