
Ask HN:  What hosting do you use for personal projects? - j_baker
I'd like to set up a webhost just to play around with during my spare time.  I'd like some kind of virtual private server so I can have root access and customize it to my heart's content.<p>I don't need anything too expensive.  Does anyone have suggestions?
======
jaddison
For VPS: I'm using Slicehost currently, but have seen some good reviews of
Linode. I think I'll likely give them a spin in the new year instead of
Slicehost - you get a bit more for your money, and can customize more from
what I understand.

I believe they both have quite good support from both community and company
perspectives. Lots of good articles and tutorials.

Some comparison links:

recent: <http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison>

older: <http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode>

The companies:

Linode: <http://www.linode.com/>

Slicehost: <http://www.slicehost.com/>

~~~
davidw
Thanks! The second comparison link is mine, which focuses a bit more on
memory, as opposed to performance. And that's where Linode and their 32 bit
systems win over Slicehost and their 64 bit systems. The latter chews up a lot
more memory for something like Rails, so even if Slicehost only looks
_slighty_ more expensive, they end up being significantly more expensive.
Which is unfortunate, because they seem like good people doing good work, and
who treat their customers pretty well. However, Linode are that way too, and
are also cheaper, so it's just not that difficult a choice at this point in
time.

~~~
akkartik
Most interesting summary. The one thing that's kept me from trying out linode
is slicehost's support for whole-slice backups. Linode doesn't have backups,
right?

~~~
tasaro
Check out <http://is.gd/5ub0S> \-- the service is free while in beta.

~~~
fragmede
( [http://blog.linode.com/2009/04/03/backup-service-enters-
beta...](http://blog.linode.com/2009/04/03/backup-service-enters-beta/) )

------
Ixiaus
+1 for Webfaction.

You get a shell, a gazillion different application types (CGI, Rails, PHP,
Django, custom). You can compile Apache and/or MySQL and configure a custom
port for it.

Their support is responsive. Service has competitive pricing. I've been with
them for three years and haven't experience any outages.

~~~
leif
I've also been with them for quite some time. I originally got it because I
wanted something cheap with django hosting, but I've stayed because they offer
plenty of different setups and have great customer service. My credit card
thought they were fraud a couple of times and stopped payment, and the
Webfaction guys were very understanding about it, and kept my sites up while I
worked my way up the bank chain trying to convince them that I actually wanted
to pay them.

------
fendale
prgmr.com is very cheap and has worked well for me for the last month (which
is when I signed up)

~~~
gnosis
Anyone manage to get Gentoo running on there?

~~~
belitsky
yes, it was simple with images provided on
[http://stacklet.com/downloads/images/lister/Gentoo/2010-0/x8...](http://stacklet.com/downloads/images/lister/Gentoo/2010-0/x86-64)

~~~
gnosis
Great. Thank you!

Would you happen to know where I could find detailed instructions on how to
install these images?

------
doubleyooexwhy
NearlyFreeSpeech.net

Insanely cheap. I deposited $5 on November 17th and I still have $2 left in
the account, pushing 4.5 to 5GB/month.

~~~
blasdel
I don't know why the hell people are downmodding you,
<http://nearlyfreespeech.net> is pretty brilliant. Sure, having to use
classical CGI is undesirable in 2009, but they were doing true distributed
cloud-based hosting long before Google App Engine and Heroku came along.

Them and Dreamhost are the only simple shared hosting providers I ever
recommend to anyone.

~~~
archon810
You just lost all credibility for recommending Dreamhost. They're down more
than a hooker in red light district and overload their boxes to an average
load of 10+. I would not use them for any hosting again.

~~~
blasdel
They're also cheap as hell, have great support, and are _honest_. They're
pretty upfront about CPU being their only contended resource. They'll go as
far as corralling CPU hogs together into ghettos so they don't affect normal
customers as much.

Classic shared hosting is bullshit in general, but Dreamhost makes the most of
it. They're the only one I'd ever recommend.

------
jazzychad
I use my home computer for this purpose. There is a simple WAMP setup on the
main OS (winxp) for quick and dirty stuff, and then I have VMWare running a
512 MB RAM image of Ubuntu Server to let me play around with more interesting
stuff. So the cost is effectively free.

If something then turns into more than a personal project, I use the home
setup as a development/staging server and then push it out to a hosted server.

