Server hosting - what should I be looking for?

Cheetah Designs

Cheetah Designs

Cheetah Designs

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If I am looking to rent a server that is connected to the internet, what am I looking for? Someone told me I was looking for a "VPS" is that correct? Just want a linux machine that I can run programs on and have full control over.

What sort of things should I be looking out for when looking for one. It's just for my own personal testing and consumption so cheapness is a must. I'd also like some reliable but I'm fully aware that you "get what you pay for".

Reason why I want one is that I need an increase in speed in real terms that connecting to a home server on VM 50Mb which I think is 2-4Mbps upstream.....is getting something cheap likely to give me better results than this? Part of what I want is cloud storage.

Is there anyway to speed test them before buying?

Was looking at this: http://www.simplywebhosting.com/plans-vps/index-economy-hwvps.shtml Cheap, but like I said its only for personal consumption.
 
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Rroff said:
EDIT: From the dollar pricing I'm assuming that VPS host is US based - not sure if your US based yourself but its generally better to rent from a hoster in your own country - especially if you spend much time managing the server using SSH or remote desktop due to the lower latency.
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Forgot to take into account latency. I am in the UK, but given the option, I'd rather go cheaper and have the latency higher than vice versa. However, what I was thinking about was the throughput.

Thanks for your input :)
 
daz said:
The problem with cheap virtual servers is that the margins are even thinner than cheap shared hosting - in a lot of cases, you'll often get worse PHP/MySQL performance on a cheap virtual server than on half decent shared hosting because of this. The main issue tends to be lack of disk I/O and CPU power.
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On that note I was thinking of dropping my host and using a VPS to host all my sites so I can invest some more money in it and get a UK based VPS.

How hard is it setting up a VPS to host websites? Is it just the case of installing PHP and lighttpd? Don't really want to pay an extra CPanel and I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty. How would I go about hosting multiple websites with different domains (my domains are with NameCheap)?

What OS should I be looking at? Is ubuntu 10.10 fine?

Whats the difference between Xen and OpenVz, the former seems more expensive. Considering I'm going for a cheap host, which one should I go for?
 
daz said:
If you're asking those sorts of questions, I'd recommend installing Linux on a PC at home and setting up Apache/PHP/MySQL from scratch and doing everything from the command line for a while before jumping in at the deep end and running your sites from such a system.
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Already have a home system with Lighttpd/PHP/MySQL on Ubuntu Server so if its as simple as that I don't forsee any issues as Apache is just a larger http server as far as I know.

Xen and OpenVZ are different types of virtualization. OpenVZ has less of a virtualization overhead (some might say it's not real virtualization at all) so performance on an uncontended node is very good. Xen on the otherhand has more of an overhead because it has more isolation, but you can't oversell RAM to the same extent that you can on OpenVZ. Both virtualization types allow the provider to oversell on CPU and disk I/O, however.
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That's interesting, thanks for the explanation.

In conclusion, a cheap oversold VPS is still a cheap oversold VPS whatever the virtualization technique employed.
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What determines oversold? The amount of VPSs per server? What is your opinion on what oversold is for any given hardware (just one hardware spec vs hosted VPSs will do)...so I can gauge.


Thanks for your response.
 
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