> Heh. Well on another consideration any "rental" will out live its cost
> effectiveness in 6 months or less. At least if you own the box, its
> useful for a long period of time.
>
> Heck I got a quad opteron, 2 gig of memory with 2 6402 HP controllers
> and 2 fully loaded MSA30s for 3k. Used of course but still.
>
> The equivalent machine brand new is 10k and the same machine from Rack
> Space is going to be well over 1200.00 a month.
>
Presumably true, but owing the gear means: 1) buying the gear; 2) buying
backup hardware if you need a "shell" or replacement gear to be handy so
if something bad happens you can get back running quickly; 3) a data
center rack to hold the server; 4) bandwidth; 5) monitoring of the
hardware and having a response team available to fix it.
The virtual private server market is interesting, but we've found
various flaws that are make our transition away from owning our own gear
and data center problematic: 1) they may not offer reverse DNS (PTR
records) for your IP which is generally needed if your application sends
out email alerts of any kind; 2) they may have nasty termination clauses
(allowing them to terminate server at any time for any reason without
notice and without giving you access to your code and data stored on the
VPS); and 3) performance will always lag as its virtualized and the
servers may be "over subscribed."
I like the Amazon EC2 solution, though the pricing is overly complex and
they suffer the "no DNS PTR" ability. But since you can buy just what
you need, you can run warm standby servers or the like and moving your
data from one to the other over the private network costs nothing
extra. I found their choice of OS confusing (we wanted CentOS, but they
have no Amazon-certified versions), too.
Does anybody have any recommendations for a good VPS provider?
Thanks,
David