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Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

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Re: Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

#12

Post by shaddi »

robotrout wrote: post #6
dryicerx wrote: post #3

Linode for general stuff. Amazon EC2 when I need a sudden burst of computational power.

Can you give an example of an actual case when you needed this sudden burst of computational power? I'm curious what sorts of things people are actually using it for in real life. (instead of "well, you COULD use it for ....")

I use high-capacity EC2 for problem sets in my bioalgorithms class. Basically whenever something's taking too long for my liking on whatever machine I'm running it on, I'll throw it up on a beefy EC2 instance and let it run there.

Re: Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

#13

Post by davidw »

jaddison wrote: post #2

For VPS: I'm using Slicehost currently, but have seen some good reviews of Linode. I think I'll likely give them a spin in the new year instead of Slicehost - you get a bit more for your money, and can customize more from what I understand. I believe they both have quite good support from both community and company perspectives. Lots of good articles and tutorials. Some comparison links: recent: http://journal.uggeda…

Thanks! The second comparison link is mine, which focuses a bit more on memory, as opposed to performance. And that's where Linode and their 32 bit systems win over Slicehost and their 64 bit systems. The latter chews up a lot more memory for something like Rails, so even if Slicehost only looks slighty more expensive, they end up being significantly more expensive. Which is unfortunate, because they seem like good people doing good work, and who treat their customers pretty well. However, Linode are that way too, and are also cheaper, so it's just not that difficult a choice at this point in time.

Re: Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

#14

Post by EGF »

I want to caveat my choice by saying that I have been through the following options before settling on my latest and honestly greatest choice by far:

I used and cancelled; lunarpages, dreamhost, mediatemple, globat

I switched to HostGator Alluminum reseller program (but do not actually resell the space)

I house each project in its own cPanel so that I can modularize each project and have any join or access it if necessary. Helps me track bandwidth and start from scratch fast on new things. It also affords an infrastructure I have not seen elsewhere.

I support this decision after using Pingdom on my sites at MT then hostgator and seeing large latency differences. I feel it was a good sample set as the sites were identical (PHP\MySQL) on both services.

However that being said I am going to be using Engineyard for the first time now that I have a RoR project.

My older php\SQL sites will remain however on hostgator.

Re: Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

#16

Post by Ixiaus »

+1 for Webfaction.

You get a shell, a gazillion different application types (CGI, Rails, PHP, Django, custom). You can compile Apache and/or MySQL and configure a custom port for it.

Their support is responsive. Service has competitive pricing. I've been with them for three years and haven't experience any outages.

Re: Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

#20

Post by whalesalad »

SchoolRack(.com) is built on a small cluster of 4 Slicehost servers. I know this isn't a small/personal project but it's given me a lot of experience with them. Of course, they're a great web host and definitely mean it when they say they're built for developers.

But... Linode is (so far) better. You get everything you get at Slicehost, for a little bit cheaper, with a more useful admin panel. Statistics are built in for CPU and Bandwidth. However, the panel is a bit more complex than the average park rangers jeep, so if you're a newbie you might wanna stick with Slicehost.

I say so far because I've only been a customer for about 3 months now. whalesalad.com (my personal site) runs on a small $19 Linode (which gives you 360mb of ram vs 256 on Slice, 16GB of storage vs 10, and double the bandwidth). At the moment I'm powering my aforementioned blog, a couple of WordPress sites, and another Django site. Nginx + FastCGI for both the Python and PHP side of things. It's holding up like an absolute champ.

Linode also lets you play around with other distros easier. You can basically cut up your allotted HD space and boot whatever you want. You can cut it in half and play with Fedora/Debian, or whatever you choose really. For experimentation, that's good.

This is a great performance breakdown/comparison of the popular VPS' out there - http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

Finally, if you choose Linode, help a guy out with this referrer link :D - http://j.mp/linodesalad

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