Amazon CloudFront is one of the cheaper CDNs, but many people worry about it’s seemingly complicated pricing scheme. Since you pay for what you use, your monthly bill is calculated based on how many gigabytes of data you transfer and how many HTTP requests are made.

You pay $0.0075 for every 10,000 HTTP requests, and $0.12 per gigabyte for North American and European visitors. The cost-per gigabyte is slightly higher for other regions, but it doesn’t go over $0.25/GB.

So how much do you end up paying for a blog with around 40,000 page views per month? $0.64.

I’ve been running CloudFront for a little while now, and I ended up paying about sixty-four cents from the 3.004GB of transfer incurred over the month of February. It’s definitely affordable, and should help take some load off your server, besides decreasing load times.

Their cloud system has been solid, with the only unscheduled downtime (that wasn’t my fault!) being a brutal Denial of Service attack that occurred a couple months after I signed up. I love the scaling features and flexibility they offer, and their support has been excellent so far. Tickets are answered quickly, their on-demand “here’s some money, please fix this for me” service is a lifesaver, and they constantly monitor their Twitter account and forum.

Two years later, I finally finished ironing the kinks out of my setup. I’m running the tiny and lightning-fast NGINX server, which servers PHP scripts through php-fpm. It uses very little RAM compared to the usual Apache setup that is the de facto standard. There’s still room for further optimization, but I’m very pleased with what I have so far.

I have to wonder: why do so many people have an issue with them? They’ve provided nothing but stellar service to me, and other bloggers who have voiced their happiness with VPS.net. I’ve noticed a recurring theme among complainers being that cPanel isn’t installed by default, so I have to wonder: are most of the dissatisfied customers people coming from shared hosting, lacking Linux skills, and not wanting to learn how to set up and administer a server?

I really wonder if they’re having a fundamental misunderstanding of the product, and they’re thinking they’re buying a managed VPS at the cheaper price of an unmanaged one. They do offer a managed service, which I have seen people write about, saying they were “shocked” that they would demand money to “set up their website.” I guess that’s why the have their new idiot-proof Cloud Hosting option now.

Slicehost customers will be given the chance to move onto the Rackspace Cloud Servers platform. The pricing is good, though. You can get the equivalent of the “256 Slice” plan for a little more than half the price, excluding bandwidth.

Of course, there are still other options for affordable VPS plans. Linode is a popular choice, and I’ve been using VPS.net for awhile now.

Rackspace to Shut Down Slicehost [The Next Web]

To get started, open the Amazon S3 Management Console, and follow these simple steps:

1) Right-click on your Amazon S3 bucket and open the Properties pane
2) Configure your root and error documents in the Website tab
3) Click Save

It seems like a good way to throw up a quick traffic-resistant website, though I imagine it could get expensive pretty quickly if it were, say, submitted to Reddit.

Here are a few resources to help you figure things out:

• HowtoForge — All sorts of Linux tutorials. They have guides to setting up server configurations on the various Linux flavors, as well as basic  introductions to Linux.
• Slicehost Article Repository — Even if you aren’t a Slicehost customer, you will find some invaluable guides and tutorials here.
• Linode Library — Much like Slicehost, Linode maintains a collection of useful tutorials.
• Official Ubuntu Documentation — Select your version of Ubuntu and look for the “Server Guide” link.
• Google! — Search engines are your friend. If you don’t know what something means or you want to learn how to do something, search for a tutorial. The chances are good that someone else has already written something on the subject.

If you really get stuck, try leaving your question on your host’s forum or on Server Fault.

The latest PHP release includes PHP-FPM, the PHP process manager.

I’ve managed to find one decent guide to compiling and setting it up so far. It looks fairly simple. I might have to give it a try sometime, as my current setup (which doesn’t use PHP-FPM) tends to hang occasionally.

We ignore the support questions and pass the savings on to you. Not lazy. Efficient.

That’s the slogan for No Support Linux Hosting, a company providing ridiculously cheap web hosting. You pay $1 per month for shared hosting with 1GB of disk space, a 10GB transfer caps, 3 MySQL databases, cPanel and 25 email accounts. Just one dollar.

It seems like a great deal for small websites or, as they suggest, someone looking to resell to clients. You pay $1 monthly to host a client’s website, charge them a few dollars, and handle the support yourself.

The billing system is interesting as well. You pre-pay a certain number of credits through PayPal, and No Support Linux Hosting dips into your pool of credits as necessary. The initial registration is free, as you don’t need to pay for anything until you actually start using the service.

$12/year for hosting is a pretty good deal. Couple it with $8.99 or so for a domain from your registrar of choice, and you can launch a website on a very tight budget.

I decided to examine the incoming search keywords for the page. The top ones, predictably, are variations of “vps.net review,” with the interesting addition of “vps.net sucks.” Surely enough, my post ranks well for the terms.

This raises an interesting question: why are so many people who think the service “sucks” searching for reviews of the company? Are they looking for a way to vent their frustration, and spite the hosting provider simultaneously?

Maybe I’m cynical, but could some of the commenters be astroturfing for rival companies? I’ve noticed that the same sort of behavior occurs with reviews of other hosts, on other websites.

Are former customers searching for places t0 malign companies they had unpleasant experiences with, or is there something more devious going on?

Many podcasters, rather than pay for ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth, use podcast syndication services like Libsyn to host their shows. Libsyn charges $12/month for unmetered bandwidth, and a monthly upload quota of 250MB. (There are a few other pricing tiers they offer, but the “libsyn250″ is probably the one most weekly hour-length podcasts will require.)

There’s another option, though.

Amazon S3 is a neat service that allows you to “pay as you go,” and host your files on Amazon’s speedy cloud servers. They charge $0.15 per gigabyte in bandwidth, as well as a monthly $0.15/GB storage fee.

I’ve been using Amazon S3 for off-site storage of my server backups for awhile, and it recently occurred to me that would be a great place to host podcast files.

If your subscribers were to download 20GB worth of podcast files in a month, for example, you would pay a mere $3. (You would technically have to pay a little more for the storage of the files, but it probably wouldn’t even be another dollar.)

If you coupled it with Amazon’s CloudFront service, a CDN that pulls from your S3 account, you could help speed up your subscribers’ downloads. (A CDN, in case you were wondering, is a service that mirrors your files across servers in different geographic locations, to ensure that your users are downloading from a nearby server.) It costs the same $0.15/per gigabyte, minus the silly “thousandth of a cent” HTTP request charges.

I wonder how many podcasters are using Amazon Web Services. It seems like a fairly affordable, and certainly reliable, option.

S3, or Simple Storage Service, is Amazon’s cheap cloud data storage system. Michael Martin, the author of the tutorial, says that his bill from last month was $2.60. ($0.15 per month per GB for stored, $0.15 per GB transferred.) Using a backup script on your server, you can automatically archive and encrypt your files and MySQL dumps, then send them off to Amazon’s servers for safekeeping.

I should start by saying that while s3 is not a free service, it’s incredibly inexpensive! My bill for the last month was $2.60, and that was with backing up a lot more than just this site! It’s the cheapest peace-of-mind ever.

Automatic Amazon S3 Backups on Ubuntu/Debian [Pro Blog Design]