VPS and Ram

[mainlime]

Hi

I'm looking at going for either VPS or dedicated hosting for a few websites (a mix of Wordpress, Joomla and custom Ruby on Rails). Traffic is likely to be low to medium.

I'm confused about memory on VPS. Most of the ones I've seen start at 128MB going up to about 512MB (at prices approaching those of dedicated servers). Now, to me, that all sounds woefully low for a server. If I was getting a dedicated server I'd be looking at a gig at least. Is there something I'm missing?

I've seen reference to guaranteed versus burstable memory. I presume burstable means my server can take up to that amount for a short time but only if it happens to be available on the host - no guarantee. Given that traffic to my sites is likely to be bursty should I be paying more attention to the guaranteed or the burstable level of memory?

I'll be running Linux, Apache, MySQL BTW.

[Dan Grossman]

Yes, it's woefully low. That's how they can sell 8-16 VPS's with a single 4GB server. If you really expect low traffic, then maybe that's enough memory for you. If you're doing custom coding and you know you need more memory than that, your own server's always the way to go.

[samsm]

The Rails site alone is going to eat 50 MB per Mongrel, possibly 200 MB per Mongrel with something like Rmagick in the mix. Two Mongrels is recommended for even smaller sites, so that's maybe 100+ MB right there.

I'm a fan of Slicehost for cheap flexibility ($20 256 MB ram), but once you reach $70/month, you are very close to the cost for Amazon EC2: 1.75 GB ram, $0.10/hour, $.18/GB transfer.

There's really no reason to favor VPS or dedicated ... it's strictly a value proposition. Typically the under $100 dedicated server is going to be fairly low end, lower end chip, no RAID, etc ... but you aren't sharing with anyone. So, you take everything into consideration when you make your purchase.

If you want to make sure that 256 or 512 or whatever will be enough, create a virtual machine with that much ram on your development system and do some tests.

[Dan Grossman]

I'm a fan of Slicehost for cheap flexibility ($20 256 MB ram), but once you reach $70/month, you are very close to the cost for Amazon EC2: 1.75 GB ram, $0.10/hour, $.18/GB transfer.

So many things I want to do with EC2... and I just got a mail last week that they'll be accepting more beta accounts very shortly.

[samsm]

So many things I want to do with EC2... and I just got a mail last week that they'll be accepting more beta accounts very shortly.

Make sure you have an S3 account activated ... I think they don't let you in EC2 without S3.

[Dan Grossman]

Make sure you have an S3 account activated ... I think they don't let you in EC2 without S3.

I do

[charlesgan]

if looking for vps host, there is a few that i see through their features. And using hosting services from them. here is what i can suggest you to take a look at:
hostgator semi-dedicated, lunarpages vps, startlogic vps

for vps, look for hosting that allow you to easily upgrading.
read user reviews. and there is host that require up to 1 week, just to install the 512 ram. which is a nightmare in waiting.

[W3Daryl]

If your looking for a VPS1 stay AWAY from Canaca, they offer Debian but sell Ubuntu, and have non existant support. My system has 280mb of ram and I find it more then enough to run my 10 site with tons of space to spare. One other tip I can give you if you see anyone offering Ensim as a control panel RUN FOR THE HILLS! I'm using VHCS2 right now and its been a rather enjoyable experience for a one person server. Cheers.

[Gene Steinberg]

If your looking for a VPS1 stay AWAY from Canaca, they offer Debian but sell Ubuntu, and have non existant support. My system has 280mb of ram and I find it more then enough to run my 10 site with tons of space to spare. One other tip I can give you if you see anyone offering Ensim as a control panel RUN FOR THE HILLS! I'm using VHCS2 right now and its been a rather enjoyable experience for a one person server. Cheers.

Well, I have a VPS-Extreme package at HostICan. I've received exemplary uptime, performance and customer support. That particular setup has 60GB storage, unmetered bandwidth (yes, that's what they say!), and 512MB RAM. That has proven to be more than sufficient for my four busy sites, which include a popular WordPress blog, a vBulletin forum, two MyBB forums, and two radio show sites with tons and tons of downloads. Never had a memory issue. Not even close.