Quick update on applications hosting

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 11:02:58 +0000

Yesterday at Warren Noronha's suggestion I signed up with Quantact for a 128MB VPS account at $25/mth. That's roughly twice what I am paying TextDrive for shared hosting with them.

So far I'm pretty impressed with Tim (CEO of Quantact) and how he operates. Everything was setup very smoothly even whilst we were having trouble getting my details through his payment gateway (not being in the US or having a state seemed to get it in a tizzy). About 20 minutes after I signed up I was SSH'ing into my new Debian server as root.

Debian/sarge is completely new to me but seems nice and, with help from procreate and the highly available srbaker I was able to get going. When I see how easily a lot of the software I need for my Rails installation went in I guess I may have a greater appreciation for the concerns of packagers. Once sr had me setup with backports it all went in smooooth.

My intention is to move an application I had been trying to develop at TextDrive over straight away. That app was bumping into the process watchdog and only likely to continue to do so. We'll see how well it fairs on a VPS with a pretty cramped memory footprint.

Some observations: I have no idea of the contention on the box but performance, from what I've seen, is much better than I expected. When you see (as I did on some sites) guarantees of only 100MHz performance it sets you up for some pretty low expectations. Time will tell, i'm giving this experiment at least a month. So far it seems snappy. Also the 100Mbit connection makes life fast.

If things work out I will probably upgrade another notch and move a number of services I currently host with TextDrive. Whether, in the long term, I keep anything with them is not settled in my mind. I really don't want to be administering email servers and the like. So there might be a role there. We'll see.

Certainly I am learning, with the help of friends, a lot about hosting and how to make the best of it.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on textdrive

Quick update on applications hosting