~~~
dhimes
same here- but centos on the home server because I am somewhat familiar with
fedora.

------
jmonegro
Heroku, hands down. It's free unless it gets serious. (ruby only, though)

~~~
thwarted
If it's ruby only, then one obviously doesn't have root access.

~~~
jmonegro
On heroku, no (that's the point - it takes a bit to get used to but it's worth
it), but on another host, why would you not have root access?

~~~
thwarted
Come on, man. From the OP:

 _I'd like some kind of virtual private server so I can have root access and
customize it to my heart's content._

Which means if heroku is ruby only, as you said, and thus doesn't provide root
access, then it doesn't fit the request.

~~~
jmonegro
Well, I suggested Webbynode in another comment. I think that, if by
coincidence, the OP uses Ruby, he might want to take a look at Heorku. And the
OP also asked what we used ;)

------
mantas
+1 for Linode

~~~
rsclarke
From a European/UK standpoint by far the best value for money with their
recent launch of a data center in London.

I found the VPS market in the UK was dead, with very little that excited me,
the London data center was Christmas coming early.

------
zimbu668
Anyone use one of the Mac Mini hosting services?

<http://www.macminicolo.net/> [http://www.xservhosting.com/mac-mini-
colocation/mac-mini-col...](http://www.xservhosting.com/mac-mini-
colocation/mac-mini-colocation.php)

Looks like you buy a mini from them or ship one you already own and the
hosting starts about $30 a month. I'm not sure if this is just to appeal to
"Mac Fanboys" or if it's actually a good setup. I'd be interested if anyone
has used one of these services.

------
idlewords
Linode and slicehost are quite expensive if you price out the RAM and disk you
get per dollar, but they do let you rent quite small instances. I've found the
main difference in favor of Linode to be nice monitoring tools and graphs.

Serverbeach occasionally runs specials on rented dedicated that offer very
good value if you need a somewhat larger box.

An EC2 small instance is also surprisingly good value if you can commit to a
year up front.

------
wrath
Not really hosting per say, but I've started to use Google App Engine
recently. No control over the software/hardware but it's nicely designed if
all you want is a rest front end (web/api) to your application.

------
vaksel
I use dreamhost. Why? Because a while back they did that 777 deal, and I
posted about it on a few forums, and ended up with like 250 primary referrals
and 200 secondary referrals.

So basically I get paid money to host my stuff with them :) I made like 3
grand from them so far.

Also since they bump your storage/bw every week, at this point I have 10TB
Bandwith and 500GB hosting. Which isn't half bad.

------
dryicerx
Linode for general stuff.

Amazon EC2 when I need a sudden burst of computational power.

~~~
robotrout
Can you give an example of an actual case when you needed this sudden burst of
computational power? I'm curious what sorts of things people are actually
using it for in real life. (instead of "well, you COULD use it for ....")

~~~
shaddi
I use high-capacity EC2 for problem sets in my bioalgorithms class. Basically
whenever something's taking too long for my liking on whatever machine I'm
running it on, I'll throw it up on a beefy EC2 instance and let it run there.

------
EGF
I want to caveat my choice by saying that I have been through the following
options before settling on my latest and honestly greatest choice by far:

I used and cancelled; lunarpages, dreamhost, mediatemple, globat

I switched to HostGator Alluminum reseller program (but do not actually resell
the space)

I house each project in its own cPanel so that I can modularize each project
and have any join or access it if necessary. Helps me track bandwidth and
start from scratch fast on new things. It also affords an infrastructure I
have not seen elsewhere.

I support this decision after using Pingdom on my sites at MT then hostgator
and seeing large latency differences. I feel it was a good sample set as the
sites were identical (PHP\MySQL) on both services.

However that being said I am going to be using Engineyard for the first time
now that I have a RoR project.

My older php\SQL sites will remain however on hostgator.

------
xist
Depending on your purpose/needs, <http://www.lowendbox.com/> lists sub
$5/month VPS. Of course, dont expect much, but i have a couple for testing
network connectivity. vmware/xen are great for local playing around though as
others suggest.

