The Flow of Consciousness

I’m pretty sure that I’ve got my new VPS running finally. It’s taken me about eight hours to iron out the bugs of moving from Dapper to Feisty.

A big thanks to my host, colo4jax. Ray Barnes has been incredibly ready to help at any time of the day or night and I really appreciate his time and depth of knowledge and breadth of experience he’s shared with me.

What are the advantages of using a VPS instead of a dedicated server, colocation, or shared hosting?

Unlike shared hosting, I have full control of the environment in which I’m working. I can install whatever software I need, update it as I see fit, and customize it to my requirements. I don’t have to worry about other customers getting hacked and affecting my files, too—the only way that a hack could take me out is by attacking my VPS or the host machine, and the latter is virtually impenetrable, as it has no need to communicate with the ‘net other than to facilitate its hosted VPS images.

Unlike dedicated server or colocation, it’s cheap and I don’t have to worry about hardware failures as much. If a dedicated goes down or a colocated server fries, the host or you must replace the parts, leading to expensive downtime and frustration. If my VPS’s host machine dies, colo4jax can simply move the image to another machine or restore it from a backup and I’m back in action. It’s also much cheaper. $20/mo for 20 GB of storage, 250 GB of transfer, and 256 MB of RAM? Hard to beat it.

There are, however, a few disadvantages. Other VPSes on the same host machine compete for CPU time, as well as with the host machine’s OS. The host OS is generally pretty stripped and not running anything more than the VPSes and maybe some sort of remote access (ssh, vnc, etc.). RAM is set—no one VPS can dominate the RAM. Then again, no one VPS can dominate the CPU thanks to the virtualization software. This makes VPSes less powerful than a hardware server, but for a low traffic server, it’s perfect.

One of my goals in the future when I have a lots of money is to buy four Mac Minis and put them into a 2U case and colocate them somewhere. Each would have two VPSes running, so I’d turn my four servers into twelve and take over the Internets. Mwahaha.