What should I look for in a good VPS?

Trojan Horse

Trojan Horse

Trojan Horse

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I want to learn with a VPS but don't really know what makes a VPS decent.

My friend has a VPS hosting company and is offering unlimited bandwith on all of his machines, but I don't know what else makes a VPS good (i.e. what's teh catch on these cheap machines):

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It's UK based and I can't think of many uses of a VPS other than creating and using a VPN for Uni so I can game... suppose I could find other decent things to do?

Any how, what are the hidden details I should be looking for in a VPS that makes it worth the money?
 
Depending on what you are going to use the VPS for will depend on how much you spend. You've also got different type of virtual technology.

XEN - More expensive but dedicated resources.
OpenVZ - Usually the cheapest and is more shared resources
VMWARE - Mostly used for Windows based and usually more expensive
KVM - A compromise between XEN and Openvz with more dedicated resources and good access via VNC normally.

As you are UK based location wise you'll want either Germany (Usually pretty cheap and good infrastructure), Netherlands (good prices and god performance), UK (I've got a few different ones I use from small boxes that host my BNC for IRC and a big one I've got OpenVPN on along with game servers + Teamspeak server). France (Usually really cheap but not always the best performance).

You get a lot of companies that pop up, sell cheap, over sell, take the money and disappear. So ALWAYS back up any data you do not want to lose. Even if you are paying for back ups always take precautions.

With regards to deals a good place is http://lowendbox.com/ You'll get a good idea what people offer and while some of these companies are new, some are old. Usually googling for reviews will tell you if its worth the effort. They all have different terms and conditions so its worth looking at those if you are looking at using a VPN.
 
thebennyboy said:
At those prices those VPS's will likely be heavily oversold. :p

Look at these: https://www.ovh.co.uk/vps/vps-ssd.xml

Fairly cheap but are not oversold. Their data centers are in Roubaix, France and the ping from the UK is VERY good. You also get DDoS protection.
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He's am extremely small company and so he's definetly not oversold, he's got like 20x more server space than he has clients.

It uses KVM I think
 
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Personally I cant see how they can offer such resources at those prices.

Erm it depends on what youre using it for. If you just want to learn how to manage a server then boot up an old pc and learn off that. Save all the countless reboots whilst you bork it.

If you intend to use it for anything in production then the size of the pipe is more important than bandwidth. If you can only connect on a kb basis then its not going to be worth it.

Are they a reseller or do they own the hardware? Where is it located? Home solution or in a data centre?

Obviously if you're looking at it for gaming then you'll need low pings.
 
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Mynight said:
Personally I cant see how they can offer such resources at those prices.

Erm it depends on what youre using it for. If you just want to learn how to manage a server then boot up an old pc and learn off that. Save all the countless reboots whilst you bork it.

If you intend to use it for anything in production then the size of the pipe is more important than bandwidth. If you can only connect on a kb basis then its not going to be worth it.

Are they a reseller or do they own the hardware? Where is it located? Home solution or in a data centre?

Obviously if you're looking at it for gaming then you'll need low pings.
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They own it in their home, speeds are 50mb upload and 100 download but it's increasing in March.
 
Trojan Horse said:
They own it in their home, speeds are 50mb upload and 100 download but it's increasing in March.
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Ok then it's a ping issue. Have you pinged the servers? Tried downloading anything from them?

At 50up 100 down its not really great depending on users and what they're doing.

Sounds like they have a basic business line so there's no failover if the broadband goes down you're stuffed until it's fixed. You won't be getting a dedicated IP at that price so factor.
 
Mynight said:
Ok then it's a ping issue. Have you pinged the servers? Tried downloading anything from them?

At 50up 100 down its not really great depending on users and what they're doing.

Sounds like they have a basic business line so there's no failover if the broadband goes down you're stuffed until it's fixed. You won't be getting a dedicated IP at that price so factor.
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I know but it's not like I need much to learn Linux when it can only cost me $1p/m . That's not even a pound! I'll have an ask for the server IP etc. What pings should I be getting? Something like 20ms?
 
Trojan Horse said:
I know but it's not like I need much to learn Linux when it can only cost me $1p/m . That's not even a pound! I'll have an ask for the server IP etc. What pings should I be getting? Something like 20ms?
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Depends on location who you route through loads of things. If you're using it to learn Linux then you'd be fine with whatever but if you want to use it as a vpn for gaming as suggested in your op you'd want as low as possible and obviously the server would need a decent ping to whatever game server you're playing.

For just learning Linux get a virtual machine running or dual boot. Will be much simpler and give you more control especially if it falls over whilst learning.
 
I wouldn't bother. Look at alternative supplies. Not "Its in my bedroom" style hosters. Might as well just buy a Pi and set that at on your own connection.
 
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