I've come to that point where I'm sick of having servers in my basement, dealing with a static DSL price, worrying about server crashes and backups and maintaining software and email. It's 2008. I just don't need to be that kind of geek any more.
I've moved my svn code to GitHub (Free!). I need to move email, dns, and a few MT sites. It seems that for $6-10 a month, I can get a DreamHost account with Perl, MySQL, Python, Rails and all the email, ssh, domains, PHP and anything else I can want with more bandwidth caps than I'll ever use.
The price I'll save in DSL connection alone (I'll move form 5 Static IP back to the regular home user account) will pay for it 4-5 times over.
Thoughts on DreamHost?
I use dreamhost's lowest cost plan for my personal sites. They have comparably poor security, uptime and performance, but they have enormous bandwidth and disk capacity for the money -- the disk capacity was the deciding factor for me. Plus they have a pretty liberal software suite and a rather nice control panel.
I recommend them highly for personal and development sites, but I do not recommend their low-end offering for any site you actually care about.
Re:IMHO
grink on 2008-09-14T05:36:12
Plus they have a pretty liberal software suite and a rather nice control panel.
Yes, this is nice. However, they keep very tight reins on resource usage (time/cpu/memory), so it's difficult to do anything more than the most trivial software operation. (Your process will get killed by their resource monitor).
I too would recommend Linode for anything other than static-page-serving/backup.
There ARE (many) cheaper VPSes out there, but Linode seems to be the best in terms of avoiding disk failure. Personally, I've recently been burned by losing data at another VPS provider, and my time is not really worth the time/effort spent reconfiguring up a fresh box (and losing data).
Really, the extra $15-$20/month is worth it.
I just canceled my mostly doing-nothing Dreamhost account. I use Linode for everything now.
FWIW: I've been very happy w/ Bluehost since the switch.
I have about 10-20 domains currently sitting in one very cheap DreamHost account.
Positives:
Infinite (for most intents and purposes) disk and bandwidth, great control panel that keeps gets better, straight forward language, very low overhead to look after stuff in terms of my time. Doesn't force me to be a system administrator like most of the virtual machine places. Despite shared hosting, I can still get SSH, SVN, etc access.
Downside:
No CPU. No Memory. Less ability to do REALLY custom things.
So I have two setups. One dreamhost account that holds all the basic and bulky stuff or anything that might eventually do a ton of bandwidth, gives me a target to do online backups to, etc etc.
I also have a virtual machine elsewhere, that I run the highly customised http://svn.ali.as/ on and use as a VPN end-point when I get stuck in networks that firewall or filter too aggressively.
I'll probably move that one eventually as I'm paying more than I'd like to.
But I'll keep the DreamHost account indefinitely at this point. Not making me think to maintain all my normal websites (and giving me the option to stuff an infinite number of websites inside one account) is well worth the money.
