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Hosting prices

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 12:38 am
by alex.barylski
I know this is a difficult to answer question, but...

Currently I pay around $20 Cdn/month for a shared host...

I have no complaints and i've been with these guys for about 5 years...however I have no praises either :)

I have very few visitors/month, maybe 500 to 1,000 unique hits...so a shared host works well for the time being...still...

I have some clients whom I wish to setup accounts with my hosting company and charge them a small monthly fee as well...yes i'm allowed to do this.

I'm thinking a smarter approach might be to rent a dedicated server and partition it into shared servers as well...putting my own web site on their as well...

I"m thinking about $10/month per 10,000 hits (non-unique)...

These web sites are all small businesses, but with high quality designs, Flash, etc...and they use my own CMS which is based on flat files, no RDBMS...but the option is there is they so choose...

Obviously I'm considering pushing the price up/month based on amount of software installed, etc...as well as bandwidth...

So I ask, knowing the above, what are some considerations, etc...I should take into account?

Do my prices sound feasible? Consider that my support is much better than any dedicated server company...likely 24/7...

What are some metrics other companies use when offering hosting + additional services...?

My hosting company offers an insane amount of bandwidth...something like 20 GB/month...I'll never use that on a shared host...so I'm sure it's a marketing gimick... :)

Anyways, just curious, what is everyones opinion on this subject???

Cheers :)

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 10:42 am
by Chris Corbyn
Virtual dedicated Server I use.

Much better than shared hosting... I run my own mail server, root shell access, firewall, dns, apache, mysql, postgresql and it costs me 72GBP for every 3 months. The cheapest plan is 41GBP a quarter.

Bandiwdth is measured as the *largest* of incoming or outgoing traffic.... not a combination of both like many hosts do.

Have a look around for UML/VDS hosts before looking at dedicated servers... I can highlighy reccomend them.

My support requests are answered brilliantly within hours and without quarrel. The guys that run it are complete linux enthusiasts and it shows.

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/vds.html (I get discount if you mention d11wtq at sign up so I'd happily share it :P)

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 11:18 am
by Buddha443556
I'm thinking a smarter approach might be to rent a dedicated server and partition it into shared servers as well...putting my own web site on their as well...
IMO, it's never a good idea to be on the same server as your customers. I've had a host setup like that and it drove me nutz. I'm down and so is the host - no site, no email and no helpdesk! Ahrg!

Better off hosting your site on a shared server else where.

I don't know how many customers you have lined up or how much your dedicated server will cost but there should be enough left over every month to make this worth your time and energy. It's an added responsibility and you'll definitely deserve to get paid for it.
I was going to ask you that yesterday. I'll just stick that in my bookmarks with your name. :wink:

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 4:19 pm
by m3mn0n
Buddha443556 wrote:IMO, it's never a good idea to be on the same server as your customers. I've had a host setup like that and it drove me nutz. I'm down and so is the host - no site, no email and no helpdesk! Ahrg!

Better off hosting your site on a shared server else where.
Very good advice.

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 10:38 pm
by alex.barylski
Buddha443556 wrote:
I'm thinking a smarter approach might be to rent a dedicated server and partition it into shared servers as well...putting my own web site on their as well...
IMO, it's never a good idea to be on the same server as your customers. I've had a host setup like that and it drove me nutz. I'm down and so is the host - no site, no email and no helpdesk! Ahrg!

Better off hosting your site on a shared server else where.

I don't know how many customers you have lined up or how much your dedicated server will cost but there should be enough left over every month to make this worth your time and energy. It's an added responsibility and you'll definitely deserve to get paid for it.
I was going to ask you that yesterday. I'll just stick that in my bookmarks with your name. :wink:
Hmmm...never thought of that...

Thanks for the tip :)

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2006 12:14 am
by josh
I also use a VPS $20/mo [www.powervps.com], if you're hosting something small (less then 100 gigs of bandwidth per month) definitely go for a VPS, you're not likely to run into any problems and with the current traffic level you mentioned.

Before buying a VPS it may also be worth it to set up linux on a spare computer at home for a few weeks, so you aren't paying $20 a month to learn how to configure apache, etc..

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2006 10:46 am
by Chris Corbyn
You get a lot of pleasure from running a VDS... maintaining my VDS is just as much a hobby as writing code :) I'm always picking up little tips and learning new things (especially with the mail server.... IMO mail server configuration can get *much* more advanced than things like FTP, HTTP...).

You can have multiple IP addresses aliased on your eth0 port for virtual hosting within your VDS and you know exactly how it all works, because after all, you set it up. No asking your host to enable mod_rewrite or mod_headers etc.... you just do it. Considering the price of a real dedicated server I don't really have a need to use one when I VDS behaves like one anyway.

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2006 5:10 pm
by timvw
I've configured sendmail once.. But that's something i'm not going to do ever again :P

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2006 5:57 pm
by Chris Corbyn
timvw wrote:I've configured sendmail once.. But that's something i'm not going to do ever again :P
Never touched sendmail.... I was led to believe that exim is more advanced. I enjoy it. Setting up ACLs and system filters. I'm just one of those people who loves to learn :)

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2006 7:38 pm
by alex.barylski
My host offers a virtual servers, but I'm not sure if that would be the right choice...

After all as my client list grows (which I hope it does) I'll need more power, etc to run everything...

I plan on installing a number of web applications, so processing power might become an issue...

How many VDS's can you fit on a single server? Or whats the average do you think?

I've been told that my hosting compan has approximately 1000 shareds hosts/server (hardware) but I can't validate this, cuz they won't tell me...but it was sorta an inside tip :)

Anyways, I've considered using VDS, but I figure my hosting company likely has just as many VDS setup on the server hardware as it does shared hosts...

Is this possible? Not asking if it's likely... :)

Cheers :)

Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2006 5:55 am
by Chris Corbyn
Any decent company would delegate set blocks of RAM to each VDS. They should never add more servers than they have the RAM for or the customers will start sharing memory. The CPU shouldn't be an issue.

On my host I've never seen the load average move over 1.02 and every megabyte of memory I pay for is backed by *real* memory in the UML server. I'm aware that many hosts don't worry about this but just check that they tell you this info before you buy.

From my VDS:

Code: Select all

load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
Mythic Beasts wrote:Our Virtual Dedicated Servers come with our unique admin console. This allows you reboot and "power cycle" your server, boot into single user mode, connect to your server's console for off-line maintenance, and change your server's kernel - just about everything you could do by sitting in front of your server.

Although our Virtual Dedicated Servers run on shared host servers, we do not overcommit the RAM in those servers. Every byte of Virtual Dedicated Server RAM you pay for is backed by real RAM in our machines.

.... snip .......

We're using User Mode Linux (UML) to provide our virtual servers. User Mode Linux is a version of the famous Linux kernel which has been modified to run as a process under Linux. Each User Mode Linux instance runs a standard Linux distribution and standard Linux applications (nothing needs to be recompiled) and each instance is completely separated from every other, guaranteeing your privacy and security from other users.
EDIT |
The server specs of the UML host wrote:# Dual Xeon 2.8GHz processors
# 4 GB RAM
So as you can see.... even if your host runs hardware as high spec as this and shoves 1000 VDS servers on that hardware, even at lowest VDS specification they would be ripping you off.... I very much doubt they put that many on one host.

Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2006 6:55 am
by Gambler
d11wtq, how do you compile things on VDS? I mean, if you have limited RAM and processor time.

Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2006 6:59 am
by timvw
They probably allow boasts... Meaning: The amounts of resources they give up are what you'll always have. When you require more (and others have more than they need at that time / idle) you'll get more ;)

Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2006 11:02 am
by Chris Corbyn
Gambler wrote:d11wtq, how do you compile things on VDS? I mean, if you have limited RAM and processor time.
CPU is not limited. It's just RAM. They do monitor the VDS usage and if you're constantly using a lot of CPU it will be mentioned.

Compiling things on my VDS is no different whatsoever from compiling on my own machine at home. I have a swap file turned on too of course (though I did forget to do that when I first got the VDS and had a few issues with MySQL crashing :oops: ). The only thing I had issues installing was GPG since it looks for the /usr/src/linux symlink and of course, VDS uses the host UML kernel and not a real one. It worked fine when I compiled the kernel on my own machine and pointed a symlink to it though. I didn't physically install and use the compiled kernel (you can't), I just left it there for the headers.

Basically... it's just like using your own linux machine over SSH ;) I just got 5 free IP addresses today too :P