Web hosting.......
Discussion
Just a quikke.....
Does anyone have any experience of "Quality of Service" with fasthosts.
I'm keen to find cheap dedicated server hosting with with the most minimal package (to keep costs down) but that supports genuine CGI binaries.
They're saying that they'll do;
Windows 2003 Web edition
IIS6
256kbit pipe
2.4G Celeron, 512M Ram, 80G IDE
£35 a month.
I have no testamonials, and I'm not sure if I could do a similar package cheaper?
Any ideas?
Does anyone have any experience of "Quality of Service" with fasthosts.
I'm keen to find cheap dedicated server hosting with with the most minimal package (to keep costs down) but that supports genuine CGI binaries.
They're saying that they'll do;
Windows 2003 Web edition
IIS6
256kbit pipe
2.4G Celeron, 512M Ram, 80G IDE
£35 a month.
I have no testamonials, and I'm not sure if I could do a similar package cheaper?
Any ideas?
JamieBeeston said:
Given windows 2003 Web costs £15 a month
The power to run the server will cost £40-50 a month
the server itself will cost £20-30 a month (over 2-3 years)
The profit on such a server would be £10ish a month!
that comes in at £105 a month....
Make your own judgement!
J
The power to run the server will cost £40-50 a month
the server itself will cost £20-30 a month (over 2-3 years)
The profit on such a server would be £10ish a month!
that comes in at £105 a month....
Make your own judgement!
J
I understand entirely where you're coming from. You may or may not have worked out that I had dialogue with sales@reg1... earlier today. I guess my point is simply that I don't have much (any) money to throw about.
I guess if I had a bit more confidence maybe my decision making would have turned out different. I'm still digging about on this subject, and TBH I'm finding quite a few negative comments about fasthosts. I think, however, I'm going to risk it.
The simple situation is that they provide what I need (and no more) at a price that I can probably bear. Most significantly I'm the sort that that is inspired by a wealth of written information, such that I understand clearly what I'm going to get. TBH that wasn't something I found forthcoming with SS and R1.
I also appreciate that there are going to be people that want to run the high level software they're given, and work with that. Maybe it's true that these sorts are going to be scared off by to much tech. I guess I'm coming at it from a different perspective (and in truth the whole ambiguity of the high level stuff scares me). You know where you are with a Byte. Miracles in miniature.
I guess I'm just bracing myself now, for that first fatal trashy crashy lockout, at my expense of a squillion megapounds per milisecond. They're more expensive than £99 p/h!
If all you need is a cheap host, without a care for the SLA or uptime, then simply go for the cheap host.. not everyone NEEDS the uptime or confidence in the network / support..
check out uk2.net, very very cheap.
It's different strokes for different folks...
Myself, I'm targeted at those who are happy and prepared to pay a top quality amount for a top quality service, but I'll readily admit there is a whole separate market out there whom want to pay 'bottom barrel' and can only expect 'bottom barrel' service... that's just not where we're at.
If you want cheap as chips, try a VPS / Virtual Server offering... similar levels of control to a Dedicated server, with alot less overhead...
Alas this isn't Utopia, so if you want something... you either need to pay for it, or run the risk of not paying and just crossing your fingers that it maybe comes off...
A decent, stable and reliable service for a dedicated server these days wont come easily for < £100 pcm...
Given the major EU data centres now charge upwards of £2.5k a cabinet (with power) you're looking at £70 a u (with an amp!) cost, let alone support and <gasp> profit!
GL with it either way
J
JamieBeeston said:
If all you need is a cheap host, without a care for the SLA or uptime, then simply go for the cheap host.. not everyone NEEDS the uptime or confidence in the network / support..
check out uk2.net, very very cheap.
It's different strokes for different folks...
Myself, I'm targeted at those who are happy and prepared to pay a top quality amount for a top quality service, but I'll readily admit there is a whole separate market out there whom want to pay 'bottom barrel' and can only expect 'bottom barrel' service... that's just not where we're at.
