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

 

[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!