History lesson aside, here’s what DigitalOcean has to offer: affordable VPS hosting with plenty of memory and fast solid-state drives. Their offerings are comparable to those of the venerable Linode, though cheaper. (The difference comes down to which is more important to you: CPU or price.)

Their cheapest plan gets you a VM with 512MB of RAM and 20GB of space for a mere five dollars per month (or $0.007/hour). That’s cheaper than a lot of shared hosting plans, for a speedy box with full root access. The plan I’m using is their $10/month option, which comes with one gigabyte of memory.

Backups and snapshots of VMs are priced reasonably, with backups costing 20% of the server’s price (e.g. $1 per month for a $5 per month server) and snapshots being $0.02 per gigabyte stored.

The service has been stable so far, and the one support ticket I opened was resolved in a timely manner. Performance-wise, there has been a definite improvement over my previous host. (It’s also nice having the server be in New York, which results in a much more favorable network latency from where I live.)

DigitalOcean has a freshly redesigned control panel, from which you can manage your servers, DNS, billing and other settings. It’s also the place where you can set up your API access if you want to manage things from a mobile app, command line utility, or even use a Vagrant provider.

I’ve been very happy with DigitalOcean since my big switch, and definitely recommend them if you’re in the market for a decent VPS provider. If you want to give them a try, here’s my affiliate link. If you enter the promo code SSDPOWER on the billing settings page, you’ll get $10 worth of free credit. You can spin up a VM, play around with it, and delete it when you’re done.

Fast forwarding a bit to spare you the gritty details, I went looking for benchmarks to see how DigitalOcean stacks up against the major competitors. In doing so, I found a new Interesting Thing.

ServerBear provides “a no hassle all-in-one UnixBench, IO, IOPS & Network performance test for Linux Servers,” and compiles an index of benchmarks for the different price points offered by dozens of web hosts. You can look up a service, such as DigitalOcean in this case, and view benchmarks for each plan purveyed by the host.

They also rank the hosts with a “BearScore” that represents the performance and specs vs. the monetary cost. Of course, there’s more to choosing a host than just raw performance. Reliability, knowledgeable staff, and quality support when something goes wrong are also very important. Unfortunately, those things are harder to quantify statistically.

Looking at the statistics, this up-and-coming DigitalOcean seems pretty good. Their $10/month offering seems to outperform my two-node VM from VPS.net (which is currently priced at $38/month for new customers…) in most areas, except for network speed. DigitalOcean, according to other sources as well, seems to have slower internet connectivity than Linode and VPS.net. But at a fraction of the price, it’s a very attractive option.

ServerBear: Performance Benchmarking For Linux Servers [serverbear.com]

There are countless alternatives for the services GoDaddy offers, but many newbies are not too aware of them. After all, they don’t pour money into TV ads during the Superbowl.

Since I’m frequently asked for suggestions, I figured it would make for a good post.

Domains

It is usually prudent to register domain names with a separate company from the one that actually hosts your web site. That way, if you have cause to switch for one reason or other, you can simply edit the DNS to point it to your new host, and you don’t have to worry about transferring the name from one service to another.

There are many domain registrars, but a few that are frequently recommended are:

• Name.com — Name.com recently went above and beyond to help recover a domain that was hijacked from a web development blog. Even though the thief had transferred it away from GoDaddy and only moved it to Name.com temporarily before being shuffled over to 1and1, Name.com was the only company involved to step up and coordinate the recovery of the stolen name.
• Hover — Hover charges a premium, but their goal is simplicity and no BS. They won’t push extra services on you when you buy a domain or clutter your admin panel up with ads.
• Namecheap — A popular option, though I know less about them. A lot of the people moving away from GoDaddy during the SOPA boycotts went with Namecheap.
• 1and1 — I’ve been using 1and1 for my many domains for several years. (Since 2005 or so, maybe.) I haven’t had an issue with them so far, though some people have reported issues with their customer service department. They get a bit of flak, whether it’s warranted or not, but I have been happy with their service for about seven years.
• Gandi — Gandi’s motto is “no bullshit™.” They handle a large selection of TLDs, so they’re a good bet if you’re looking for something exotic, like a .it, .io, .ly, .me, or .fm domain. Their prices do vary depending on the extension, though, since country-level domains vary depending on their home nation’s policies.
• Moniker — I currently have one domain registered with Moniker, as I had acquired it after the previous owner allowed it to expire, and I never moved it away from Moniker. I haven’t had issue with them so far, and they’re an established name in the industry.

