Ask Slashdot: Service-Heavy FOSS Hosting? 75
An anonymous reader writes "For many of us our hosting providers are a way to hone our skills as well as run a business. Which provider out there gives the best bang for the buck for a FOSS developer? Virtually everybody provides Perl, PHP, Ruby, MySQL / MariaDB etc. but where can one get easy and cheap access to a stuff like NodeJS and Big Data? Companies such as Pair Networks are great but not quite on the mark with any of their service offerings for somebody looking to test out real world scenarios with these technologies from a hosted stance. Obviously hosting from home is always an option but that has the penalty of administration, backup, DR planning, bigger security footprint etc. and for those of us whose time is balanced between making money and friends / family time that's not very appealing."
VPSs (Score:5, Insightful)
VPSs have gotten so cheap and full-featured, I don't know why anyone who has IT knowledge would host any more.
I am legacy hosting on Dreamhost for $10 a month. My MySQL instance has become so slow, I have removed it from my Nagios check. Their old in-house mail web interface is slow as anything (new accounts go to Google Mail, they may have a migration option). Server load can exceed 100, server load is usually many multiples of the number of processors. Dreamhost was considered one of the good web service providers.
Meanwhile for $16 plus bandwidth I get my own VPS on Rackspace, 20 gigs disk space, 512MB RAM, I can install whatever I want. Linode - 1024MB RAM, first 2 TB of bandwidth free, 24 gig hard drive. I put my own Apache in, my own MySQL. I even run BIND 8 on them. Right now I'm using Perl on the server, but I'm free to use whatever I want. And if $16 is too rich for you a month, you can find even cheaper VPSs. Linode and Rackspace have had a decent QoS, and my business is profitable, so I pay a little more.
Re:linode or similar (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do you say that? I've been using them for ages with no issues. Yes, their customer side stuff was recently hacked, they notified us real quick. Never an issue with my hosts running on their service though...
So... why utter shit?