Vps?

[phppete]

Does FQ have any plans to offer VPS/slices similar to slicehost and linode?

[hobbes]

FQ's offerings are: shared hosting, including the high-capacity shared (HC), and managed quest servers (MQS). I suppose you could claim HC is VPS-like, but that really depends on what you want out of VPS.

[phppete]

Yes I know what they offer but was wondering if future plans include VPS. :)

[hobbes]

I don't think Terra speculates much about what's in the cards, nor that a VPS would be in the deck.

At this time, I'm monitoring the cloud/grid hosting efforts to see where they end up going. Price points & pay-for-usage are very appealing. Pairing these with a management service that could balance across two of them (for reliability, fail-safe, etc) could be interesting. Yes, it would be nice to see FQ get into the game, but doesn't seem to be the niche they're after.

[Terra]

Unfortunately this is one of those things I can't really discuss right now...

At this time, the tools to make it happen aren't quite there yet as we would not be basing it on Xen - which currently has a spotted future...

However, if something like that were to go into Beta testing, I'd let you know... ;)

tag_VPS

[SneakyDave]

Please move or edit if we aren't allowed to talk about these options here...

I've tried RackSpace's cloud, and it wasn't as reliable as the sales staff says it is. I number of weird problems that weren't resolvable with a ticket, things that were working, then not working for a period of time, and then working again.

I got a "slice" right before I learned about linode, and now I wish I hadn't gone through the trouble of setting up a slicehost slice, although I haven't had any problems with the VPS service.

It'd be great to see FQ offer its own VPS option.

[Terra]

You can talk about it, I just can't discuss potential future deployments like this...

What did you not like about slicehost?

I'm still a bit put back by the number of slices they would have to put on one server for them to make a profit...

For a 256 slice, to fully populate the server, they would have to run 64 slices on it... So even with a Quad Core server, you are only guaranteed 1/16 of a CPU... It gets even worse when all those virtual machines are bottlenecked by the underlying I/O subsystem (network, storage, etc)...

Just goes without saying that things like this don't need to make sense to still sell like hot cakes... VPS's are one area were marketing will always trump technical... Clients want them, so I can no longer ignore VPS solutions, even if I don't agree with them due to funneled resource sharing technical reasons...

As far as cloud type hosting, that is extremely difficult to get right, especially trying to offer it as a generic service where no customization of scripts are needed... We saw this rather quickly when we setup a large client on one of our Cluster systems due to HTTP stateless design... The other issue is storage, and I still don't like the latency seen from networked filesystems not to mention the problems associated to file locking...

[SneakyDave]

The only problem with slicehost, from what I've seen, is that they've stagnated in features and prices. Linode offers more options, 32 bit distros & 64 bit distros (Slicehost only offers 64bit, and are beta testing some custom 32 bit distros), ability to add RAM and/or disk space to a package. I've found that 64bit Apache processes don't run well on a 256meg slice, unless a person can utilize nginx, lighthttpd, or some other light-weight web server to handle the static file load.

Since Rackspace bought Slicehost, they haven't really added much or competed on price with Linode (which is cheaper, and performance tests indicate they're faster). Slichost just added more package options, and threw in some extra bandwidth, but most customers just wanted them to compete on RAM/Price/Disk space.

One thing Slicehost offers, but Linode currently doesn't, is full image backups. Slicehost charges $5.00 a month for that.

Linode has a few more options as to which datacenter you want your VPS located (including London), I think Slicehost only has 2 data centers at the moment, and none in Europe.

Linode also users the faster Intel Xenon processors (QPI?). I think Slicehost is using AMD chips (Opterons?), but I have to find the exact article that was comparing performance.

But for the price, Linode offers more, for less money. Unless full image backups are a necessity, then Slicehost might end up being a better choice.

Linode also currently offers discounts on 1 or 2 year commitments, slicehost doesn't.

