I switched from running Windows on my laptop four years ago and using Ubuntu linux instead and even though I’ve since switched to a Mac as my day-to-day machine, once I’d got to grips with the terminal and the sheer power of it, it’s pretty difficult to go back. At the same time I switched from using Windows as a hosting platform (something I’d had a good deal of experience with), to a dedicated server running red hat linux. Over the last four years I’ve got very used to having root access to a range of servers running various linux distributions – these being used to host the range of sites and web applications belonging to the companies I’ve been involved in.

When it came to getting some hosting for myself then, it had to be linux. But I really didn’t want to have to pay the price for a full dedicated server, so I looked around for some linux based shared hosting. Now obviously there’s loads of it. But the more I looked, even though the price was good, I found it difficult to find out just what you got for your money.

I need PHP5 and mySQL as a base, and that’s not a problem – most hosting companies do that. But they restrict how many databases you have, or the size of those databases. And in terms of PHP because you don’t have control over the PHP install in itself you’ve no guarantee that they’ll have the extensions that you need, and on most of the sites they don’t tell you what actually is included. It’s a frustrating experience – chances are you’re going to end up with a system that doesn’t do quite what you need it to. And that wasn’t an option to me.

So, at this point I’d almost resigned myself to paying for a dedicated machine, but before I did I thought I’d just have a quick look to see how prices for Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Grid hosting were doing these days. On a dedicated server if your hard drive fails, there’s a power outage or any other machine problem you (and your clients) are offline instantly until it’s fixed. With cloud technology, your content is distributed over many machines ensuring that you don’t have a single point of failure, while offering you all the other benefits of a dedicated server.

Previously when I’ve looked at this sort of hosting it’s been cost-prohibitive, and I fully expected it still to be the case. But then I stumbled across VPS.net. Owned by the UK2 Group (who also operate UK2.net, which has been running for more than ten years now), VPS.net is a complete cloud based offering.

First of all you pick your number of nodes, each being a self contained chunk of processing power, memory and hard drive space. The more you buy the cheaper each costs, but I started with two nodes for the price of £28 a month. Once you’ve signed up, you’re taken into an easy-to-use administration console. Here you simply ‘build’ your server by assigning a certain amount of nodes to it and picking an operating system, or choose from a dizzying array of turn-key installs offering everything from a basic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack to an Asterix internet telephony server. And that’s it. Within a minute or so you get root access to your new machine, and you’re ready to go.

To say I was amazed is a slight understatement. But then I realised that you could at any point add or remove nodes on an existing server via simple admin interface with only a minute or so of downtime, and you can even purchase additional nodes on a day basis just in case you’ve got something big coming up. You can grab a snapshot backup at any stage too, and should you ever need to, replacing the live machine with a backup takes around two minutes in the tests I’ve done so far. Very, very impressive stuff.

I’ve been using VPS.net for a month or so now, and aside from some issues they had with their SAN a couple of weeks ago that slowed things down a little, the quality, speed, support and general service has been great. So much so that I can’t quite imagine going back to a dedicated server, even this soon.

If you’re considering hosting and you want all the power of a dedicated server but also the security, resilience and scaleability of a VPS cloud, and all for a very reasonable cost you should definitely check them out – they come highly recommended.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Cloud Hosting – VPS.net