Shared Hosting

There are three major types of web hosting services: shared, VPS and dedicated. Shared hosting is the cheapest option, and is the easiest for beginners to get started with. Basically, you share a server with many other users. Its resources are allocated equally, and everything usually works fine so long as none of the website get too much traffic. Things get a little more complicated then, and the host may suspend the offending web site and ask them to upgrade to a pricier service.

Some hosts advertise “unlimited” bandwidth, but you shouldn’t take that claim too seriously. While they may not meter your bandwidth, they will still cut you off if serving your site takes up too much CPU time. (More traffic means more requests served simultaneously, which means greater processor usage. Obviously they don’t want to impact the other sites on the server, so they suspend the site.)

• A Small Orange — ASO aims to provide affordable and fair web hosting without overselling, a tactic that some hosts use to maximize profits, selling more accounts on a server than the hardware can handle, under the assumption that the majority of users won’t be fully utilizing what they pay for. A Small Orange is upfront about the limitations of each plan they offer. You can get a shared hosting account starting at $35/year ($2.91/month) and move up to higher plans as needed. Their $10/month plan with 5 gigabytes of storage space and 100GB of transfer is a pretty good deal, and more than enough for even a moderately popular blog. They also offer reseller, VPS and dedicated plans if you outgrow shared hosting. [Affiliate Link]
• Nearly Free Speech — What if you didn’t pay a flat monthly fee for basic web hosting? What if you only paid for what you used, and not a penny more? That’s how Nearly Free Speech works. Pricing can get a little complicated, but it can be very cheap as a result. You make a deposit, as little as $0.25, and pay as you go. Serving up static HTML isn’t going to cost much, depending entirely on how popular your site is and how much you’re storing on their servers. Dynamic sites, like WordPress blogs, start with that same baseline, but there is and additional $0.01/day dynamic site fee, and additional usage fees for your MySQL database.
• WP Web Host — This one is well-known in the WordPress community. They specialize in hosting services for WordPress. They’re up front about their policies on the maximum system resources that you can consume under a shared plan, as well. (15% CPU, 512MB of RAM)
• Media Temple — Media Temple’s “Grid Service” offering, though pricier than most shared hosting services, is known for being more reliable. They use redundant server clusters that can “burst” extra resources to handle spikes in traffic. You get a 100GB storage pool and up to one terabyte of monthly network transfer. Media Temple offers a custom control panel, and one-click installs of popular software packages, such as WordPress.

Virtual Private Servers

While a shared host puts many users’ sites in the same server environment, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is more like having a dedicated server, though it is significantly cheaper. Using a technology known as virtualization, a server is partitioned into several virtual servers. Far less customers are put on one machine, so you have a much greater share of the hardware’s resources, and you also have full control over the server environment. In most cases you’re given remote access to the command line, and you can install your choice of operating system (Linux or Unix distributions, in most cases) and configure things however you want.

There are two varieties of service you’ll find when you purchase a VPS: managed and unmanaged. With a managed server, you give up some control in order to have the provider take care of the technical details for you, and maybe offer a friendly control panel like cPanel. With an unmanaged server, you’re given free reign over your virtual machine and little support (unless you pay extra to be rescued). If you’re familiar with Linux and don’t mind getting your hands dirty in order to retool things for your needs, an unmanaged VPS is awesome.

