Well, I’ve finally decided how to handle my Web hosting issues. Right now I have an account at pair.com that I’m not using, and an account at TextDrive that works fitfully. A very kind reader offered to host rc3.org on his dedicated box free of charge (like two months ago), but I haven’t moved this site over there yet. If I had done that, I was going to move some other stuff (like mail) back to pair.com so as to avoid giving him too much of a support burden and cancel my TextDrive account. Then I came up with this brilliant idea for a site that I wanted to implement using Ruby on Rails (for synergy with what I’m doing at work). My idea for that was to buy yet more hosting from one of those companies that gives you a virtual server on a partitioned physical server, so that I wouldn’t have to pay much and could break things as badly as I wanted.
At that point I’d be paying pair.com, some yet to be named hosting provider, and causing labor for my generous friend. As I was SSHing into his box yesterday, I noticed the name of his hosting provider, Layered Technologies. I checked out their prices, and they’re pretty affordable (well, they range from pretty affordable to really expensive). You can get their bottom line server for $65 per month with no contract. Pair.com has the specs for all of their servers published online. The specs on the server from Layered Tech are comparable to the specs on the server I shared with 50 other people at Pair.com, so I think I’ll be fine in that regard.
The real victim here will be my friends who are Linux experts. Be prepared for a barrage of stupid questions. (I’m going with Fedora Core 4 as the operating system on the server because Red Hat is what my Linux-loving friends know best.)
February 7, 2006 at 9:44 am
I’m going to point out up front that I know nothing about RedHat. Now if you’d have gone with Debian I’d be on the hook.
I’m kind of shocked by those prices, I’ve been shopping around (not something I do terribly well) lately for a decent, affordable solution to host a client’s Rails app, and $65/mo usually gets a middle of the road vserver.
Wonder how they’re doing it. Definitely let us know how it goes.
February 7, 2006 at 9:47 am
I’ve been considering getting my own server as well but the one thing that holds me back is worrying about keeping the OS patched up. Is that much of a concern for you or is there an automated way to keep up to date?
February 7, 2006 at 12:19 pm
I’m running Fedora Core 4 on the new server, and you can set up yum (the package manager) to automatically download and install any updates to packages it manages so that you don’t have to deal with it. Then the only trick is to use yum to manage everything. (Easier said than done in some cases, but if you can do it, it makes life a lot easier.)
May 25, 2006 at 5:20 am
One thing is true. The less you pay the more you suffer if something brakes.