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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'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.
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?
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.
I'll second that. Bytemark have been extremely helpful, reliable and competant. They are a tiny bit more expensive than some of the alternatives, but they offer secondary services such as domain-hosting nameservers and backup-MX hosting for free.
I also really like having my server sitting at GMT. It makes working out time differences really easy :)
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.
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.
Pricing UML servers is a strange "artform". In your case, wanting 60G of disk pushes you up into the land of dedicated servers at $79 to $125 per month. This is probably a lot more processing power than you need.
The best offer that we would have for you is:
- 15 Gig disk
- 256Meg RAM (128 Meg core and 128 Meg swap running out of tmpfs space)
- 40G/month of transfer
- $50/month pre-pay 1yr + $0 setup or
- $60/month billed quarterly + $100 setup
Our servers are available either located in Philadelphia with internet connectivity on Level-3, Verio, or AT&T (your choice), or in Los Angeles with internet connectivity BGP'd between Level-3, Yipes, and Williams. The underlying servers are AMD Athlon XP2200's with 1Gig of ram, Raid-1 80Gig drives, and 100Mbit switched connectivity that is not bandwidth limited. In general, bursting to a couple of megabits from individual connections is pretty easy.Our servers are designed to not be overcommitted. We basically cut a server up into 20 increments. Each increment gets 32 Meg of ram and 32 Meg of swap. The swap is run out of a "tmpfs" mount on the underlying host, so it is usually ram as well. Running this way, the only users that have ever complained about performance were running applications that ran their virtuals out of RAM, not the underlying host.
The servers themselves have an SSH based console that lets you see processes, kill your virtual, restart your virtual, and "become" the virtuals console upon a reboot. This lets you fix filesystem errors and watch bootup, etc.
We have options for local and off-site backups, multi-patch connectivity for green-screen applications, additional IP addresses, including IP addresses on multiple backbones, local and remote replicated file systems, and a bunch of other stuff.
In about 2 weeks, we are reworking our website with new UML offerings that are more flexible, allowing users to buy RAM and disk seperately, configure server pairs as hot-backup systems, buy dedicated physical systems with UML pre-configured so you can sell your own UML "sub hosts", and more. Of particular interest to a lot of users will be user-manageable external firewalls, and managed security services so that you don't need to worry about patches, etc.
Our website is: http://mirroredsolutions.com
You can call our offices (yes there are real humans here) at (610) 237-2000 or (800) 470-2756. Our AUP is pretty simple, don't spam and we are happy. Depending on which of our networks you want to be on, IRC servers are allowable, but check with us first so that we are sure they will work for you.
One last point for people considering getting into the UML hosting business. There is an unbelievable amount of fraud out there. We get >75% bogus orders. There are orders with real credit card numbers with real names and phone numbers presumably coming from Russian or Far East organized crime. We have setup our system to "require" 100% phone authorization before we turn a server on.
Doug Dumitru
EasyCo LLC
610 237-2000
doug@easyco.com (I get so much spam, a little more can't hurt)
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
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
Plus they've got IPv6 support already, if you're looking to the future.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.