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Virtual Server Hosting?
Eric Anderson asks: "I am shopping around for virtual hosting providers using something like UserModeLinux to allow me to have at least a virtual box to admin for myself. The current two companies that I am looking at are TekTonic and Linode. The price is right for these two companies, but I would like to know of any other suggested companies to look at, and opinions from people that have used these services. I am mostly buying this 'just for fun', but would also be interested in opinions on using these services in a business environment as well."
I'm using JVDS right now and am reasonably pleased. Occasional unexplained reboots (also explained security reboots) aside, their speeds and prices are good.
You should definitely take a look at webhostingtalk.com and read what others are saying about various VPSes. It's how I found JVDS, and a lot of newer (read: potentially flakier) startups offer incredible early-signup bonuses to forum members.
I just use their shared hosting setup, but tech support has been very responsive and the price is reasonable.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
http://www.bytemark-hosting.co.uk/
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I'm a linode.com customer as a matter of fact. One of the things that impressed me the most initially was the open TOS/AUP... Don't do something illegal and you're fine. The message boards on the site also showed a strong since of community much as many large open source projects have. There's even an irc channel on OFTC that the owner hangs out in.
I work for Liquid Web and we offer VDS and Dedicated systems. You can check out our plans at http://www.liquidweb.com.
All systems are based on Redhat 9 and include full root access. These systems are great for busier sites that need more cpu/memory than a shared hosting account.
Virtual servers (running on nice enterprise dells) with FreeBSD or some form of Linux (i'm biased I know)
johncompanies
Read about them here in the response to there ad on Kuro5hin
AD
Yes I know the first link redirects through kuro5hin that way they get any cash rev.
Oh really?
I'm hosting a few sites with them, on the cheapest plan, and it seems to be pretty good so far.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Since you provided links to both companies, watch their sites.. Which ever one is /.'ed first.. Go with the other one.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
We at PDXcolo.net use User-mode Linux to provide virtual colocated hosting. We offer a range of plans from 64MB of RAM through 512MB, with disk space starting at 4GB and bandwidth starting at 30GB/month. Plans start at $20/mo, with additional bandwidth at $1.50/GB and disk at $1/GB.
We unlike some other providers have a very open TOS/AUP allowing you to do anything you would like that is legal and that doesn't include SPAM
I'm in the market for a VPS or dedicated server, however, I need more disk space than what is usually offered. I'm not doing anything illegal. I just want to store my stuff offsite and have an offsite server available for (possibly) commercial use. The problem is that most of these VPS offerings only come with around 4GB of disk space, and $5.00/mo per additional gig. Disk space is cheap. Why so chincy on the disk space. Here's my ideal VPS deal:
60GB Disk space
athlon 2100 or P4 1.6
256M RAM
root SSH
1 IP address
40G/mo transfer
$49.00/mo
Anyone know of a similar offering?
Matthew
/. finds me to be 20% Troll, 80% Funny
If you want a cheaper ($5/month) virtual they offer cpanel which is close enough to what you want. Otherwise if your are thinking in the mid range 5-50$ host, personally I havnt seen alot of difference between the hosts... As for more then 50$/month I would actually suggest thinking going all dedicated for the bit more it would cost, and you can get pretty much anything you want.
The price is right ($19.95 for 64MB ram, 4GB disk space, 30GB transfer), and they have some nice features that cheap virtual servers often lack, such as the ability to 'power-cycle' your machine from their web control panel, in case you firewall yourself or similar.
They offer RedHat 9, as well as a minimal Debian install, which makes it easy to install just the packages you need. I've found them to be stable (143 days uptime), and the tech support is friendly and helpful.
you could just use freebsd's jail fraimwork, which doens't require any special usermode-fu crud to mess with. It is simply there in any FreeBSd system, and is chroot on steroids. I simply hate the use of the word "jail" on a linux system as linux doens't have a "jail" command, just a chroot, and a bunch of scripts that sit on top of that which trap() things to handlers. Furthermore, you could simply use the linux compatibility mode in freebsd, which as it turns out is faster than linux itself, and then jail that off. Each freebsd jail can have its' own IP address, its own filesystems, and whatever else any other system has.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Here
Check out BSDHosting.net. They use FreeBSD to provide jailed servers with full root access. I've been with them for more then a year now, and I've been blown away by the level of service. FAR superior to any other host that I've ever used. Their support is provided by serious geeks, and they will go out of their way to solve any problems you may have. Try calling them & asking them a few questions & you'll quickly see just how good these guys are.
I've used Linode for about 3 months, and it has worked great for me. No more DSL worries for my servers...
Freevo - Linux Multimedia Jukebox
In my experience as a customer, they live up to all the rave reviews about their support and premium bandwidth. It's easy to get spoiled when hardware, network and OS issues are virtually non-existent.
Hosting Metro for a while now and am very very happy with it. To the point where one of my friends has now signed up with them and another is about to as soon as his existing hosting contract finishes. These guys are great.