• A Small Orange — (See the above entry under Shared Hosting.) A Small Orange also offers VPS plans, as well as dedicated servers. Their servers are fully managed, and include a cPanel license. So they’re a good bet if you don’t want to make the leap to managing a server and editing configuration files from the command line.
• VPS.net — My hosting provider of choice. They offer a few different services, their “cloud servers” offering being what I use. You get a scalable VPS (you can add or subtract “nodes” of resources and deploy them with a quick reboot) and unfettered access over SSH. It’s unmanaged unless you purchase optional “managed services” or one-time “do it for me” support tickets. It’s very reliable, and there are datacenters across several continents. A single-node VPS with 376MB of RAM, 10GB of disk space and 1TB of network transfer will run you $20/month. [Affiliate Link]
• Linode — Linode is a well-liked option along similar lines to VPS.net. Their offerings provide good bang for the buck (a 512MB system with 20GB of storage and 200GB of transfer will cost you $19.95/month) and they’re known for their support. They also have a nice collection of tutorials, which I have referred to in the past, even though I’m not a customer.
• Media Temple — MT also offers virtual servers, several variations of that theme in fact. They have their VE, GS and Nitro plans, which all have their different pluses and minuses. I don’t have any personal experience with Media Temple, though they have a good reputation and I had considered them at one point.
• Rackspace — Rackspace is a big player in the cloud server arena. They provide numerous services for varying needs. They host many web apps, like Amazon.
• Amazon Web Services — Few names are more well known in cloud services than Amazon. Their EC2 service powers a lot of big-name web apps and social networking sites, though it is just as viable for smaller sites. They also have S3, which is good for storing and serving static files, CloudFront, their CDN, and others.

Those are just a few suggestions. Whatever your needs are, there are many options out there. Be sure to shop around and look for reviews before comitting to a service.

A good resource for asking for advice is the Web Hosting Talk forum.

Blitz is a configurable service that will pound your site with page requests, allowing you to specify the concurrency, timeout, and duration of the onslaught. As it goes about this, it builds statistics and plots them along timelines. You can watch response times, errors and timeouts as it slowly ramps up the number of concurrent users until it reaches the maximum. At the end, it even projects how many hits per day your setup can handle at that rate.

The service has a generous free tier, though they offer paid upgrades for higher concurrency and duration. The free tier offers 250 concurrent users over a one minute rush. (Though if you sign up with this invite link, they will add additional concurrencies to your account.)

I found Blitz very useful when I was trying to squeeze faster response times out of my WordPress setup, tweaking my caching system options and adjusting Nginx and PHP configurations. Since they use the connections at their datacenter, you get more real-world results than if you simply ran Apache Bench locally on the server, or from your residential internet connection. Both tools have their uses, of course, and Blitz is a good one to have in your arsenal.

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]

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.

Over the past few months we’ve been preparing for this celebration by sliding new hypervisors into place with an additional 50% in RAM – and now VPS.NET*is happy to announce that this week we will be increasing the RAM per node – every VPS.NET node for both current clients and new signups will go from 256MB to 375MB per node – every node will also receive an additional 200MHz in CPU (600Mhz per node). This is all given to you at absolutely NO cost.

No worries – we’re still not overselling. . It’s taken a few months (and we’ve somehow stayed quiet on this!) but we’re finally almost ready to roll these upgrades out to you.

For those of you who haven’t heard of VPS.net, they take a “cloud” approach to managing their Virtual Machines. A VPS can consist of as many (or as little) “nodes” as you wish, a node representing a fixed unit of computing power. As your needs grow, you can instantly order and activate new nodes, and your VM dynamically expands. A 119MB increase in RAM per node is a very welcome bonus.

Happy birthday, and keep up the good work, VPS.net!

What exactly is VPS.net? They are a provider of Cloud Virtual Private Servers. You can affordably purchase as much hosting firepower as you need, and have full control over the management of it. VPS.net isn’t like other providers though. Their unique “cloud” twist makes things a bit more interesting…

What makes VPS.net different from other services? Instead of simply partitioning a physical server into slices and selling them as virtual servers, VPS.net has what they call a “Virtual Private Server Cloud.” They break their infrastructure into “nodes,” which are blocks of resources (256MB of RAM, 10GB storage, 250GB transfer, and a certain CPU share) that you can pool together in various ways to create custom virtual machines.