~~~
gnosis
Wow, ramhost (one of the links from that site) offers $3/month VPS.

That sounds about as cheap as it gets... anyone have experience with these
guys?

<http://www.ramhost.us/?page=virtual-dedicated-server>

------
chrischen
I'm using Slicehost right now at $20/mo, but I did calculations, and if you
pay for what you use on Rackspace cloud (and assuming you use almost nothing),
Rackspace cloud comes out less than $20 per month. I'd be switching over if I
weren't so damn lazy.

------
warp
I use a share at www.gandi.net, 1 share isn't too expensive. In my experience
they respond the same day to support emails, and you can enable temporary
console access via their website in case you really messed up your
installation.

update: gandi is in france.

~~~
PeterHammar
Gandi here too, great service.

------
pavs
Media Temple. I absolutely hate it, but moving to a new host is a bitch. When
I get some time to move I am either moving back to Slicehost or Linode and
built my server up from scratch.

Note to everyone, don't ever use media temple. They are absolutely horrible.
Every week, either the servers gets hacked, servers goes down or something is
wrong with their admin panel and they won't let you access it. And of course
its slow as hell. I have used their both dv and gs setup, just horrible. Their
customer service is decent, but what am I going to do with good customer
service when the server has so many problems?

They do have a good marketing and design team. I have to give them that.

~~~
rwhitman
Haha same deal. The gridserver is $20/mo and I have a dozen sites on it, nice
control panel but the uptime is horrible and its slow as molasses

It blows yet I have to keep it unless I want to migrate 12 different sites...

~~~
pavs
I feel you. Migration can be a pain in the ass. Fortunately I only have 5 site
with media temple. Next month I will have some free time and I will definitely
dump this horrible hosting.

I personally recommend slicehost, there are excellent. Never had a problem
with them, leaving them was a mistake. I was looking for a managed solution
and MT was recommended by some guys so I jumped.

------
roschdal
I use amazon ec2 for <http://freeciv.net/>

------
mark_l_watson
I prepayed for a 3 year reservation for a small Amazon EC2 instance and I am
very happy with that decision because I frequently deploy customer projects to
AWS, and any experience from my own projects is a big help.

I also permanently rent a small VPS from RimuHosting. I like their customer
service and their low costs.

And, the elephant in the room is Google AppEngine. I have several deployed
apps and an effective price of free is difficult to beat. Surprisingly (to me)
I have had no customer interest in deploying to AppEngine. I have had ongoing
problems using JRuby+Sinatra on AppEngine, but the Java support is fairly much
hassle free.

------
cperciva
I've been very satisfied with RootBSD so far.

