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Reality of budget VPS services

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Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#21

Post by kd1221 »

dangrossman wrote: post #14
kd1221 wrote: post #11

Can anyone else comment on experiences with Linode (and equivalent alternatives)? I'm considering moving a group of servers off expensive dedicated hosting ($400/server) to a VPS service. I've looked at Amazon EC2 but they don't seem to have a sweet spot for my needs.

Are you sure that's the right move to make? Do you no longer need the resources of even a single dedicated server? At even 2-4GB RAM requirement, you would not be saving money buying a VPS over renting a server. A Linode 4096, where you're sharing CPU and disk IO with all the other users on the physical server, is $159.95/mo. For $159/mo you could rent a Xeon 3230 quad core, 4GB RAM, 2x250GB HD server from Softlayer…

We deliver video content. We have a CDN that properly encodes and serves our content. All I need is to handle the HTTP requests for the "directory" of videos. A shared environment would probably be fine. All the 4GB servers seem to have most of their RAM dedicated to caching when I check what free -m gives me. Our physical disk space requirements are low. As I shift more of our content to the CDN, our bandwidth needs are decreasing as well (from 12TB/mo to 7TB/mo since I started optimizing).

I inherited this setup, so to me it looks like the servers are overpowered. Also, the customer service is terrible, which is the primary reason for wanting to leave them. I want a service where I can easily requisition and kit out new servers quickly in an "a la carte" fashion.

I have 3 servers running on EC2 already using micro instances. They're mostly to handle minor services (email list subscription/requeuing for all the web properties, payment processing postback handling, etc.) They've been up for nearly a year without any problem.

I've been leaning toward EC2, but I wanted to hear what else is out there.

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#22

Post by SageRaven »

sjs wrote: post #3

Anyone 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?

I ran with RootBSD.net for a year or so, and I thought they were awesome. Sharp guys and good support. I even migrated a client's site over to them, saving my client a bundle over unmanaged bare-metal hosting and earning myself some credit for the referral. At the time, I think $20/month was their smallest package, though they may have a $10/month now.

I've had a few Linux VPSs under $3/month (posted specials on lowendbox.com). I agree with the article: don't expect the world for $2/month, back up anything of value frequently, and enjoy the too-good-to-be-true ride while it lasts. The performance is hit-or-miss, you'll find your VPS rebooted more often than you'd like, but for dinking around with an idea, they're perfect.

I'd even be comfortable using these cheap services for backup mail relays or DNS servers. Just don't forget the backups.

Most seem to support PayPal subscription payments, which makes them easy to set up and forget.

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#24

Post by sathyabhat »

pieter wrote: post #4
ridruejo wrote: post #2

The 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.

Yeah, and not to forget, the free tier offer expires in November

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#25

Post by jackowayed »

I've actually had a pretty good luck with my $5 (base price $6) VPS I found on lowendbox. It has 512MB of RAM

Part of it is expectations. I know I'm not paying anything for this box, so I don't expect 100.0% uptime and the ability to run a high traffic service of which I really care about the availability.

I just need a place that can run cron scripts, regardless of whether my computer is on/online. And run screen so that it can download something that takes a few hours. And I do have a webserver on there, host some very unimportant things on there (like static versions of showoff slides from presentations I've given ... I'm guessing they get hit by humans once a month, though I guess I could check the logs), and occasionally I'll scp a big file into the web directory for someone to download.

The uptime isn't great. Pingdom sends me emails about it being down basically every month, but usually it's like 30 minutes. Uptime hovers right around the 99.9% that they guarantee. Sometimes pingdom monthly reports say it's a little less. I haven't bothered to try to invoke the SLA to get my month's $5 back, or whatever. For what I use it for, it works just fine.

If I were running a real website that I was invested in having people visit, I'd go for Linode/Slicehost/AWS/etc for sure. But this is the cheapest way to fullfil my needs for this box.

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#26

Post by citricsquid »

VPS hosting is the new shared hosting; so many applications and platforms exist that it's easy for anyone to get started operating a VPS hosting company. I could rent a dedicated server now for $200, install SolusVM and be a fully functional VPS host within a couple of hours and the majority of "budget" vps hosts are these. They don't have the funds to build a real business (like Linode), they just install some widely used software and off they go. They are limited by the software they use (whereas a company like Linode is limited by its engineers) so when things start to go wrong their response is to penalise the customers not make the engineers work harder and achieve more.

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#27

Post by rkalla »

nckbz wrote: post #17
Hrundi wrote: post #5

Good 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…

I agree. I wouldn't completely write off those smaller servers and I think it serves as a very good entry point for learning Linux and server administration. If you're just starting out with Node or Rails its great. I would recommend someone a Low End Box over a free Amazon Micro Instance any day, just because the CPU they limit you at is just bad. You start Apache or Nginx on those things or do a big yum install/apt…

I agree with you, but would point out that CmdrTaco hosts his new site (that got front page on HN a few times) on a Micro on AWS.

He does a serious amount of caching (obviously) and offloaded all assets to S3, but it looks like it is still possible.

FWIW, I am still skeptical given the amount of complaints you see about the Micros on the EC2 forums regularly. He could have just gotten lucky I suppose (as far as his neighbors on the host).

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#28

Post by rkalla »

Hrundi wrote: post #5

Good 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…

Appreciate the heads up on Burst's network. I noticed their bandwidth for big chunks on dedicated machines is ridiculously cheap (40TB for like $100 [1]) but if the routes are inconsistent that doesn't help me a whole lot.

Also noticed while speed-testing the different nodes the CA connection (to Tucson, AZ) is phenomenally fast, but to PA about half the speed and to EU it drops quite a bit again.

When I do the speed tests for Linode using similar locations they all perform fairly well, same goes for AWS.

[1] http://burst.net/servers-la.shtml

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#29

Post by rkalla »

pieter wrote: post #4
ridruejo wrote: post #2

The 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.

Just a reminder to everyone that prices out the flat On-Demand rates of Amazon, a 3-year reserved instance price is 48% cheaper than OnDemand.

So if you know what your deployment needs are, take the On-Demand price and roughly divide it in half for your real cost-per-month (with a majority paid up front).

If you don't know what kind of deployment you need, then yes, running everything on-demand can be pricey compared to alternatives.

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#30

Post by ntoshev »

sathyabhat wrote: post #24
pieter wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, and not to forget, the free tier offer expires in November

I believe it expires an year after you started using it. Do you have a reference saying it won't be available for anyone after November 2011?
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