Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : VPS for reliability and flexibilty and RADIUS

[bokad]

I am looking for a linux VPS to host a RADIUS server, webserver, and mySQL database. Reliability and customer service are more important than price. Need less than 1GB of storage and RAM (probably much less). Server load will be light, less than 1 transaction/request per second.

Recommendations for a provider?

(1) Is RADIUS (specifically FreeRADIUS) a program/service that would normally be offered or is VPS only for web and database hosting?

(2) Is VPS the right medium for this (vs dedicated or colo)? I chose VPS because I didn't want to have to deal with backups and hot spares, etc... I assume with VPS that the server instance is spread across multiple physical servers so it doesn't matter if a specific physical server fails?

[UNIXy]

Hi,

Originally Posted by bokad

(1) Is RADIUS (specifically FreeRADIUS) a program/service that would normally be offered or is VPS only for web and database hosting?

You can run about any software off the VPS including FreeRADIUS. All VPS nodes have an extra network hop so there might be a few more tens of milliseconds delay than usual. It could matter depending on what systems use the RADIUS.

Originally Posted by bokad

(2) Is VPS the right medium for this (vs dedicated or colo)? I chose VPS because I didn't want to have to deal with backups and hot spares, etc... I assume with VPS that the server instance is spread across multiple physical servers so it doesn't matter if a specific physical server fails?

How important is this RADIUS instance? The working purpose of a VPS is not reliability but flexibility (software flexible). There are providers that manage their VPS nodes well as to not cause systemic issues. But do know that one VPS on the same node could affect the whole hardware node including your low-load one.

Also, not all providers have failover in place. At least I wouldn't rely on it especially if your RADIUS instance fulfills an important role. Also, I wouldn't worry about hot spares and whatnot as long as the dedicated server has dual redundant power supplies, dual CPUs, mirrored RAID-1 disks, and server-grade components (Opteron and Xeon).

Regards
Joe

[ragubhat]

>> Recommendations for a provider?
>>

This Tecktonic guy does not sting on hardware resources and his Virtuozzo and OpenVZ CTs are good for the bucks you shell out.

Btw where is your location? Got a low latency connection?

[bokad]

I decided to go with a high availability dedicated hardware solution (it's virtual so the system can be moved to another physical machine if there is a harware failure but the hardware is not shared so I'm the only one using a specific hardware node) from Netriplex based on my past experiences hosting other things with them.