~~~
ams6110
Awesome to see a BSD-based hosting service. Are they fairly new? I was looking
for one a couple of years ago and don't recall seeing their name.

~~~
cperciva
As a company they're not new (they're part of Tranquil Hosting) but the first
time I heard about RootBSD was in early 2009 I think.

------
whyenot
I use Linode. It's inexpensive, reliable, and easy to set up and use. The
company also makes significant contributions back to the open source
community. On my rating scale they get double bonus points for that.

------
whalesalad
SchoolRack(.com) is built on a small cluster of 4 Slicehost servers. I know
this isn't a small/personal project but it's given me a lot of experience with
them. Of course, they're a great web host and definitely mean it when they say
they're built for developers.

But... Linode is (so far) better. You get everything you get at Slicehost, for
a little bit cheaper, with a more useful admin panel. Statistics are built in
for CPU and Bandwidth. However, the panel is a bit more complex than the
average park rangers jeep, so if you're a newbie you might wanna stick with
Slicehost.

I say so far because I've only been a customer for about 3 months now.
whalesalad.com (my personal site) runs on a small $19 Linode (which gives you
360mb of ram vs 256 on Slice, 16GB of storage vs 10, and double the
bandwidth). At the moment I'm powering my aforementioned blog, a couple of
WordPress sites, and another Django site. Nginx + FastCGI for both the Python
and PHP side of things. It's holding up like an absolute champ.

Linode also lets you play around with other distros easier. You can basically
cut up your allotted HD space and boot whatever you want. You can cut it in
half and play with Fedora/Debian, or whatever you choose really. For
experimentation, that's good.

This is a great performance breakdown/comparison of the popular VPS' out there
- <http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison>

Finally, if you choose Linode, help a guy out with this referrer link :D -
<http://j.mp/linodesalad>

------
blhack
I started with a host called "kiloserv"...I haven't yet met anybody else who
has heard of them (saw them in a sig on /.); they were fine for something that
I wasn't too concerned about (all I really needed was an off network box for
testing my network setup at work). Kiloserv was $10/mo for a VPS, it never
went down on my in ~2yrs, and it worked...

That said, the bandwidth didn't seem too special, the company had 0 support of
any kind...didn't offer a console, or DNS hosting (that I know of), and on and
on and on...they worked, but not for a business.

After them, I switched to slicehost (per a recommendation here) and they
were/are _awesome_. Totally professional, good bandwidth, $20/mo, everything I
wanted. I recommend them 100% to anybody doing a semi-serious project.

After a recent comparison here, it sounded like linode was also really really
good, so I bought a VPS from them ($20/mo again) to use a development
server/sandbox. The linode box seems to, honestly, be outperforming my VPS
from slicehost with benchmarks on AB (although this could just be a slight
disparity between my httpd.confs on the two boxes).

Slicehost or Linode are outstanding +1 to them.

My next box will probably be a colo'd box with prgmr. ($50 for 1u including
power and bandwidth is really enticing to me).

Slicehost/Linode are what I use right now...

------
pieter
I'm using hosteurope.de (as I'm in Europe and want decent ping times). They
have pretty good deals, starting at €13/month for 1GB RAM and 5TB data. I'm
still on an earlier plan, 256MB for €10/month though.

They have pretty decent service, but their English (understandably) isn't that
good. They've been down a few times in the last few months, but otherwise have
a pretty good track record.

I think for the money you pay them, you get a very good price, but don't
expect 99.99% uptime

~~~
fmw
I did a short and non-representative comparison between the ping times to my
Linode in London (<http://vix.io>) and hosteurope.de. From my home in the
Netherlands my Linode VPS is 10ms faster (~31ms for Linode versus ~41ms for
hosteurope.de). Considering that hosteurope.de is hosted in Köln (Germany)
which is about 190km from where I live the routing to London is a lot better.

------
DanBlake
Looks like I am the only one in here that uses dedicated servers. Mix of
theplanet, colo at level3 and gigenet.

------
jacobian
I've been very happy with Rackspace Cloud, and especially with how well it
scales down -- as low as $10/mo. It's not quite all the flexibility that
Amazon does, but the API's nice and getting better, and for personal stuff the
smaller size is a big win.

------
Pistos2
I use WebbyNode as my main VPS provider, but over the years I've made enough
friends on the Net as to be able to get shell accounts on several servers, as
well. Add to that a machine at home which is used for less important stuff.

------
adrinavarro
I have been using OVH to host my main projects They offer dedicated servers
for the hobby market, at unbeatable prices (<http://kimsufi.fr>, you'll have
to look for your local OVH distributor), but also top-level servers at very
good price. Plus they're very good (have awesome peering/transit quality,
unbeatable prices, 3 datacenters and 10 years of experience).

