Virtual Private Servers

Cavey

I am looking towards setting up my personal web site and possibly a couple of other projects. Web hosting seems to cost £30 per site per year, but if I am going to host more than one project or use more space, Virtual Private Servers (VPS) might be more cost effective. It is also more flexible than simple web hosting.

Ideally I want unrestricted bandwidth (I don't like the threat of excess charges) and a few Gb's of storage (more storage equals more sites I can host for others, I am not planning on using that much). I prefer Linux (especially Debian or Ubuntu and derivatives) to Windows. My old linux box had 768Mb RAM, but I don't know if this is that important if I mostly want to run LAMP (although some of my PHP scripts to manipulate data did take a fair bit of RAM).

I am therefore interested in the prices for two types of VPS -

A. Basic run of the mill VPS with good bandwidth, just so I can run multiple sites, and
B. 512Mb+ RAM/10Gb+ Storage/Unlimited bandwidth.

Any suggestions, even foreign hosting (Netherlands or US perhaps?) appreciated.

foxwales

Lots of hosting companies are cheaper than that, shop around.

You are assuming that you are going to get substantial traffic and that you will require a large quantity of storage space.

If your site isn't even live yet and you have no user base, customer base or regular viewers; then you are simply chucking money at nothing.

Establish your user base first and keep an eye on user stats and site traffic; once you have an idea what your requirements will be, then start looking for a package that will suit you.

This is a common mistake made by lots of people in first establishing sites; they spend money on all the bells and whistles and find after a month or two that their sites are just not generating the expected traffic; thus wasting money.

weegie.geek

Unlimited bandwidth? Even most cheapo packages will have more bandwidth than a new website (or a few new websites) will need.

Any decent host will upgrade your package with no hassle or downtime, so go for something cheap at first, then work your way up.

A VPS is only really needed if you're going to be running custom apps on the box, or if you're running ram/cpu intensive stuff.

Get a small shared package first. If it's not able to cope with the load, or if the host advises you that you're using too much cpu time or ram, then you know you need more, but a VPS is way more than most people need.

There are numerous threads about who's best to go for re: hosting, so have a search of the forum.

Cavey

I am not assuming that I am going to get substantial traffic, but the last thing you want is to get a 2Gb limit and then be /.'d causing you to go over that limit. This then leads to either your site being offline or a large bill, both of which are not good if using it as an online CV with a 70Mb PDF attached to it (for example).

Anyway, I have come to the conclusion that a web hosting package is not what I want (in fact I would hate it). I don't really mind throwing £120 per year at a VPS with "unlimited" (translates to 50-150Gb) bandwidth (from Easyspace) as it will just do what I want it to do (like SSL certificates and automatic updating/installing of common web applications in apt).

I had searched on here for virtual private servers and VPS, but nothing useful came up - most people just seemed to be after web site hosting.