Reality of budget VPS services
justkez.com
Reality of budget VPS services
1–10 of 70 posts
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#2The ultimate budget VPS is an Amazon instance. You can be relatively sure that it is not going to go under. You can run one free micro instance (http://aws.amazon.com/free/). You can scale as needed easily, both in terms of file system and CPU by simply rebooting your EBS to another instance type. You can have reliable, incremental snapshots. And finally, you have a great ecosystem of vendors providing AMIs for nearly all OS versions and popular web apps (like my own, http://bitnami.org/stacks)
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#3Anyone care to follow this up with a brief article on the more expensive VPS providers? (such as A Small Orange) Are those of us on Linode, Rackspace Cloud, and Slicehost missing out at all?
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#4The ultimate budget VPS is an Amazon instance. You can be relatively sure that it is not going to go under. You can run one free micro instance ( http://aws.amazon.com/free/ ). You can scale as needed easily, both in terms of file system and CPU by simply rebooting your EBS to another instance type. You can have reliable, incremental snapshots. And finally, you have a great ecosystem of vendors providing AMIs for nea…
Amazon isn't really budget. The free tier is nice, and the tiny instances are priced ok, but beyond that they're quite expensive for a VPs. The nice thing with AWS is the scaling and the supporting infrastructure, but you do pay for that compared to more basic VPS offerings.
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#5Good article. I disagree with a few remarks.
While there is certainly a huge amount of fanboyism surrounding buyvm, most of it comes from the stock scarcity.
I personally run 3 vps' with them (first three plans) and the performance has always been far more than acceptable. I run an adult tube site that has exploded in popularity due to a fun domain name and being one of the first to post a leaked sex tape for a latin american actress. It can reach around 200 to 300 thousand uniques per month. Never had a load issue.
Of course, your mileage may vary. I could have ended up in a lousy node. Many people outright abuse their service for portscanning, spam sending and what not. Also, many people won't do this intentionally; they get infected through ancient wordpress installations.
My experience has been worse with Burst. Their IO is acceptable but their network is dismal. Ping times from aroud the world tend to confirm this.
Notes to take home:
ALWAYS make backups! If a provider goes deadool on you all of the sudden, you should always have fresh backups in a remote site. Honestly, there's no excuse these days. You can always get your money back if you file a dispute on Paypal. I wasn't affected by the collossal Hostrail crash, but many people were.
Lastly, always choose Xen over Openvz.
Edit: Forgot to add something very important: Avoid Hurricane Electric (he.net) like the plague. They are an absolute fuck up of a datacenter.
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#6The ultimate budget VPS is an Amazon instance. You can be relatively sure that it is not going to go under. You can run one free micro instance ( http://aws.amazon.com/free/ ). You can scale as needed easily, both in terms of file system and CPU by simply rebooting your EBS to another instance type. You can have reliable, incremental snapshots. And finally, you have a great ecosystem of vendors providing AMIs for nea…
Don't forget you also have to pay something like $0.10 for 1GB of outgoing traffic.
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#7The ultimate budget VPS is an Amazon instance. You can be relatively sure that it is not going to go under. You can run one free micro instance ( http://aws.amazon.com/free/ ). You can scale as needed easily, both in terms of file system and CPU by simply rebooting your EBS to another instance type. You can have reliable, incremental snapshots. And finally, you have a great ecosystem of vendors providing AMIs for nea…
Don't forget you also have to pay something like $0.10 for 1GB of outgoing traffic.
You still get 15GB for free in the free tier, which should be ok for many use cases
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#8Anyone care to follow this up with a brief article on the more expensive VPS providers? (such as A Small Orange) Are those of us on Linode, Rackspace Cloud, and Slicehost missing out at all?
Just an FYI to those looking into Slicehost, it's now part of Rackspace Cloud Servers and doesn't sell their own VPS.
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#9The ultimate budget VPS is an Amazon instance. You can be relatively sure that it is not going to go under. You can run one free micro instance ( http://aws.amazon.com/free/ ). You can scale as needed easily, both in terms of file system and CPU by simply rebooting your EBS to another instance type. You can have reliable, incremental snapshots. And finally, you have a great ecosystem of vendors providing AMIs for nea…
Amazon isn't really budget. The free tier is nice, and the tiny instances are priced ok, but beyond that they're quite expensive for a VPs. The nice thing with AWS is the scaling and the supporting infrastructure, but you do pay for that compared to more basic VPS offerings.
Well, if we are talking about bigger instances, then it is not "budget VPS" anymore either :) Still, depending on your needs (and specially if you combine with reserved instances, which can drive the cost 50%) it can be quite cost-effective
Re: Reality of budget VPS services
#10The ultimate budget VPS is an Amazon instance. You can be relatively sure that it is not going to go under. You can run one free micro instance ( http://aws.amazon.com/free/ ). You can scale as needed easily, both in terms of file system and CPU by simply rebooting your EBS to another instance type. You can have reliable, incremental snapshots. And finally, you have a great ecosystem of vendors providing AMIs for nea…
Don't forget you also have to pay something like $0.10 for 1GB of outgoing traffic.
Yeah, but most people pushing more than a few tens of GB/month probably don't really need to save a few dollars over e.g. Linode.
Budget VPSs are the modern "shell account", their primary users are a combination of learners, early-stage developers, small-scale control-freaks, people who don't know any better, and of course the odd criminal enterprise.
Some of these will never grow much, the ones that do should normally have the cash for better accommodations and/or more EC2 bandwidth, and the criminals I don't really care about.