[NCLUG] [Poll] VPS and web mangement hosting

[Bob Proulx]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> Bob Proulx wrote:
> > could use a lot of disk space.  The sweet spot for me would be 1G of
> > ram and 40G of disk space.  That would force me into your highest
> 
> Funny, that's half the RAM and the amount of disc in of our lowest tier.

You have a very nice tier.  I am not unhappy with it.

I have always reasoned that real ram is the biggest cost limiter in
the VPS ecosystem.  It can't be overbooked, although some do overbook
it with severe consequences, and it isn't something you can be without
if you need it.  However it is possible to design memory efficient
applications.  It is also possible to sloppily consume ten times more
memory.

Memory is both cheap and expensive at the same time.  If I am buying
once it for my own machine then it is cheap.  If I am renting it
monthly then it it expensive.

> I kind of went back and forth on the disc space.  In general I've heard
> people saying, and thought myself, "disc space is cheap".  However, as
> Evelyn likes to say "Data is heavy", and the storage we use for our virtual
> hosting is not cheap, partially because it's fully replicated...

Yes.  Although RAID can be problematic in implementation it has still
saved me more times than I can remember.  I wouldn't want to be
without it.  And when there is a lot of data then taking care of it is
heavy.  Trying to scrub or fsck or restore a large filesystem is
extremely painful.

> So, when that guy came up to me at a conference and the first thing he said
> was "how cheap are your virtuals", I said "that's not what we do".  The
> question our ideal customers ask is: "How many little downtime do your
> virtuals experience in a year?"  :-)

I am okay with scheduled downtime.  :-)

Bob