RW Forum's new home should be....

[Melbosa]

I know some of us have had experiences with Various hosting solutions out there, and wanted to see if there was a preference amoung us all on whom to use.  Notice GoDaddy is NOT on the list due to my own experience of moving off their platforms for various reasons.  It may very well come down to costs in the end but I wanted to make sure everyone had a say before we move.

We are looking to move to a full VPS hosting service this time, not a shared web server like our current GoDaddy hosting is today.

Some things to note about the options there:

Amazon
I personally have no experience with them as a host, but they are offering solutions free for a 1 year subscription providing your usage doesn't exceed a threshold per month.  This is tempting knowing that we are a small set of users.

Microsoft
I added them because I have experience with Azure through NAIT.  I know what the offerings are and know what the models look like.  I just don't think the cost is worth it through them.

DigitalOcean
Cost effective and I have one VPS already there myself.  Service is alright but find the advancement of the VPS infrastructure is slow.

Rackspace
I know they are a player in the VPS space, but I have no experience what so ever there.

Linode
This one was actually shared with me first by Cova (remember that guy?).  Currently this is the VPS hosting service I choose for most of my clients.  They are cheap. Their admin web interface, while functional and robust, is very ugly and not eye friendly.  They actively are updating their infrastructure very aggressively; I've been using them for almost 2 years and have gotten hardware updates and resource increases for free 3 times on the same plan.  And as a side note, Fragapalooza is hosted there.


So yeah, let us Admins know your thoughts of where we could move this bad boy of a forum!

[Tom]

I've heard about more downtime on Linode vs the others.

I have been thinking about using Linode for things that don't require 2-3 nines.

I currently exclusivly use DigitalOcean. They are stable, and inexpensive, and performance is good. Support is great. You are correct that their advancement is slow, and its one of the things that's made me think about moving off it. But so far I haven't found anything as attractive for my use cases.

From what I've heard about Rackspace is thats where you go if you want killer uptime and support. If you need "fanatical support", go rackspace. Its not cheap. But it's also not prohibitively expensive for mission critical apps.

I'd vote DO just cause I'm familiar with it, its cheap and stable.

[Lazybones]

I don't have too much opinion on the low demand space.  Most of what I deal with is in Azure and Windows / SQL instances so it isn't to relevant.

I believe AWS actually has a few confusing options available for low demand systems including some kind of personal server plan that was released when the cheap Amazon cloud drive was released. I will see if I can find the relevant link.

[Melbosa]

I've heard about more downtime on Linode vs the others.

I have been thinking about using Linode for things that don't require 2-3 nines.

Just did a quick check on my emails from both DigitalOcean and Linode about service outages (as I have VPS on both).

In a 2 year span for both, DigitalOcean sent me 4 emails about unscheduled outages, Linode 6 emails.  So yep they were down more.  Important to note that these notices were only the unscheduled outages, and all were failover hardware notices.  Outages were no more than 1-2m for both providers.

In the same 2 year span for both, DigitalOcean had 1 scheduled outage due to upgrades/infrastructure work, Linode had 6.  DigitalOcean's outage was 3h, Linode's were from 30m to 2h.  But that might be because of the aggressiveness of Linode's infrastructure upgrades vs DigialOcean.  Important to note here, in the 2 years with DigitalOcean I have yet to receive expanded resources or updated infrastructure (to my knowledge) in the same plan vs Linode's 3 in the same time frame.


So my two cents in comparisons - DO is like Redhat/CentOS/LTSB OSes - you stick to a stable platform release for solid up-time, Linode is like a more evolving platform keeping you more current but incurring a slight increase in downtime.  For our needs, I'm not sure DO's higher cost over Linode (not much higher mind you, but is higher) is worth the marginal increase in outages; again all based on my past 2 years experience.

[Melbosa]

I believe AWS actually has a few confusing options available for low demand systems including some kind of personal server plan that was released when the cheap Amazon cloud drive was released. I will see if I can find the relevant link.

Yeah I remember this as well as the Free 1 Year stuff they are offering right now.  I've spent a couple of days trying to figure it all out from their website documentation, and damn right its confusing.

[Melbosa]

Guess with AWS we have 1 year free to decide if we like it...

[Lazybones]

Guess with AWS we have 1 year free to decide if we like it...

Down side to that is unknown future cost... but we we keep things relatively simple moving should not be too hard.

[Lazybones]

Found the cheap amazon personal server option.

https://amazonlightsail.com/

Edit: need to check if it is too limited however.

Edit2: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/aws-announces-virtual-private-servers-starting-at-5-a-month/ some description of the service.

[Tom]

The question is if it uses normal AWS instances under the hood, if so, it'd have just as much downtime (which is not insignificant, just ask netflix and their chaos monkey).

[Melbosa]

So anyone else want to weigh in on this?  Only two votes so far.

[Thorin]

I have no experience with any of them.  The cheapest non-GoDaddy I'm sure will be fine.

[Darren Dirt]

Just like the forum software, my interest and hope is simply long-term sustainability/stability with little investment required by my selfless friends to keep it running smoothly.

GL in making the right decision buddies. Many thanks.

[Lazybones]

My only push is HTTPS/TLS support which is a limitation of the current host.. Don't like logging into things in the clear and well don't like the fact people can snoop the traffic.