Opening up Google Reader this morning, I found this post on PHPDeveloper.org’s RSS feed. They use Xen hypervisor on their big beefy servers to provide what they call “slices” (i.e. virtual machines that you can do pretty much whatever you want with).
The host is called Slicehost, and the provide VMs of 256mb RAM up to 15.5GB RAM (!). Prices for the smallest “slice” is $20 (£13.37) per month, which is pretty reasonable for the muck-around equivalent of your own dedicated server. The beauty of it is that the resources you pay for are reserved, so you won’t find some other “slice” on the same server as you using up your RAM or CPU time when you need it the most. Of course, these VMs aren’t just limited to development servers, upwards from the 1GB slice is the equivalent of your own dedicated server, so is also more than suited to production servers, especially as initially Slicehost was meant for business and production needs. Bandwidth is pretty reasonable as well - 100GB per month for the base package. Personally I wish something like this had come along before I bought 1and1 hosting for 2 years, heh! Oh well.
Check out Slicehost here!
November 19th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
My site is being hosted out of a VPS with linode.com. It’s not my server, it’s a friends, but i’d recommend them and I know my mate (http://kevinsnet.com/) would too. Mine (or his) is a UML (User-Mode-Linux) VPS, a different kind of virtualisation, but they also offer Xen hosts with BSD in. Very good customer support, forums, IRC channel, the works. Check them out.
November 21st, 2008 at 5:22 pm
£13.37?
Their pricing structure really is leet!