Lots of hosting questions

[dangerstat]

Hi,

A couple of questions about web hosting / dedicated servers.

I've not really looked around in any real detail but what are the "standard" costs of a virtual server with, say, 200GB of traffic per month and a virtual server of about 256MB RAM, 5GB storage space? Perhaps £100 per year?

Also I need root access to the box, are there any companies that allow this?

Cheers

D

 

[Augmented]

Very unlikely you'll get that (and a decent service) for £100/year. A baseline of £150-£200 (US hosted) is much more realistic, assuming you only want a Linux distribution installed and nothing else.

Typical extra costs you need to consider are:
* cPanel/WHM licences
* Microsoft licences for MS software
* Managed support

If you're happy doing admin on your own box, then I can't recommend Slicehost more highly. Simply choose your distro and away you go. No hidden extras or stuff you don't want to pay for. Just a high-performing VDS, bandwidth and storage space. What you do on your VDS is up to you - no restrictions about root/ssh access. They were recently acquired by Rackspace, so no need to worry about stability of the company.

I should note that running your own 256MB VDS box isn't quite as attractive as it might seem - resources get eaten up very quickly. You should assess whether what you'll be running and for how much usage will be accommodated on a 256MB VDS.

 

[dangerstat]

Very unlikely you'll get that (and a decent service) for £100/year. A baseline of £150-£200 (US hosted) is much more realistic, assuming you only want a Linux distribution installed and nothing else.

Typical extra costs you need to consider are:
* cPanel/WHM licences
* Microsoft licences for MS software
* Managed support

If you're happy doing admin on your own box, then I can't recommend Slicehost more highly. Simply choose your distro and away you go. No hidden extras or stuff you don't want to pay for. Just a high-performing VDS, bandwidth and storage space. What you do on your VDS is up to you - no restrictions about root/ssh access. They were recently acquired by Rackspace, so no need to worry about stability of the company.

I should note that running your own 256MB VDS box isn't quite as attractive as it might seem - resources get eaten up very quickly. You should assess whether what you'll be running and for how much usage will be accommodated on a 256MB VDS.

Thanks for the reply

In terms of the issues you mention, there's absolutely nothing I'm doing that requires any Microsoft products (I run Debian here) I really don't want that annoying cPanel thingy, rather I'd be ssh'ing in and transfering files over via sftp. Managed support isn't a huge concern, the only issue would be to ensure they backup the VDS relatively frequently (weekly ideally).

256MB is a problem, one hosting company I was looking at offer "burst" rates, which I assume means that if there's capacity in the machine being under utilised you can use it? In terms of how much of an impact having 256MB would have, I think it'd be a problem, but not a major issue but I'd want a host where you can easily increase the amount of RAM you are gareenteed access too.

I'll have a look at slicehost because you way you explain it, it sounds perfect!

 

[dan0r2]

http://cheapvps.co.uk/

Pretty good no frills and more importantly you can have a UK based VPS.

I've a linux one I used for testing.

 

[Augmented]

Managed support isn't a huge concern, the only issue would be to ensure they backup the VDS relatively frequently (weekly ideally).

Automated backups of the complete system image at Slicehost are an optional $5/month IIRC (you can turn it on/off as you need). But since you have ssh access, you can just simply run your own scripts to backup files locally e.g. rsync.

256MB is a problem, one hosting company I was looking at offer "burst" rates, which I assume means that if there's capacity in the machine being under utilised you can use it? In terms of how much of an impact having 256MB would have, I think it'd be a problem, but not a major issue but I'd want a host where you can easily increase the amount of RAM you are gareenteed access too.

That's the idea - although all hosting companies probably have a slightly different definition of what 'burstable' is . Slicehost don't offer burstable RAM usage, but CPU can be over-utilised if the host machine is under-utilised. I think upgrades are only plan-to-plan i.e. you can't just upgrade RAM and not disk.

FYI, a typical setup with just Apache and mod_php is around 15-20MB per process - this limits you to about 10 concurrent apache processes before the VPS need to use swap memory, and generally isn't advised for low-memory VPSs. Especially if you want to have a mailserver and/or FTP server running. Many people instead run lightweight webservers like nginx or lighthttpd.

 

[monkeysmith]

Use Slicehost for work. Never had any problems. Also, check out the ocuk host review site, sticky in this forum.

 

[malef!c]

The ones I have used before without much trouble include:

- cheapvps.co.uk (owned by VAServ / a2b2.com etc)
- Wisehosting.co.uk
- Layershift (Manchester DC)

Have a look over at Webhostingtalk.com in their offers section, there are some good deals to be had on there.

 

[daz]

Have a look over at Webhostingtalk.com in their offers section, there are some good deals to be had on there.

That would be a good idea, but Webhostingtalk has been hacked for the second time in two weeks. This time, unencrypted credit card numbers and CVV numbers were also compromised from their premium memberships.

 

[malef!c]

Oh really?

When did this happen - I know they got done over in March (and once before that as well) but hadn't heard of this one with credit card details!

Wow, that place has lost it now!

 

[jamoor]

The ones I have used before without much trouble include:

- cheapvps.co.uk (owned by VAServ / a2b2.com etc)
- Wisehosting.co.uk
- Layershift (Manchester DC)

Have a look over at Webhostingtalk.com in their offers section, there are some good deals to be had on there.

Does anyone use layershift on here?

Was looking at their packages (I know register1 come highly rated, but I find it odd that their top package has 10gb storage and an extra 5gb is £100 a year, which to me seems a little bit expensive)

Ideally I need 20gb of space.

 

[Gornall]

Don't know if it's what your after (not particularly my area) but I have a friend that does hosting.

http://www.humblehosting.org/

He's a great lad, and a member of these forums.

If it isn't something he offers I'm sure he'll be able to help with some advice!

 

[visibleman]

Very unlikely you'll get that (and a decent service) for £100/year.

Easily doable if you go the unmanaged route ie: you can pick up a 1GB RAM/75GB/1TB BW KVM in the Maidenhead for £4 pm (with OpenITC).

Get on to lowendbox.co.uk and the forums, lowendtalk.com. Obviously cheaper services tend to be OpenVZ based but bargains like above can be had.

If you want something managed then Tso or Vida would be go-to.


Edit - Missed your comment about backups. With a LEB you're, usually (some providers offer backup storage/solution), on you're own but due to the low costs of a LEB you could quite easily factor in a backup solution (either dedicated backup storage or another LEB and mirror etc etc).