This is just a quick notice to let you know that I’ve recently moved this site to a new host (currently pulseheberg), and may move it to other hosts. My previous hosting was running out, and I’m taking this as an opportunity to experiment with various VPS offerings (Linux or Windows), change registrar, tweak DNS, etc.
Hopefully nothing will go wrong and it’ll be transparent, but if not, please let me know.
If you have some (even dirty/quick) notes about the migration, it could be very interresting!
Especially if you are installing a Windows Server.
So far:
– Windows 2008 VPS test went without a hitch, and performance was quite good (IIS 7, PHP in fast-cgi mode, MySQL). Installing and configuring MySQL to be less of a memory hog was the most troublesome point.
– Ubuntu 12.04 works “alright” with a few apt-get and Apache2/mod_php, but performance is less impressive, despite the hardware having higher specs.
Next in line: nginx & Windows 2012.
On the upside Windows would have the advantage of running everything I have. On the downside, there is much less choice for Windows VPS hosting (with included license, I found only OVH and Ikoula), and you get less vCore/RAM/Storage for the same price. So if I go Linux, that’s with a plan for getting DWScript up to speed in FreePascal, and/or keep Ikoula 1€ VMs for testing & demos.
Isn’t Windows Azure an option? I’m sure I’ve read some blog posts from Scott Hanselman about that he uses it. And his blog probably have many hits so, I think, whatever he uses must be stable.
I’m not a “internet server guy”, (well, I didn’t even have a blag^…), that’s why I’m asking…
^ xkcd reference.
Azure is not priced very competitively, their small website option, a shared hosting with very limited storage, is more expensive than all the dedicated VPS I’ve tested, let alone other shared hostings. Their Virtual Machines (without storage and without bandwidth) are 5 to 10 times more expensive than equivalent specs at OVH or Ikoula.
F.i. the Pulseheberg VPS I’m testing is 7€/month for 2 cores (fast Xeon E5 class), 2 GB RAM, 2 cores and 200 GB storage, the equivalent Azure offering would be between 50 & 100 €/month for the VM, plus 10 €/month for the storage, plus the bandwidth. Even the more expensive cloud instances from OVH or Ikoula are still way cheaper for what you get, and both those services have not faced outages during the last years like Azure did.
Amazon EC2 is more competitively priced, but only for higher numbers of machines. If you’ve got the traffic, it’s easy to justify EC2, while I guess Azure is more for resellers or Enterprise users locked in the MS stack. For backups, Amazon Glacier is competitive right from the first Gigabyte, and I’ve been using it for some time (though I’ve never really needed it so far, which will probably be the real test).
Of course, all those VPS are overkill for a site like this one (they could probably handle a hundred sites of the same size), but the extra headroom is nice to have for experimentations!
As you mentioned there was less choice for Windows VPS, I thought you probably should had a look in Azure. But I wasn’t aware of the price was so higher. Looking in 6 months price I’ve expected something like 50~70% more, but not 5 TIMES more.
Thanks. Hope that everything work as expected.