Suppose you need a server with 512MB of RAM, 20GB of storage, and 500GB of monthly data transfer. Just order two nodes, create a new virtual machine, and assign the nodes to it. Press the switch to boot it up, and then you can choose one of the many OS images to install. (Ubuntu, CentOS, Gentoo, Debian and Turnkey Linux are are distros available at the present.)

What if you’re experiencing unusually high traffic? Just add another node and assign it to your virtual machine. It will reboot gain access to the new resources. (You can even purchase “temporary” nodes on a $1/day basis, which work great for handling short-term traffic spikes, or creating a temporary development test server.) I really like this concept. It’s very nice to be able to pay for the resources you need when you need them, instead of being stuck upgrading from a $50/month plan to a $100/month plan with a traditional VPS.

The service has seemed stable thus far, and customer support is truly awesome. I’ve rarely seen management so actively involved with their customer community. If I had a pre-sales question, all I had to do was send a quick message on Twitter. Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of the UK2 Group, which is the parent company of VPS.net, participates actively in the VPS.net community forum, along with the rest of the people at the hosting provider.

The servers are speedy, though your mileage will depend on your skills at configuring Linux servers.

I would definitely recommend VPS.net to anyone who has outgrown shared hosting. Between their flexible resource node model and their customer service, they’re definitely worth considering.

Affiliate link: VPS.net.

I came across the two hosts by chance, by reading an up and coming design blog (Usability Post). Noting the fast load times, I decided to see who the host was. There was a little Slicehost logo in the footer, so I clicked through.

The Slicehost homepag loaded quickly, and the clean theme greated me. The page advertised affordable VPS plans, ranging from $20/mo to $280/mo, along with a list things included in every plan. Slicehost promises

• Full root access
• The ability to reboot the VPS
• A selection of distro choices
• “4-core servers running Xen virtualization instances”
• RAID-10 Array
• “Guaranteed CPU share and more when available”

The starting plan, at $20 per month, offers 100GB of transfer and ten gigabytes of storage, with 256MB of reserved RAM. Their numerous packages increase fairly slowly in price (the second level, with twice as much of everything, is only $18 more per month than the first plan), and have plenty of options to suit your needs. Need 4GB of RAM and 1.6TB or transfer (with a full 160GB of disk space)? It’ll cost you, but you can have it.

So I decided to do some research into Slicehost, to see just how reputable they were. I did some Googling, and checked Webhosting Talk, like anyone should do to get an idea of a host’s customer satisfaction. While I was doing that, I came across Linode.

Linode is a similar service to Slicehost. Their site didn’t come up quite as fast as Slicehost’s for me, but respectable nonetheless. They have very similar offerings to those of Slicehost, though Linode’s plans are different. Their base plan has 360MB of RAM, 12GB of storage, and 200GB of transfer; all for $19.95/month. Linode even tells you how many of each plan are available at the moment.

Both companies look really good, and they seem to have fairly clean track records. I’ve had problems digging up any dirt on either. The best I’ve really found is that Linode’s achille’s heel is disk usage; apparently disk access is the real slow-up on their machines. And really, it doesn’t seem all that bad. Their VPS rigs seem snappy enough for most purposes. Both companies have loyal followings, and pretty good customer satisfaction.

I think I’ll probably be going with one of these services when 1&1 decides I’m using too much of what they sold me. I’ve considered Media Temple, but they don’t offer quite as much. I don’t know. Hopefully I’ll have plenty of time yet to decide.

A word of caution: Slicehost and Linode don’t offer any graphical control panels like cPanel or Plesk. They have something for managing the VPS, and that’s about it. They expect you to make use of your root access to do what you need to do (though you could install cPanel if you were to buy a license). Hopefully I’d be up to the challenge if I ended up on one of their servers.