Cheap Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
E. Frank Ball III
www.FrankB.us
NBLUG - North Bay Linux Users Group
Types of servers
- Home Server (DSL or Cable modem)
- Leased Server
- Co-Located Server (Co-Lo)
- VPS - Virtual Private Server
Home Server
- DSL or Cable modem
- Cost: Electric bill for server.
- Lots of storage - 1TB drive for $50.
- Slow internet connection.
- Usually stuck with DHCP.
- $20/month for Static IP from Sonic.net.
- Terms of service and/or firewalls can prevent servers.
Co-Located or Leased server
- Leased Servers
- Expensive: $60/month and up.
- Co-Location
- Even more expensive.
- Co-Lo's may require buying a quarter rack.
- Responsible for hardware.
- Purchase
- Delivery
- Maintenance
VPS
- VPS - Virtual Private Server
- Cheap: $10/year and up.
- New business model - market is changing rapidly.
- Lots of companies being bought out, or going out of business.
- Cost of entry is low, so more inexperienced business owners.
- Cheap: $10/year and up.
Virtualization Technologies
- Xen
- Para-virtualization.
- Intermediate cost.
- KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)
- Full virtualization - Hardware assisted.
- Newest type of virtualization, not many vendors offering it yet.
- Most expensive.
- OpenVZ
Virtualization Technologies
- OpenVZ
- Not true virtualization: Containers.
- Highest effeciency.
- Single shared kernel for all VPSs on host.
- Can NOT load kernel modules.
- tun/tap interface not usually enabled (no tunneling: VPN, 6to4).
- All processes from every server is visible, and killable, on host.
- Root on host has full access to virtual machine.
- Cheapest option.
OpenVZ resource control limits
- /proc/user_beancounters
- Maximum RAM usage
- Maximum Kernel memory usage
- Maximum number of processes and kernel-level threads
- Maximum number of TCP/UDP sockets
- TCP/UDP input/output buffers
- Number of CPUs
- % of CPU usage
- Maximum disk space
- Number of open files
- Number of file locks
- Number of pseudo-terminals
- and many more ...
- Most vendors only limit RAM, CPUs
Be efficient
- Running a server with 128MB of RAM
- OpenVZ + sshd, cron, syslog-ng = 6MB RAM
- replace rsyslog with syslog-ng - 30MB RAM (or inetutils-syslogd)
- nsd instead of bind
- thttpd, nginx, or lighttpd instead of apache
- postfix MTA instead of sendmail
- each ssh login uses about 4MB RAM -
dropbear is more efficent (about 1MB), but is missing sftp - 60MB of RAM for full server (web, dns, mail)
- No GUIs.
- My setup script configures my VM in minutes.
Cheap VPS Providers
| Provider | Price | RAM | Disk Space | Band- width | # CPU | CPU GHz | IPv6 addr | Virtual- ization | City |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BuyVM.net | $25/yr | 128MB | 15GB | 500GB | 1 | 2.5 | /64 | KVM | Las Vegas |
| ServerDragon.com | $18/yr | 256/256MB | 15GB | 500GB | 1 | 2.13 | 4 | OpenVZ | Denver |
| ServerDragon.com | $12/yr | 96/192MB | 5GB | 500GB | 1 | 2.13 | 4 | OpenVZ | Denver |
| Hostigation.com | $20/yr | 128MB | 5GB | 500GB | 1 | 3.39 | 1 | KVM | Los Angeles |
| ipxcore.com | $21/yr | 256MB | 10GB | 300GB | 4 | 2.4 | - | OpenVZ | Piscataway |
| HttpZoom.co.uk | £12/yr | 128/256MB | 8GB | 500GB | 1 | 2.53 | 1 | OpenVZ | London |
| AllSimple.co.uk | £15/yr | 128MB | 4GB | 100GB | 1 | 3.20 | /112 | Xen | London |
| Crissic.net | $15/yr | 512MB | 100GB | 2TB | 3 | 2.67 | /64 | OpenVZ | Jacksonville |
Total cost for eight servers: about $146/year or $12/month
Links for more information
- Finding a server:
- Discussion Forums:
More information
- OpenVZ inforomation
- Setting up a server
- proxy tunnel: ssh -x -p 22 -fND 2222 my.server.net