You do effectively run inside a virtual machine on a shared server. You can reboot your vhost any time you like from the control panels, you have shell and SFTP/SCP via SSH (obviously) and you get to choose what you want to install. You can install the GNU compiler tools to add your own applications or you can just go with the basics.
For a bit over $6/mnth you get 500megs of storage, 20gig of traffic, unlimited pop mail boxes, secure SMTP or POP3 before SMTP, MySQL or PostgreSQL as you like, Real Server, (mod_)PHP, (mod_)Perl 5, Apache, full control over your domains and subdomains, including the ability to create and modify all your own DNS records. You can point multiple domains there if you like.
There are a lot of other features there as well. I liked it enough I signed up for 2 years up front.
Support is great. Every email question I've ever sent them has been answered quickly and coherently. They work with you until the issue is resolved and don't just say 'its not happening for us' as I've experienced with others in the past. The guys aren't just textbook admins, they definitely seem to know what they're doing from my observations.
There are a lot more features I cannot begin to cover off here. But definitely check out their options. I'm sure you'll find something there you'll like.
A good choice might be Media Temple http://www.mediatemple.net. They offer plenty of goodies including MySQL, PHP, Flash, e-mail & aliasing, SSH login, and web-based control of all services, even page editing. Service has been reliable and quick with me. Check it out.
Don't be a Hem, find some new cheese.
We were with Eryxma for a while, using their virtual-private-server solution. It was nice for a while, though we didn't particularly care for the redhat installation (we're more slackware-oriented.) The speed varied sometimes drastically on their end; we got blacklisted at least once because someone at some time had been a big-time spammer somewhere on our IP block; and eventually the service was discontinued and we were put out in the cold because they simply couldn't deal with the amount of abuse on their VPS servers: hackers would grab a machine for a month to use it to DDOS, etc. (cheap, trouble-free way to have another ssh-able machine for nefarious ... things.) We were rather disappointed.
Don't be fooled: a VPS server is still a shared resource, and you'll still feel like you're living with noisy roommates who want to party all night.
Your mileage will hopefully vary (on the positive side,) but we're now much happier having our little box on a shelf at our ISP. The guy's nice, and the cost of having shelf space is actually less than what we were paying for a slice of a server off in another state.
I can go kick the thing when I'm mad at it. Good feeling.
I had rimuhosting.com's service for a few months. ($19.95, 64MB ram, 4GB disk, 30GB transfer).
Tech support was extremely responsive and helpful. They are available from late at night to afternoon (due to them seemingly located in Asia).
I ran Gentoo there, with a custom file system that I had setup at home. They were extremely helpful with this. UML's are great for most things -- except for compiling large programs.
If you want to run Gentoo Linux, I recommend you keep a duplicate of your system image at home, compile updates there, sync (unison/rsync) your packages directory, and emerge the packages. Of course, with binary-based distrobutions, this is not even a problem.
UMLs (on any provider) don't do well in applications where there is high disk utilization, otherwise I would highly reccommend using a commercial UML provider, and I would definitely recommend Rimuhosting as a good choice.
I think now they even have a page where you can view the status of, and reboot your UML machine without any assistance.
I am hosting one of my business sites on Linode.com (platostn.com).
It has been great to me. I love having a cheap web account that I can use emerge on (I am a Gentoo fan).
You get to pick your distro with Linode.
Also, I should say that I was using hub.org (freebsd setup). They had HORRIBLE reliability. There was too much "scheduled downtime" and way too much unscheduled downtime.
+1 linode
-Jackson
I work for Kyron.it and we offer UML dedicated servers. You can check out our plans at http://www.kyron.it which is only in italian for now... but english version is coming soon... we are giving out a 7 days trial. to check it out just send a email to (info at kyron dot it) and we'll be pleased to reply.
Linode.com's hosting services are very good. All UML hosting sites seem to be working through some teething problems as UML matures but Linode.com has been exemplary in doing everything possible to make UML work well on their systems and provide a solid hosting service. And I have found their offerings to be very reliable.
I have had a server there for nearly 6 months and have had one unscheduled reboot (due to the data center accidentally pulling a power plug which I assume is a very rare occurrance) and one scheduled reboot, to patch the host system kernel to secure it against a local root exploit. Aside from that, it has been 100% rock solid.
Linode.com's web site and host management are top notch too. The quality of the experience there really gives me confidence that Linode.com is a serious company which is going to be around providing great service for a very long time. When I looked into other virtual hosting services and saw web sites that looked like someone's little sister designed and implemented them, well they didn't give me much confidence in the company behind the site.
But Linode.com's excellent site, terms of service, and absolutely fantastic support have all made me a very happy customer indeed.
Highly recommended.
It's been a while since I've worked in an environment with so little RAM -- I don't know how/if things will run.