If you want cheap as chips, try a VPS / Virtual Server offering... similar levels of control to a Dedicated server, with alot less overhead...
Alas this isn't Utopia, so if you want something... you either need to pay for it, or run the risk of not paying and just crossing your fingers that it maybe comes off...
A decent, stable and reliable service for a dedicated server these days wont come easily for < £100 pcm...
Given the major EU data centres now charge upwards of £2.5k a cabinet (with power) you're looking at £70 a u (with an amp!) cost, let alone support and <gasp> profit!
GL with it either way
J
I guess I'm kinda keen on the separate server deal simply because I'll be afforded a level of protection from all of the other nutters like me.
I'm not too worried about causing problems, I don't cause that many here, and I'm not so bad that my threads fall apart under load. My biggest worry is taking a fnancial hit for something I didn't cause. Uptime isn't yet a huge issue, I don't have any customers.
Another worry is being sold some sort of deal where I'm on a virtual server, but they're telling me that I'm on my own machine. I doubt that I'd not know because I'm likely to have PSAPI, the problem for me is what do I do about it. I can see the situation where people are spouting technobabble at me, and denying the truth. Aint that the way of the world these days.
If I could afford bloat out a supercomputer, I'd be a happy man. (Some people might rightly assert that that's what I want to do anyhow)
Edited by dilbert on Friday 24th November 02:23
I've heard that certain cheap £39 a month deals are indeed on Virtual servers as opposed to physical servers... couldnt possibly comment tho
the long and short is simple..
you take a Dedi, you get a Dedi, you crash it, you click the Reboot button in the Control Panel
You kill it, you click the reboot button in the control panel
you break it, you click the reboot button in the control panel
you murder it, you pay for the engineer to reformat / fix it... it's only fair that those who take the support time pay for it.. saves the rest from covering unnecessary costs!
I know with us, you Defo get your own dedicated server, with the other bargain basement if it sounds too cheap, there's a reason providers then you maybe don't!... you ... well... don't
The era of cheap colo is dead
The era of cheap servers is dieing a quick death..
the only way to get cheap anything in this industry is to either :-
go to the USA
go up north
mislead your client-base in to thinking they're getting something they simply aren't!
</experience dictated pessimism!>
J
Thats not my seen
When you say virtual server in the context of windows do you mean running in VMWare Server/ESX? If so I don't see the issue, you can reboot when you want, the OSs are isolated, cpu shares are split properly, RAM is allocated.
Running a physical server that takes £50 a month to power but running say 5 VM's on it makes sense to me as long as the users are told what equivilent cpu power they are getting. You have to run a lot of code for a lot of users to max out the cpus all the time just running IIS so it makes sense to use VMWare.
Running a physical server that takes £50 a month to power but running say 5 VM's on it makes sense to me as long as the users are told what equivilent cpu power they are getting. You have to run a lot of code for a lot of users to max out the cpus all the time just running IIS so it makes sense to use VMWare.
dilbert said:
I guess I'm kinda keen on the separate server deal simply because I'll be afforded a level of protection from all of the other nutters like me. I'm not too worried about causing problems, I don't cause that many here, and I'm not so bad that my threads fall apart under load.
My biggest worry is taking a fnancial hit for something I didn't cause. Uptime isn't yet a huge issue, I don't have any customers.
I'm not too worried about causing problems, I don't cause that many here, and I'm not so bad that my threads fall apart under load. My biggest worry is taking a fnancial hit for something I didn't cause. Uptime isn't yet a huge issue, I don't have any customers.
For a physical reliability point of view, the fasthosts virtual packages are hosted on a far more resilient platform than their dedicateds (which incidentally, are manufactured in-house). I've had a fasthosts bog standard account for years and it's only gone down once due to a server fault.
It's interesting that you should say that.
I'd not had previou experience of "VMWare", so I've been doing some digging. These packages seem to be loaded outside of the OS, and provide (presumably) a more limited GUI that allows instances of operating systems to be loaded.
