[kwlug-disc] VPS hosting

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Paul Nijjar <paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca> wrote:

> Bikeshed topic!
>
> So we are seriously considering purchasing some VPS hosting. We have
> lots of data (5-10GB) to store, but not much bandwidth usage (say 10GB
> per month). We would be hosting Drupal and probably some custom web
> development (hopefully all on the same VPS, unless it makes sense
> financially to purchase separate ones). We would be looking for a
> barebones Debian install that we can lock down and customize.
>
> The two big players seem to be Linode and Rackspace (and I guess there
> is Amazon EC2, but I am bigoted against Amazon). Of the two I am
> falling for the Linode branding because its name is derived from
> Linux, but that is an arbitrary emotional justification.
>
> Of the two, is there one that is better?
>
> There appear to be a lot of smaller players in the VPS space as well.
> Should I be looking at some of them? If so then which ones and why?
>
> I am apprehensive about going the VPS route because maintaining a
> server on the Internet is terrifying. But I am not sure that shared
> hosting is going to meet our needs so well either.
>

Regarding Amazon AWS, they can be good for low traffic site when
you are using midrange instance types. The high cpu instance types
are too expensive and not cost efficient. Amazon has the habit of going
down frequently, 3 major outages this year (June, July, October). They
would not be my first choice.

I host with RackspaceCloud. Not by choice. Was with SliceHost and could
not say enough about them, but they got bought out by RackspaceCloud.
As far as the VPS itself goes, they are OK, but their management interface
had issues until recently (no way to edit DNS entries, have to delete and
add, but I think this was fixed). Also, they don't have a clear pricing
structure
since they want to do the on demand thing like Amazon does.

I use Linode for some clients, and I am thinking of switching to Linode
myself. Would go from 512MB to 1GB for some $7 a month more than
RackspaceCloud.

Maintaining a VPS is not hard. You install apticron, and configure it for
your email address, and you get notified when new security packages are
available, and that is it.
-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
Fast Reliable Drupal
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and
wrong." -- H.L. Mencken
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