I see that the base plan for several of these includes 64 MB of RAM, but I see that at least RimuHosting states that Java servlets won't run with 64 MB of RAM, and more is recommended if using a MySQL database, I don't see anything yet on Linode's site about practical requirements. Does anyone have any experiences with what's necessary/practical. It seems that on the base plan, doubling the RAM from 64 MB to 128 MB also doubles the entire monthly cost. I'm just interested in using it as a hobbyist, and it wouldn't be high volume.
The tech support is really wonderful, the prices good, and it's run by a guy in a bank vault.
~Donald
~Donald / Just RTFM
pronethosting.net
When they mention the amount of disk space available, that may or may not include the virtual server itself. For example, looking at the linode page, the free space is the space left after the distribution is installed.
2. Uptime. Providers that claim 99.999% or whatever uptime are simply lying. It's probably the uptime of their network connection, but not individual server - I've had 3 different VPS's over the past two years (Verio, JVDS and Spry), and every one of them has at least once experienced a server problem where it was down for several hours.
3. Proprietary things. Whatch out for provider trying to lock you into their way of doing things. This may be a complicated xinetd/qmail setup that works well with their GUI panel (which you may not care about). Once you get used to their way of doing things, it would be hard to move to another provider who will probably have a different setup.
4. Watch out for the price. The vast majority of the hosting companies out there operate as Ponzi schemes - their main source of revenue is the setup and pre-payment fees, but the monthly fee alone isn't enough to sustain their costs. This makes them very eager to keep signing up new customers and not to work hard on retaining them.
5. Few hosting providers will upgrade their servers, it's just too much trouble. So if you got a FreeBSD 4.3 or RedHat 7.2, it will probably stay this way despite of what the sales guy may tell you.
6. You don't know what hardware they are using. It is trivial to patch the kernel so that dmesg always reports it's a 2.4GHz Xeon whereas it's really a PII.
7. Most hosting companies don't like to reveal their inner workings. You can most of the time guess whether it is a FreeBSD jail, a Linux UML (those usually list memory limits as part of the price), a Linux VServer (not a lot of those yet, but it's the future most likely) or a proprietary solution like the ViaVerio crap. What this means is that you don't know what security and reliability measures they have in place, don't ever assume anything.
8. AUP. A more restrictive AUP is a good thing IMHO. Providers with liberal AUP's are usually winking that they like to host porn. You probably don't want to be on the same machine with a porn site because they will eat all your CPU. Some providers prefer porn customers because they are easy to deal with, always pay on time and don't like to draw attention. Then other providers don't host porn because they consider it immoral.
9. Make sure that the IP's you get have not been previously spoiled by a spammer. You will find out sooner or later when your e-mails sent from the VPS bounce.
Well that's about all I can think of right now...
grisha.org
I personally used linode.com for around 2 months and I was very impressed with their service. The ability to "reinstall" any OS instantly and play around was a really cool feature with endless possabilities. Best of all, their control software _just_worked_.
You might also want to look into getting a dedicated server. I just picked up a P3 800 with 256MB of ram for $40/month. Most VDS supplies are charging that much for a lot less horsepower. There are plenty of deals out there to be had. Check out www.webhostingtalk.com.
Linode is ok as a UML provider. No DNS and no backups, but otherwise I have been happy with their service.
/usr tree to their most recently patched binaries.
One thing that would be nice is a hosting company that lets you NFS mount your redhat
Alternatively you could just use debian stable, but for my case I prefer the RH option for various reasons...
I use Bytemark Hosting, and I like them very much - prices start at 15/month for 64MB of RAM, 3Gb of Disk space and 1Gb of backup space - although given the current weakness of the dollar, I don't suppose it works out as well economically as the US ones do.
However, if you use them, be sure to put me as your referrer ('tim'), You can choose between either getting me 1.50 off my hosting fees per month, or they'll make a one-off donation of 7 for the Debian project - your choice.
I've always found service wit them to be fast and efficient - and they're a nice couple of guys.
All those prices are in Pounds Sterling, by the way - unfortunately Slashdot strips them all from posts...
www.olm.net provides higher performance packages; their sister company www.webaxxs.com provides less expensive packages. Not as cheap as the ones you posted in the original article, but they're solid companies with a reasonable number of employees and 24/7 phone support, not some dude sitting in an IRC chat room who may provide good support but isn't going to be around forever.
I'm from TekTonic and was just browsing the logs and noticed all the links from SlashDot (imagine my surprise!). The traffic hasn't put a dent in the server :)
I'm a bit disheartened that none of our users seem to read SlashDot, oh well..
P.S.: Our web server is running under UML with 256MB of RAM allocated to it.
I've only had an account with them for a few weeks, but so far, VPSCenter.com has been great; $19.95 for 2GB and 25GB xfer. They use H-Sphere as their control panel software. (I didn't know about linode though.)
Not to toot my own horn but : .
Pigs Can Fly Computing offers low cost Virtual private servers based on UML with full root access starting at $5/month