End-user perspective on small office tools & technology

Young Blog Looking For A New Home

HP_serverOver the past year I’ve become acutely aware of the problems possible with blog hosts. Even the good ones have trouble periodically. I’m not seriously unhappy with my current hosting company, but I am wondering what’s better. I’m inclined to think that a bone fide dedicated server shared by a handful of users would be better than my current arrangement.

It’d be folly to think that any service < $10/mo is going to give you a meaningful slice of hardware/rackspace/bandwidth/power/support. I’ve been wondering if say 8 people were willing to pay $25/mo what they would get for their $200/mo. Fred Posner made an inquiry with a colo facility that he uses, and here’s the answer:

dual Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.40GHz stepping 04
2GB RAM
250GB drive
up to 324GB transfer per month
dedicated hardware (not VM)
auto-backup

So now the trick is to see if anyone else would see this as beneficial. Are there 6-7 other people who’d be interested in sharing a server like that? Any takers?

This Post Has 8 Comments

  3. I would have qualms attempting to share a dedicated server in the manner you describe because just too much could go wrong with so many cooks in the kitchen so to speak. You can get the exact 1/8 machine you speak of for $20/month at slicehost without all the concerns and a host of other benefits. If your still looking for a dedicated server, softlayer is the place to go in my opinion.

  4. Pair Networks has a Virtual Private Server offering. FreeBSD/512MB RAM/400GB/month traffic for $80/month, for the lowest offering:
    http://www.pair.com/services/vps/

    Though I have not used their new pairVPS service, I have been a standard hosting customer for 7 years and they have never disappointed.

  5. Don’t go there – it’s not worth it.
    My suggestion would be to go for a VPS or a cloud service.
    Check out what MediaTemple (VPS) and RackSpace (cloud) have to offer.
    Paying more than that just for blog hosting seems too much to me.

  6. Check out Linode’s VPS packages. I’m in my 6th year with them. During the few times I’ve experienced an unscheduled outage, response to tickets has been swift (a few minutes) and the issues have been mostly been resolved within 20-30 minutes.

    You’ll be expected to deploy and manage your VPS and its data yourself, but by not going the dedicated server route you’re absolved of the problem of dealing directly with hardware / network failures at the data center as a lone and not very valuable customer.

    Linode’s forums are open, all the way back to 2003, so you can check out their record on “System and Network status” warts and all. They in fact suffered their most widespread incident this week, but responded with their usual extreme dedication and good will.

    They’ve not been the greatest in customer communication, but on actually running a VPS host environment many consider Linode to be the best.

    Certainly worth considering.

    HTH,

    Cliff

  7. I have recently been checking our Square Space. It is an all in one blog platform and hosting. So far I am very impressed with this product. We are currently using WordPress and I think it is great, but the complexity keeps increasing if you are trying to do a lot of customization.

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