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Comment by seltzered_ | Hacker News Reader

The hostel

You decide to run a site on 'shared' hosting (e.g. dreamhost, 1&1, godaddy (shudder), etc.) because it looks really cheap and they list so many "unlimited" things.

The good:

It's surprisingly pretty cozy for your startup wordpress blog about fish, although at that point you start wondering why you didn't just get a wordpress.com account instead, but you justify it by saying you were able to put your custom design theme with lasercats this way. You're not sure why your friends are saying the site feels slow.

The bad:

Oh, you like to program huh? Sorry our python version is 2 years behind. What's this ruby stuff you speak of? You're hosting user-submitted content on your bunk bed? Get out! Or upgrade to our overpriced "VPS" solution! You give up on the site and throw money away.

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The thing is, the price difference between this and a vps is too dramatic. For example, I can get a Lunarpages basic hosting, with "Unlimited" Bandwidth and "Unlimited" Storage for $4.99/mo with support for rails apps and python (not django however). Not to mention a free domain name.

However the cheapest linode vps is $19.99/mo.

I would LOVE to have a vps to play around on, I would have so much use for it and yet I'm a student living in London and all my money goes towards the cost of living. It makes much more sense for me to go with the cheaper shared hosting as I just can't afford anything more.

As an aside, I found http://virpus.com/ the other day and they are selling vps's starting at $3/mo. Does anyone have any experience at all with them?

Gotta love those "CPU slices" that ensure you'll never dream of touching those "unlimited" limits.

CloudSigma is in Europe, and has a little lower barrier to entry compared to Linode. I'm on the lookout for an even cheaper solution. Virpus seems to be almost too cheap, so where is the catch?

Thats what I'm trying to find out. TBH I'm not looking to use it for a startup, more for actually playing around with all the new stuff I see on HN. But yeah it does look a bit dodgy being SO cheap.

I'm on the EC2 free usage tier and having no problems for my minimal use of a VPS. For just playing around and testing stuff, it's great.

Ah, I hadn't see this before! Going to register now.

I've heard good things about http://prgmr.com/ and they have 5/6/8/12 -dollar tiers.

I use prgmr to host a website and couple of private git repos, I would definitely recommend it.

If the amount of traffic they offer feels adequate, good for you. Otherwise, practically anyone else will offer more traffic these days.

I've heard quite a few people knocking virpus for unreliability and bad support, though I've never used them myself. http://www.lowendbox.com/ is a good resource for cheap VPS information, though be aware that I wouldn't put anything "production" on just one (I have a couple of cheap VPSs that playthings and some non-sensitive off-site backups go on, but anything of any import does not just go on one of them). Also, be wary of "burstable RAM" - more often than not it is far more trouble than it could possibly be worth (the feature might make sense in an environment where you know the likely use patterns of the whole host and its guest OSs, but it just causes problems in a shared environment IMO).

yeah. I'm currently using dreamhost shared and despite my gripes, it's not bad for the lay person. Dare I say I recommend it if you want to run a static-page driven site (e.g. jekyll / hyde / etc.) . I want to see how far they take unlimited and see if they'll handle my several-gig photo collection soon.

Hell, my dad uses godaddy of all things, but at least he has his tiny wordpress site up to help his non-tech business.

Dreamhost handle my photo collection fine.

Also, Dreamhost at least gives you shell access, which is a big plus. And, contrary to a comment above, you can build your own environment. I have an up to date python 2.7 virtualenv from easy_install, and same for ruby.

The price difference between shared hosting and VPS is non-existent. http://www.lowendbox.com/ is a site dedicated to low-end VPS offerings under $7/mo. They have tons of offers listed and guides like "Yes, You Can Run 18 Static Sites on a 64MB Link-1 VPS" (http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/yes-you-can-run-18-static-site...) To be listed there, $7 should be recurring maximum price, not limited time offer. Some are really good.

The real difference is not in price; it's that in shared hosting you don't get the option and associated responsibility of managing your software stack; in VPS you do.

Disregarding that you can get VPSes for less than that, is $20/m really that much of a problem? That's 5-7 fewer trips to the cafe, 3-4 fewer beers at the bar, or 1-2 fewer times eating out per month. If you really wanted to you could find $20/m.

Rackspace Cloud starts at a little over £7/month for their cheapest offering.

They also give you some ability to "scale up" by simply asking for a bigger instance, and they handle moving your server over.

The only real downside is the default password. Unlike AWS, you are given a root password, which is pathetically easy to crack, so the first thing you need to do is change that.

Ha, well said. I could never understand why GoDaddy didn't bother to improve its Rails support. I tried more than once to get a Rails app up on GoDaddy only to find that they were still supporting a version from 5 years ago. Seems like it would be an easy way to get several thousand paying customers who just have simple Rails applications.

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