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  1. #1

    Is anybody interested in sharing a box with VPS?

    My company is primarily a software development company. We've been running on a dedicated box at Ev1, but we're getting to the point where we need more RAM and Ev1's RAM monthly fee for RAM upgrades is just highway robbery (in my opinion).

    So, I was thinking about buying a decent Dell box and colocating it. After doing more research, I began thinking about getting a seriously meaty server, with 2 to 4 dual core xeons, a pile of memory and a good RAID 5 or RAID 10 drive setup. Then, I'd partition that box off with VMWare ESX into several servers (depending on the power of the box we buy, 4 or 8 servers most likely). I'd probably take two of those VPS' myself (one for production, one for development), and then sell the remaining VPS to external users, like you guys. I like the idea of VPS because shortly thereafter, I would probably get a second box that was also a good, meaty server, and provide load balancing and failover between them with the VMWare infrastructure tools.

    Hosting is not and probably will not be our primary business, but we have to keep our servers up in order to serve our sites, so it's not much more work to ensure that the hardware and such are up for others sharing the same server. But, what goes on in your VPS would be your responsibility. At the moment, I'm just trying to guage interest. So, I'm guaging. Would anybody be interested in such an arrangement?

    Overall, I would see this more as a partnership than a vendor/customer relationship really, so I'd like it to be a win-win for everyone involved.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
    Posts
    104
    What kind of pricing are we talking?

  3. #3
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Posts
    560
    So how much were you looking for each "partner" to put in? I think it's a good idea, just need some moe info.

  4. #4
    I'm not really sure, though obviously it'd have to be in line with what most other vps services were offering. I guess I'm just trying to guage interest at the moment and I'm trying to find a good colo facility to host it out of, and price out the VMWare software and a good server. I'm looking at Dell 68xx servers right now. I'm leaning toward the VMWare software because, though it's not really "made" for virtual hosting in the sense of renting out discrete VPS's like Virtuozzo's software, from what I've read their VMWare infrastructure is more robust. I love the fact that it can run on the bare metal hardware instead of requiring a host operating system, and that it sounds like it is much more efficient than Virtuozzo.

    I know Linux admin pretty well, but have never messed with VPS yet. So, before I get too far on this I plan to setup a VMWare cluster here in the office to see how difficult it is to setup and maintain, though the sysadmins I know say it's pretty braindead simple.

    Overall, I'm glad to see some people are interested, that's what I really wanted to know. I want to see if it's even worth spending a lot of time researching this if when I'm done I don't have anybody interested in taking advantage of the box... I think pricing, as mentioned above, would be competitive, with a small exception that the power of the box would not be oversold, like many VPS hosts do (which I discovered the hard way). The big benefit I see to going this way is that if I can get a pair of beefy servers up, then perhaps VPS' could be sold at the same rough pricing and performance as a low end dedi box, but would be much more fault tolerant. That would come about because low end dedi boxes usually do not have RAID, redundant power supplies, redundant disc controllers, etc. along with the failover features that come with VMWare Infrastructure.

    In the long run I'm even toying around with the idea of building a shared environment with a beefy shared mysql server and so on...

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
    Posts
    104
    I guess you werent kidding when you said you were going beefy

  6. #6
    Yep. Personally, I like Heinz 57 sauce with my servers...

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Location
    WebHostingTalk
    Posts
    8,901
    * Moved to Other Hosting Related Offers and Requests

    Sirius
    I support the Human Rights Campaign!
    Moving to the Tampa, Florida area? Check out life in the suburbs in Trinity, Florida.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Dec 2005
    Posts
    326
    you might want to try.

    http://www.superbservers.net/services/colo.php

    I've been with superbhosting for a few years now... pretty reliable service. It's not the cheapest but you're getting a good reliable service. If you go with them make a point of telling me how they are on the server side.

    Thanks

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