Results 1 to 13 of 13

Thread: VPS make sense?

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Posts
    345

    VPS make sense?

    I've had shared, reseller, and now dedicated. I was going to do VPS for a monitoring station. However, what I find interesting, is that by the time you get even 512 megs of ram let alone 1 gig, you are at the same price you can buy a managed dedicated from at Servstra. What am I missing?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    Minneapolis, MN
    Posts
    1,648
    Do you really need that much ram? I'm running Nagios, Postfix, Apache, and Bind in about 128meg currently. As far as pricing goes, that's always puzzled me as well. There are a few players in the market that offer exceptional values for unmanaged services -- the few that immediately come to mind are Leeware, ServerAxis, and TekTonic.

    Eric
    Eric Spaeth
    Enterprise Network Engineer :: Hosting Hobbyist :: Master of Procrastination
    "The really cool thing about facts is they remain true regardless of who states them."

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Posts
    345
    I'll be running ZABBIX, which requires 64 with 256 recommended. So you are probably correct that I don't need that much. But if I also run another site on it, 512 might make sense or at least 256. Still, two people sharing a dedicated would pay for the dedicated. I'm thinking that the economics must not be where I would think they would be for VPS.

    Thanks for the hosting names, I'll check then out.

  4. #4
    Many VPS providers allow you to purchase a plan, and upgrade to a more powerful account by just submitting a ticket, or changing a setting in a control panel. You might want to go with one of these providers, in a plan with less memory, and see if your performance is adequate. At best, it'll be fine, and you'll save money. At worst, you'll have to bump your plan to one with more memory, which will require you to submit a ticket or change a setting in your VPS control panel. One provider that I use who allows you to bump your account from within the CP is vpslink.

  5. #5
    The big draw to VPS versus the same priced dedicated is that you get a small slice of a much tastier pie. The typical VPS node would run you $300 to $400 per month or more for the really high end nodes if you were to get one dedicated. We're talking about multiple CPUs, 4GB+ RAM, SCSI/SAS hardware RAID, redundant power supplies and so forth.

    It's been argued that because the machine is shared you lose any reliability advantage that those components might offer. I think it's just up to personal preference.

    In my opinion, VPS makes the most sense between $10 and $400 a month. For $400 a month, you had better be getting a big slice of a very tasty pie! Anything more than that and you might as well have the whole pie.
    Sincerely,
    Andrew Kinney
    CTO, Advantagecom Networks
    http://www.SimplyWebHosting.com

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    Rovaniemi
    Posts
    483
    The whole point of a VPS is that it is a solution in between shared/reseller and dedicated.
    It has the same possibilities as a dedicated server, but at a cheaper cost.
    There is no point having VPS accounts with huge amounts of disk space and memory. Not only would it make it very expensive, but then you might as well just move to a dedicated box.
    As I said, this is the whole point of a VPS, to supply an in between solution. If you need tons of disk space and have very busy sites which needs lots of resources then there's no point moving to a VPS, you'll need a dedicated server.
    I am aware that there are hosts who do offer VPS accounts with lots of space and memory, but I personally don't believe in this solution.
    IceBlueHost | Premium Quality Hosting Solutions
    Shared | Reseller | Xen VPS | Dedicated | cPanel | Softaculous | CLoudLinux | Game Servers
    True 24x7 Support | No Overselling | Servers in France and Canada
    Follow us on Twitter for the latest news and special promotions

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Posts
    345
    Quote Originally Posted by advantagecom
    The big draw to VPS versus the same priced dedicated is that you get a small slice of a much tastier pie. The typical VPS node would run you $300 to $400 per month or more for the really high end nodes if you were to get one dedicated. We're talking about multiple CPUs, 4GB+ RAM, SCSI/SAS hardware RAID, redundant power supplies and so forth.
    I already have multiple of the $440 machines. What I need is an a box to monitor them. Therefore it doesn't need to be fast, and I can afford having a hard drive or power supply choke once in awhile. It just needed to be 512 of ram, a real P4 or better, and and few gigs of disk space and DirectAdmin. I want it in the same same data center as our other servers, SAVVIS TX. Lots of tiny responsive traffic, so bandwidth is a minor issue while well connected to the monitored servers is.