Here is a comparison done between the 2 over a year ago:
http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

I can host about 6 domains on a 256 meg slice (LAMP stack) that are low traffic (2 wordpress, 1 custom PHP app,and 3 static HTML sites) for the $20.00 minimum with slicehost. I have to use nginx to do it though. Most Apache stalwarts are using at least the 512 meg slice for 1 or 2 dedicated sites. And I can't run anything like APC caching on a 256 meg slice without it fragmenting 100% within a few hours.

Another thing about slicehost is that you can use Rackspace's email app to host your email so that you don't have to setup postfix, qmail, or whatever on the server to store, process, and filter user email. I don't think Linode offers anything like that at the moment.

[Matt]

Slicehost isn't the only VPS out there and Servint is an example I've come across of a company that really does the VPS thing right. A $20 VPS sounds a bit too commoditized.

The only problem with slicehost, from what I've seen, is that they've stagnated in features and prices.I have zero experience with Slicehost, but having a homogeneous architecture should enable a company to better support its clients. There are so many variables in the number of applications that a host has to support, that standardizing on a particular operating system and hardware set helps to reduce chaos.

VPS's are one area were marketing will always trump technicalThe advantage of a VPS is the flexibility to build your own environment without incurring the cost of a dedicated server or the risk of upsetting other users on the machine. The fact that SneakyDave runs nginx is a perfect example.

I get the impression that VPS is a pretty mature technology at this point (certainly it has become mainstream). While it may not be suitable for $5/mo budget hosting, I'm willing to bet that in the near future virtually every "shared hosting" account will be running within a VPS.

-Matt

[SneakyDave]

Terra...just curious, you said

as we would not be basing it on Xen - which currently has a spotted future...

Xen appears to be the most popular open source virtualization method out there, just curious as to why it might have a spotted future, multiple forks, or ????

Regarding Matt's comments, yes, there is a little bit of a comforting factor to know that whatever I put on my VPS shouldn't affect anybody's MySQL connections, processing speed, writable files, and the like. I should be able to only abuse myself.

But obviously, with a VPS, you really have to have a technical background in order to do upgrades, configure applications/security, etc. because you have to do all that yourself. I've seen a few people that only know how to ftp a Wordpress installation try to configure their VPS, and they get very frustrated.

I only run nginx with Apache because of the memory hit httpd processes take. It is fairly fast and light with static content, but it presents other challenges if you want nginx to serve static content, and send PHP requests to Apache. They're minor issues, but I've had good luck with it.

[phppete]

Regarding Matt's comments, yes, there is a little bit of a comforting factor to know that whatever I put on my VPS shouldn't affect anybody's MySQL connections, processing speed, writable files, and the like. I should be able to only abuse myself.

That isn't true is it, anyone on the same box that is going swap happy can cause I/O to slow you down to a crawl. I could be wrong but from the little I have read the next version of XEN uses tokens to try to control that.

[SneakyDave]

That may be, I haven't heard of that condition with Slicehost, or other VPS', or at least haven't heard anybody wondering out loud why their I/O or other resources are suddenly acting flaky, and getting an answer that somebody else is abusing it.

That's why I said "my VPS shouldn't affect anybody's else' system". I haven't heard any cases of that happening, but I suspect it also has to do with the management of the instances themselves, as I'm sure you can overbook VPS' just like shared hosting.

I haven't seen this type of text on Slicehost, but Linode gives some estimates on how many virtual instances on a host, but who knows how accurate these numbers are:
How many Linodes share a host?

Linodes of the same plan are grouped together onto a host. We adjust the number of slots on each host according to its resources and hardware specification. On average, a Linode 360 host has 40 Linodes on it. A Linode 540 host has on average 30. Linode 720 host: 20 Linodes; Linode 1080 host: 15; Linode 1440 host: 10; Linode 2880: 5.

[phppete]

Slicehost don't have that problem, others do, look at webhostingtalk.com in the VPS forum and you will see plenty of threads relating to it.