Virtual Private Servers

Hi,

Time for another knowledge-sharing post.

I recently discovered a very good alternative to shared, reseller, or dedicated hosting: A virtual private server (VPS).

In fact, a VPS is a virtual machine running, with many other virtual machines (VM). There are many packages, but the cheapest are:

Tektonic (Based on Virtuozzo. I own 3 VPS from them. Very, very nice and responsive people. They've been very supportive for me in my beginnings with VPSs.
OpenHosting (Based on linux Vserver, fedora core 4 only for now, interesting utility billing system)
Vpslink (Based on OpenVZ, the open-source version of Virtuozzo, never tried yet)

Tektonic puts limit on outbound bandwidth that can be sometimes harsh. (Unmetered 1 mbps max for the smallest plan (15$/month)). That is more interesting for applications that don't need much outbound traffic (like remote backup, you have an unmetered 100mbps!) or e-mail, which don't really need an instant transfer, but can be problematic for web hosting. Vpslink, on the other hand, use total monthly transfer and offert gigabit connexions on all their packages. Their restriction is more on RAM (64 MB only on the smallest plan). Can it even run yum or up2date???

Both Tektinic and Vpslink offer control panels, but Vpslink might be better because all the plans are using the monthly traffic method to restrict bandwidth. The most expensive unmanaged plan at Tektonic (100$month) only allows 4 mbps outbound.

Vpslink offer for unmanaged virtual private server for web hosting is the one that makes the most sense, IMHO. However, there may be some features lacking compared to Tektonic, since they use OpenVZ. For example, is there an iptables firewall available? In Virtuozzo, it is configurable via the control panel. In OpenVZ?

  • 40$/month
  • 20 GB HDD spac
  • 500GB monthly traffic
  • 3 IP addresses
  • 512 MB RAM
  • 5$/month for the ServerCP control panel
  • 10$/month for DirectAdmin control panel
To learn linux, or for test servers, Tektonic is really the best solution...

Tektonic offers managed VPS, if you need more features. Vpslink does that through its parent company, Spy. User Mode Linux is another technology, used by BlackNightSolutions. Nice Irish folks...

If you need to host 3-4 domains or more and would like to have a control panel, I recommend looking at a Tektonic and Vpslink. Openhosting doesn't offer a control panel. Only webmin is available, and virtualmin is not "officially" supported. Openhosting is also more expensive, but a lot less restricted in hardware resource.

The choice is yours!

As usual, comments welcome!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

General linux performance troubleshooting

Here's a list of commands that you should execute and then share the output to someone who can help you figure out what resource is the bottleneck in your system. Note, it requires the  sysstat  and  procps  packages (ubuntu and RHEL and its derivatives): uptime vmstat 1 10 iostat -xN 2 10 mpstat -P ALL 3 10 pidstat 1 10 free -mw (or free -m, if your OS doesn't support -w)  uptime is to see the load averages on the system. vmstat is mostly used to tell if the system is swapping or not. If you see significant numbers in the 'si' and 'so' columns, your system is most likely swapping (using the hard drive as RAM), which usually slows performance a lot. iostat is mostly used to determine if your disk subsystem is not able to cope with the load. If you see one or more lines that shows 100 or close almost constantly, it is probably the case.  If it is your swap volume, you probably saw numbers in the 'si' and 'so' columns in the  vmsta...
Read more

Networker automated recovery testing using the REST API - introduction

One feature that is lacking from Networker, compared to some of its competitors, is the built-in automatic recovery testing. However, when there's an API, there is a way.  Networker's REST API is not perfect, but it allows the backup administrator to perform queries about Networker resources (objects). As my workload is going up, I realize that one of the tasks that I tend to skip the most is the periodical recovery tests.  Don't forget that a a backup that is not tested should be considered non-successful. I also found out that my recovery tests were not diverse enough. When I started this project, I knew a little bit about REST APIs, and nothing about JSON processing. With the Networker REST API documentation, and the help of a friend and Networker Support staff, I was able to create HTTP queries with Postman,  cURL and jq . Once I got the queries that I needed, I put them in a bash script that would somehow select one backup, and then restore it. My first attem...
Read more

Tips for being a better system administrator

Here are a few tips that I have discovered or implemented during my career, that can help anyone get better results: Follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy  or better 3 copies of the data 3 different media 1 copy offsite Test your backups regularly. Ideally, automate your recovery tests. Use Whatever-as-code as much as you can. IaC is the first that comes to my mind, but using code to define objects and their properties have several advantages: Auto-documentation of changes Ability to easily rollback (using source code management like Git) Makes it easier for standardization an compliance Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt, Terraform, Pulumi are good examples Maintain a changelog of all the major changes in your infrastructure (that isn't already "documented" because you're using IaC). Keep track of your hardware inventory and plan your renewals and warranty extension purchases. Build a spreadsheet with all the components that you manage and make sure that everyone on the sysadmi...
Read more