    In the mean time, I have an old 246 dual-opteron with 4 gigs and mirrored 73 SCSIs that I will be phasing out and splitting to mirrored and load balanced pair of new Opterons with the same FreeBSD 6.1 OS. That's obviously massive over-kill, for a monitoring machine but it provides me a place to work during the transition and test software upgrades in an SMP environment. After the transition is complete, maybe I will just buy a cheap dual-core where I can use and prototype software before rolling it out on the main servers. That way I can continue to test upgrades and software for the main servers and do some non-critical hosting.

    Thanks!

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    942
    Quote Originally Posted by ScarabWeb
    The whole point of a VPS is that it is a solution in between shared/reseller and dedicated.
    It has the same possibilities as a dedicated server, but at a cheaper cost.
    There is no point having VPS accounts with huge amounts of disk space and memory. Not only would it make it very expensive, but then you might as well just move to a dedicated box.
    I think the SWSoft folks would disagree with you there In the keynote speech at their recent summit their CEO stressed how they feel virtualization will be at every level of hosting in the next few years.
    Matt Ayres - togglebox.com
    Linux and Windows Cloud Virtual Datacenters powered by Onapp / Xen
    Instant Setup, Instant Scalability, Full Lifecycle Hosting Solutions

    www.togglebox.com

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Posts
    345
    Quote Originally Posted by TheWiseOne
    I think the SWSoft folks would disagree with you there In the keynote speech at their recent summit their CEO stressed how they feel virtualization will be at every level of hosting in the next few years.
    Of course he's selling it right? OpenVPS's shared kernel architecture is the least resource intensive, of course it isn't very flexible. Neither does he have FreeBSD support which is a huge part of the market. Someone will probably pick up that market from him.

    For true enterprise vitualization, VMWare is the only real product out there. Of course they've been at it forever too. The flexibility is amazing. The only problem is, the price removes much of the cost advantage, but gives you with the flexibility advantages, which are very valuable. They do not have licensing models for key areas yet either, which I think is a mistake. They could do a combination of what they have and shared kernel and have the best of both worlds.

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    942
    Yes of course he is selling it It does not make it any less true. If you look at SWSoft's own product line they offer VPS's in ranges where you don't even have root , but just your own set of files / processes up to using it to split up a dedicated. I could say more, but it's pretty well documented the uses they see for virtualization in hosting on their site.

    http://www.swsoft.com/en/products/vi...tions/hosting/
    Matt Ayres - togglebox.com
    Linux and Windows Cloud Virtual Datacenters powered by Onapp / Xen
    Instant Setup, Instant Scalability, Full Lifecycle Hosting Solutions

    www.togglebox.com

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    Minneapolis, MN
    Posts
    1,648
    IBM had it right all along... eventually we'll all be back to running on mainframes.

    Eric
    Eric Spaeth
    Enterprise Network Engineer :: Hosting Hobbyist :: Master of Procrastination
    "The really cool thing about facts is they remain true regardless of who states them."

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    942
    I actually believe they did! What is happening in the datacenter world is there is plenty of space, but not enough cooling / power (back when most datacenters were built a Xeon 700Mhz was a screamer -- Now a quad dual core is the screamer). Using virtualization now makes your DNS server use ~.02A of power instead of having to put it on it's own server which even on a low end desktop would draw .5-1A. I know if I had all of our VPS customers on dedicated servers I would have had to purchase my own datacenter by now (but have the same profit margin).

    I truly believe it to be the wave of the future and many of the large industry analyst agree with me
    Matt Ayres - togglebox.com
    Linux and Windows Cloud Virtual Datacenters powered by Onapp / Xen
    Instant Setup, Instant Scalability, Full Lifecycle Hosting Solutions

    www.togglebox.com

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Posts
    345
    Quote Originally Posted by spaethco
    IBM had it right all along... eventually we'll all be back to running on mainframes.
    We're almost there with a web server. BUT we're a lot more sophisticated today. Instead of efficient vector based graphics terminals we are using web servers that send us UNIX help files and raster graphics so that we can load them into a help file viewers on our computers that have more power than the web server. (Actually IBM worked really hard to lose that market.)

    It doesn't look like I can find a VPS inside of the SAVVIS data center that does DirectAdmin sooo I'll just work on the 246 dedicated. There are some advantages for me to do that anyway. It just surprises me that I didn't find anything.

    Thanks all for your help.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •