8 reasons that a VPS is more awesome than you realise
anchor.com.au
anchor.com.au
A better article would have quantified all the measurable metrics like "virtual machines are 'fast'" and talked about some of the negatives - like privacy/security concerns etc.
What I want to know is - why are they so much more expensive than linode(for example). These guys are offering a 512Mb VPS @80$/m compared to 19.95@linode. They also charge 100$ for setup - (doing everything manually?)
(Disclaimer - I am a happy linode customer)
Hosting prices in Australia are all super-expensive.
The reality is we're a long way from everywhere. When we connect into the US we need to run the cables 15,000kms and we get to pick up the vast majority of the costs to do so. Then when you try split that cost over 22 million people versus the 300million++ in the US, you end up with economies of scale which are way out of whack with what your familiar with. :)
To give you some idea, the vast majority of residential DSL connections cost in the order of $100/month .. and only come with 150GB data allowance. :)
If Amazon EC2 does come to Sydney as expected then I would expect a bit of a shakeup of the industry.
So for all you know your VPS could still be hacked in seconds despite whatever security measures you have in place.
As someone else said, bandwidth is expensive and travels great distances. But that's not the only reason either imho. Things are simply more expensive here. :(
The second point however is a stereotypical blanket statement. It's important to note that Anchor as a company designed and maintained the infrastructure of Github.com and now does the same thing for testflightapp.com; Both of which are high profile startups each of whom have traffic numbers orders of magnitude higher than most Australian hosting providers see across their entire network.
In the end, quality hosting isn't just about the hardware (linode, rackspace), but highly skilled engineers who can architect and provide solutions that don't 'just work' now, but scale into the future.
The problems I was referring to were simply the ability to keep from falling over at random times for varied reasons. Many providers they tried couldn't even handle this basic task. Sure, we could have paid for the expertise with a company like Anchor but it was more cost effective to look outside Australia.
You need to be a lot clearer on what you're bringing to the table to be able to charge four times as much.
And I agree, it is sometimes difficult to get that message across (especially, on a single blog post). Probably the biggest offering is seriously talented sysadmins, there's plenty of articles which hopefully get some of that across. For example, the 10 year old MySQL bug which we recently fixed. Could be wrong, but I am not sure that your $20/month hosting providers would be doing that for a client.
Good luck going with a provider that overbook their machines beyond usefulness (most do).