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Ask Slashdot: Service-Heavy FOSS Hosting?
An anonymous reader writes "For many of us our hosting providers are a way to hone our skills as well as run a business. Which provider out there gives the best bang for the buck for a FOSS developer? Virtually everybody provides Perl, PHP, Ruby, MySQL / MariaDB etc. but where can one get easy and cheap access to a stuff like NodeJS and Big Data? Companies such as Pair Networks are great but not quite on the mark with any of their service offerings for somebody looking to test out real world scenarios with these technologies from a hosted stance. Obviously hosting from home is always an option but that has the penalty of administration, backup, DR planning, bigger security footprint etc. and for those of us whose time is balanced between making money and friends / family time that's not very appealing."
NodeJS is pretty efficient. If you are just looking to try it, download the source from github and "./configure; make install;" that on an ubuntu server VM.
Or, if your lazy:
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs
Try out Red Hat's Openshift, it has node.js and a bunch of other applications. Best part is it's free, so if you don't like it no reason to scale it up and pay.
http://www.openshift.com/
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
Going to be flamed for it, but Windows Azure is probably your best bet. Supports all of that, and a ton more, and is cheap.
You can do it all with AWS, too, but in my experience Azure tends to take less time to manage, and leave more time for developing. YMMV.
VPSs have gotten so cheap and full-featured, I don't know why anyone who has IT knowledge would host any more.
I am legacy hosting on Dreamhost for $10 a month. My MySQL instance has become so slow, I have removed it from my Nagios check. Their old in-house mail web interface is slow as anything (new accounts go to Google Mail, they may have a migration option). Server load can exceed 100, server load is usually many multiples of the number of processors. Dreamhost was considered one of the good web service providers.
Meanwhile for $16 plus bandwidth I get my own VPS on Rackspace, 20 gigs disk space, 512MB RAM, I can install whatever I want. Linode - 1024MB RAM, first 2 TB of bandwidth free, 24 gig hard drive. I put my own Apache in, my own MySQL. I even run BIND 8 on them. Right now I'm using Perl on the server, but I'm free to use whatever I want. And if $16 is too rich for you a month, you can find even cheaper VPSs. Linode and Rackspace have had a decent QoS, and my business is profitable, so I pay a little more.
Yes. I am willing to sign a long-term contract immediately under those terms.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
LowEndBox.com has some great deals on virtualized servers. Last month, I got a VPS with 1 GB of RAM for $2/month, 6 months pre-paid.
Joyent is a bait & switch company - http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120817/11083120083/bait-switch-buy-lifetime-account-as-long-as-we-exist-until-we-get-tired-you.shtml
I guess they're in the embrace phase.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
AWS has many options. You can deploy a single micro server for free for 1 year and stacks of technology and server resources that scale horizontally or vertically very easily. The really were the first successful "Cloud" (IaaS, PaaS) service provider and are probably the cheapest, especially if you want to get your feet wet.
I totally agree. If you at the point where you are needing / wanting node and the like, then spin up a linux image, and install whatever you want. You don't need a traditional hosting company at all. The cost of AWS is negligible in this scenrario (and free for a yr as mentioned), the benefits are great, assuming you have the wherewithal to install and play with stuff like node.