For my own thing, I've got a shared hosting at SurpassHosting.com. I used to
rely on Dreamhost to host my blog and do random tests, but they're just crap.
Surpass is just good for what I need in those cases...

~~~
AdamGibbins
OVH are - OK

But they have absolutely terrible support, heaven forbid if your server goes
down or experiences a hardware failure - its often a battle just to get them
to replace hardware. They also throttle FTP traffic.

Although, apart from the throttling and assuming your box never dies, yes OVH
are good.

~~~
adrinavarro
I have a pretty good contact with the old-skool OVH community and their
administrators. And I can say that they don't throttle any traffic at all!
(I'm sure of that)

And their support may be pretty bad if you have a non-pro offer. That means
that if you get a 200€/month box you'll have a pretty awesome, first-class
support. But if you have a 20€/month box and your hard drive dies, you'll have
to wait one day or two. That seems fair to me.

~~~
_Lemon_
I have 300 servers from the Kimsufi to PRO and the support is pretty much the
same.

As for the throttling, that doesn't happen (as far as I'm aware) however they
do have poor peering connections to the US so it's pretty normal to get 5kb/s
there which is much worse.

------
dwiel
I use linode for work and think its great. I used to use webfaction but
switched because they were too inconsistent. Poor performance sometimes and
they were always responsive to deal with problems, but they happened every
couple weeks.

For home use I have an old Thinkpad thats way more powerful than a cheap slice
somewhere which cost me $150 on craigslist + 12kwhrs/mo. I used to use an old
desktop, but the laptop will actually save me money on my power bill in about
2 years, by using 17watts instead of 100. Saves carbon too since we get mostly
coal power here.

------
jmonegro
Before Heroku, I used Webbynode (<http://webbynode.com>). It has root access
and much more, all you need, and it's not expensive. They're also very good.

------
mhb
No one likes AWS? You can turn it off whenever you're not using it.

~~~
justinsb
AWS starts at around $60 a month, a basic VPS (Rackspace, Linode etc) starts
at around $10 a month. With the VPS, you wouldn't have to spend time turning
it off and on to save pennies, and you wouldn't have to learn all the EC2
oddities (Elastic IP, EBS, Ephemeral Storage, AMIs, Availability Zones,
KeyPairs, etc).

For someone looking to get started, a normal VPS seems easier and cheaper.

~~~
drewcrawford
Rackspace bought slicehost who charges $20/month.

Linode's lowest VPS is $20/mo: <https://www.linode.com/signup/>

Am I missing something? I'd love to find a decent VPS provider at $10/month.

~~~
turtle4
No, grandparent poster was off on pricing, but his intent is correct. AWS is
several times more expensive than the other 'lighter' VPS solutions out there,
which is why is isn't brought up/suggested more often.

~~~
justinsb
Thanks, I was a little off on pricing - I didn't realize Linode started at
$20.

Rackspace is $11 / month for the 256MB slice, no bandwidth, though there's no
bandwidth included in EC2 so that's apples-to-apples. I doubt bandwidth costs
would be that significant for the OP's purpose.

Looks like prgmr also has cheaper entry points, including some bandwidth.

------
bentlegen
If you're playing around in Ruby, you could give Heroku a try
(<http://www.heroku.com>). They have a free plan for small projects.

------
ericclemmons
I've started using Zerigo.com's cloud-hosting. So far, it's been fantastic for
keeping my LAMP stack imaged for quick deployment so I can test new projects
in their own sandbox for pennies.

Note, it's a private beta still, but I figured they were worth mentioning.
Having a VPS on SliceHost as well, I'd recommend something quick & small for
"tinkering" and keep the VPS for your existing sites until you're sold on a
new environment.

------
ideamonk
Free Yahoo Developer Accelerators from Joyent, they apply same terms and
conditions and AUP to free developer accounts as well as their customers -
<http://is.gd/5uR3I>

PCSmart Hosting is cheap at 4.95 pounds / month - <http://is.gd/5uR4E>
unmanaged linux vps, pure bliss for the low price.

------
DanielBMarkham
To the general hosting question:

blog: Nexcess.net

small project sites: HostGator.com

Old ASP.NET site that I'm going to discontinue: DiscountASP.Net

"Real" web projects: roll my own using VMWare or Xen

------
s3graham
There's no root access and might not suit you, but the answer to "what hosting
do [I] use for personal projects?" is Google App Engine. It's really very
convenient and easy for small things. (e.g. <http://h4ck3r.net/>,
<http://skulpt.org/>)

------
vorobei
I've been a happy Linode customer since August 2007. There were two minor
issues with DNS (not their fault, I believe) during that time. Once I had to
do an emergency RAM upgrade on a Sunday -- it was the best customer service
experience I've ever had.

I run two servers -- Gentoo and Ubuntu. I recommend Ubuntu.

