How to choose a low cost VPS | Hacker News Reader

How to choose a low cost VPS

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My favorite host is prgmr.com. They have plans which fit even the smallest budget. The support is friendly and competent. You have access to an out-of-band SSH-based console and rescue image, so you can do arbitrary command-line maintenance stuff.

You can install whatever version of whatever distro you want. You can upgrade on your own schedule. You can even do more exotic things like install a custom kernel or even BSD (anything with Xen guest patches will work). You can use LVM.

The best part is that they give you tools to fix things yourself. You don't have to use some half-baked web UI whose creator didn't envision your use case. You don't have to file a support ticket and wait for the staff to get back to you for most maintenance tasks; you can just reboot in rescue mode and do it yourself.

> VPS control panels

I've worked with a few different hosts, and I've never found a web-based server management UI that isn't slow, buggy and generally half-baked.

They are weak on bandwidth side. Other than that, what they offer is great.

hm. See, I thought that provisioning/support was my weak point, not bandwidth. Bandwidth is actually an easier problem to solve, right now; I have, shall we say, massively overbought. I do need metering (right now, well, when I say I 'overbought' well, my burst capacity is two whole orders of magnitude larger than my 95th percentile. My commit is 60% of my burst capacity. I haven't had to limit a legitimate user for bandwidth usage in more than a year.) and I do need to do some general network upgrades. Right now, while I have the /external/ capacity, there are several internal bottlenecks which means that I will see some bad shit when usage hits one order of magnitude or so above what it is now. Actually, slightly less than that. I've got several points in the network where some traffic ends up doing a 'router on a stick' where the stick in question is a 1G link. Bad news, as my external capacity is 12G/sec. if Also, I don't have any metering, I mean, other than tcpdump (and perl) when shit gets bad. That's clearly a problem if I want to run at over 1/10th capacity, which I do.

I mean, on the metering side, right now, that is part of why the bandwidth quotas are so 2007; I mean, I /know/ that if I am having problems on my network due to overuse, someone is massively overrunning their bandwidth quota, so I can TC them down to something reasonable without breaking with the expectations I've set. So yeah, if you really do need serious amounts of bandwidth, (like, say, north of 200Mbps) on a VPS, I'm weak... but that's a whole hell of a lot of bandwidth.

(so yeah, I guess what I'm trying to say is that you are right if you are a serious bandwidth user, but most people aren't; and my policy of 'limit, and only if it's causing problems' I mean, rather than charging you for overages, makes bandwidth less of a big deal for most customers.)

Nonetheless, I am way too close to the 'will cause problems' bit with the bottlenecks in the internal network for me to set bandwidth expectations higher without good metering, but switches with 10Gbe uplinks are getting cheap, so it should be a fairly simple matter.

Now, provisioning? yeah, especially on the dedicated servers, I'm completely unacceptable. I've had a few customers that I strung along for weeks. (I mean, they got refunds... but that's just not acceptable.) - provisioning for VPSs is generally way better, It's rare that you wait more than a day or two, but still not anywhere near the linode/rackspace standard, and until I fix that, well, I'm dramatically less useful than they are.

I like prgrmr. They used to be cheap, but they aren't anymore - because everyone else lowered their price.

I'm paying $10/month (+$1/$2 more for outgoing traffic) for a 256MB Rackspace Cloud. It costs $8 or so at prgrmr - it is 25% but it's only $2, and rackspace always has space and bandwidth (unlike prgmr which has no spare capacity every now and then).

Minimal rackspace is now 512MB @ $16/month (comparable prgrmr is $12). If you're doing anything nontrivial, I suspect rackspace is a better option.

From Rackspace FAQ:

> Can I import my own image or export an image of a server?

> At this time, you would have to pick from our Linux distributions or Windows images.

I want to upgrade the OS on my schedule, not theirs. I want control of my own backups. And I really, really want snapshot capability, running / under LVM or btrfs. None of these seem possible from my interpretation of this answer (although I can't conclusively say they aren't).

You're right, though -- the pricing isn't bad at all.

> I want to upgrade the OS on my schedule, not theirs.

You can. But you can only install from their images. After that, you can "apt-get dist-upgrade" or whatever at your own rate.

> I want control of my own backups.

I think they give you that.

> And I really, really want snapshot capability, running / under LVM or btrfs. None of these seem possible from my interpretation of this answer (although I can't conclusively say they aren't).

Likely they can give it to you. They have really excellent chat support - just ask.

I've got 300 days of uptime on a $10/month VPS, that's working flawlessly since the second it was installed. I know from other people that they have fantastic support - but I can't vouch for it myself - I've never needed it.

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