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Reality of budget VPS services

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Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#31

Post by kd1221 »

Hrundi wrote: post #16
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.

I'm enjoying it. No downtime since I started with them. I'm at the Atlanta datacenter, with the low plan (20 usd or something). root@linode:~# uptime 13:50:03 up 118 days, 5:10, 1 user, load average: 0.09, 0.10, 0.13 I'm very happy with them, but I cannot confirm with a 100% certainty that the experience will be the same for you. May I ask what you are running in those servers? Are your services bound to CPU, bandwid…

Currently they're bandwidth bound, but I'm dissolving that. In the next year I imagine that it'll move to being more memory bound. Then that will turn into being bound by I/O, but that can be solved with memory and more clever caching schemes. CPU should never be an issue unless I move the video encoding back in house, but I don't see that happening soon, and I would separate that into a its own server farm.

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#32

Post by rkalla »

Does anyone have a good recommendation for a host with a nicely spread out global presence?

I am aware of the big players (AWS, Linode, Softlayer, RimuHosting) but they all seem to have shortcomings that don't make anyone particularly ideal and I'd love to avoid a combination of all if I could.

I am looking to minimize network latency and maximize disk space with memory and CPU being secondary concerns. More or less think CDN edge location requirements.

For example:

  AWS - Speed to China and AUS/NZ from the Singapore region 
  is subpar. Speed to Japan from Singapore is much worse 
  compared to the Tokyo region directly. Managing many  
  images in many regions across the AWS stack can be time 
  consuming.

  Linode - Their CA datacenter (hosted by HE) has a terrible 
  reputation and uptime. I love that they normalize their 
  bandwidth pricing across all data centers though. Disk 
  space is an issue for us (media distribution).

  Softlayer - Looks solid, nothing for the AUS crowd or 
  Japan/Chinese users.

  Voxel - Not cheap, again nothing for AUS/NZ crowd.

  RimuHosting - Doesn't buy enough in EU/AUS to offer budget 
  bandwidth pricing, the London bandwidth is horrifically   
  expensive.

  JoyentCloud - Single data center at this time.
These are all nit-picks, each of these services are great and I've hosted with them at different times and been very happy (other services like SliceHost and VPS.NET have been bad/very-bad - respectively) but I am curious if I am missing a single host that could meet most of these requirements that I just don't know about yet?

For example, I had never heard of BurstNET or BHost or A Small Orange until reading this thread... so I'm hoping I might be missing some fantastic host somewhere with medium/large VPSs or small/medium dedicated solutions.

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#33

Post by nckbz »

rkalla wrote: post #27
nckbz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Yeah, I'd believe it. In full disclosure I run my personal blog off an Amazon Micro instance. Its a Fedora instance running passenger, nginx, and rails. In production mode with assets cached it absolutely serves requests at a decent speed. Absolutely painful to run an integration test or development mode though. Probably just my fault for using Fedora and not the default "Amazon Linux". However, I setup a client with a small instance running RedHat and never experienced any latency.

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#35

Post by ridruejo »

rkalla wrote: post #29
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.

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…

In addition to reserved instances, there are a couple of other ways you can achieve cost-savings for common situations. If you need to run background tasks (like video encoding, reports, etc) you can try running spot instances at a fraction of the cost of an on-demand instance. You run the risk that the instance is terminated, but you can always spawn a new one without affecting the main service, since basically you do not care if the task finishes a couple of minutes later. Another one is scaling up and down base on demand. If you run, say, a SugarCRM instance for your sales team, you can have it run in a Large instance during the week, 9-5pm, when it is going to be in full use by multiple people. Then, the rest of the time you can scale down to a small or micro instance. It is still going to be available, but at a smaller cost.

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#36

Post by malbs »

wx77 wrote: post #12
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?

Well as someone who has used quite a few VPS servers over the years from a plethora of providers I must say at this point in time Linode is probably the best bang for your buck with all the utilities and uptime it provides. The only thing about Linode is you must not order from the fremont datacenter and you have to subscribe to the status updates to realize what's going on. The only thing that a more expensive provi…

+1 to linode - in the past I opted for cheap options, and suffered, but after experiencing the management tools and infrastructure linode has in place, I'll stick with them at the more premium price.

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#37

Post by Hrundi »

rkalla wrote: post #28
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…

Hello rkalla,

I must clarify that my experience was related to their regular VPS offerings.

They do offer a premium VPS (notice how its product descriptions mention "1GBPS port" and "Less than 50% load of budget VPS nodes", in contrast to just "XXX GB/MONTH" for the regular).

I didn't try their dedicated servers. They may have fatter pipes. I just had very poor latency, consistent with all their locations, being Florida the most stable for me.

If you do any sort of data crunching, you can get a good value for your buck. Certainly cheaper than AWS.

For my taste, Linode's latency has been pleasantly consistent. 95% of the time, it equals 142ms from Atlanta to South America (so far, the best I've found). I just wish they had a smaller offering.

I'll go back to watching the presidential election, have a nice day!

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#38

Post by msh »

I have been using a 15$ vps from www.tektonic.net since 2004 and have been happy. I run a few personal sites and sometimes test code. They have been down 1 to 2 times a year which IMHO is fine for the price.

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#39

Post by count »

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…

Is he.net bad for just a colo'd rack, rather than VPSs?

Re: Reality of budget VPS services

#40

Post by dotBen »

rkalla wrote: post #32

Does anyone have a good recommendation for a host with a nicely spread out global presence? I am aware of the big players (AWS, Linode, Softlayer, RimuHosting) but they all seem to have shortcomings that don't make anyone particularly ideal and I'd love to avoid a combination of all if I could. I am looking to minimize network latency and maximize disk space with memory and CPU being secondary concerns. More or less…

Well to be clear, this post is examining Budget VPS's (aka "Low End Boxes"), ie You can use LEB's to get a good geo-spread if you need to do network topography examination, ping/traceroute/looking-glass from multiple nodes, etc.

If you are hosting media, not sure a LEB is the right choice for you.

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