As far as I can see, the context of each operating system is separately maintained and independantly switchable. From the perspective of my earlier statement about PSAPI, this approach ought to be enough to make it appear as though a virtual instance of an OS is also a unique instance on a machine.
The thing is though, that there are things that you can do from the perspective of concurrency which are specific not just to the instance of the the OS, but also the machine. I'm thinking here of things like setting the interrupt request level and perhaps paging.
It leads me to wonder exactly how it is that "VMWare" might avoid splitting indivisible events with peripherals. It must be very difficult, if not impossible. More importantly though there must be issues with memory handling. I've never tried to suggest that modern OS's are compact, but if one has a situation where an application (fully inclusive of dirvers kernel and multiple user mode processes) requires say 300M of data space, clearly this is going to require some degree of swapping out to disk, and in general that's going to be expensive in time.
As an alternative, it may be the case that a full machine level virtualisation engine is running. This would potentially mean that all binaries are interpreted. Maybe there is a sort of middle ground where some of the binary is interpreted, and some executed directly.
Only full interpretation offers the flexibility claimed, but it has the limitation of overall performance being directly drained.
Imagine a java application running in a JVM. It's perhaps synchronized with a .NET application it'sself interpreted, where each application runs under a different OS, both of which are virtualised on the same machine.
It's an expensive nightmare. Especially for the little guy. You can do all of that with one function call. All you need to know is the calling convention for the environment you want to communicate with. Bang that'll be 20 cycles to stack and one jump. Total time (cache hit) maybe 20ns. Compared with previous, and the enevitable cache misses, one might be looking at more than half a second.
Overall I've come to the conlusion, with limited knowledge about "VMWare", that the ideal picture is one of; Run this software execute multiple clients. I'm guessing that the picture is far more grey in practice. Maybe colocation of simple sites is a good example of an application for VMWare, I don't I'd argue that. I just can't see it being a vision of everybodys future though. It's like 3G, who needs it?
I'd not had previou experience of "VMWare", so I've been doing some digging. These packages seem to be loaded outside of the OS, and provide (presumably) a more limited GUI that allows instances of operating systems to be loaded.
As far as I can see, the context of each operating system is separately maintained and independantly switchable. From the perspective of my earlier statement about PSAPI, this approach ought to be enough to make it appear as though a virtual instance of an OS is also a unique instance on a machine.
The thing is though, that there are things that you can do from the perspective of concurrency which are specific not just to the instance of the the OS, but also the machine. I'm thinking here of things like setting the interrupt request level and perhaps paging.
It leads me to wonder exactly how it is that "VMWare" might avoid splitting indivisible events with peripherals. It must be very difficult, if not impossible. More importantly though there must be issues with memory handling. I've never tried to suggest that modern OS's are compact, but if one has a situation where an application (fully inclusive of dirvers kernel and multiple user mode processes) requires say 300M of data space, clearly this is going to require some degree of swapping out to disk, and in general that's going to be expensive in time.
As an alternative, it may be the case that a full machine level virtualisation engine is running. This would potentially mean that all binaries are interpreted. Maybe there is a sort of middle ground where some of the binary is interpreted, and some executed directly.
Only full interpretation offers the flexibility claimed, but it has the limitation of overall performance being directly drained.
Imagine a java application running in a JVM. It's perhaps synchronized with a .NET application it'sself interpreted, where each application runs under a different OS, both of which are virtualised on the same machine.
It's an expensive nightmare. Especially for the little guy. You can do all of that with one function call. All you need to know is the calling convention for the environment you want to communicate with. Bang that'll be 20 cycles to stack and one jump. Total time (cache hit) maybe 20ns. Compared with previous, and the enevitable cache misses, one might be looking at more than half a second.
Overall I've come to the conlusion, with limited knowledge about "VMWare", that the ideal picture is one of; Run this software execute multiple clients. I'm guessing that the picture is far more grey in practice. Maybe colocation of simple sites is a good example of an application for VMWare, I don't I'd argue that. I just can't see it being a vision of everybodys future though. It's like 3G, who needs it?
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