~~~
NateLawson
I was with a company who used Linode from about 2003 to 2007. It was awful. We
had a one-day outage when someone kicked out the power cord. Another outage
with some routing mishap by Linode. DDoS floods destined for our VM due to irc
bots or whatever running on another VM.

Linode would start an upgrade without notice during normal business hours, and
then only admit they were messing with things if there was a crash.

Get a dedicated machine. The lost productivity alone makes it worth it.

~~~
jedsmith
Since Linode started in June 2003 (and your company was one of the first
customers -- I'm looking at your tickets), you got to experience a lot of the
growing pains of a new company. If you were to try us today, you wouldn't walk
away with the same impression as you did then. I'd bet on that.

We learned a lot during that time, and I think it's a defining aspect of our
company that we can admit that.

I am, however, unable to find a one-day outage for your account; the longest
I've come across -- which is power-related, so I'm assuming the one you're
referring to -- was reported by your company at 5:39 p.m. and resolved at 8:01
p.m.

------
rwhitman
I've used MediaTemple which has become so awful as to be unusable and
Slicehost which was great and reliable but now owned by Rackspace and starting
to suffer from the problems with their datacenters...

Been hearing good things about Heroku and after reading this thread psyched to
check out Linode

------
Jim_Neath
<http://brightbox.co.uk> all the way

------
jamesbritt
I use a server at The Planet. Probably more costly than what you want for your
needs.

------
jseifer
I've used linode for a couple of years now and I've been very very happy with
them. I use dnsmadeeasy for critical projects even though Linode has their own
custom dns you can use, just to keep it separate.

------
pnz
<http://lithiumhosting.com/> pretty cheap. haven't noticed a second of
downtime in the 6 months i've been with them. very responsive staff, too.

------
labria
<http://www.volumedrive.com/> They have real servers for reasonable prices. Or
some kind of linode/slicehost, if you don't need too much.

------
chunkyslink
I've used Rimuhosting VPS <http://rimuhosting.com/> for a while now and they
have been nothing short of excellent.

------
ralphc
For my personal projects my main consideration was price, I found fsckvps.com.
For $12.95 a month I get 512MB memory, 30GB disk and 400GB transfers a month.

------
Keyframe
I have a server at fdcservers and one at theplanet - both "unmetered" 100Mbps,
no problems so far (I'm with theplanet for more than 5 years, since ev1)

------
qeorge
I am a very happy VPS customer of WiredTree.com. Their prices are great,
servers are fast, and the support is top-notch.

Edit: root, WHM/Cpanel, etc as well

------
ams6110
I've used OpenHosting with no complaints.

------
randallsquared
vpslink.com

Pretty cheap, and only down two or three times in the last two years (since I
started with them). They are somewhat less communicative than I'd prefer when
something happens, but they did tweet updates last time.

------
dmd
Chunkhost.com is giving away half-gig instances right now.

~~~
zackattack
Sorta, they're not free, it's only for the beta period, and they still require
a (valid) credit card number, and presumably they'll start charging you once
the beta period ends (and they don't specify when that is on their homepage).

~~~
pavs
I have no experience with these people and never heard of them, but I am
guessing that the CC information is needed because they are giving you root
access to their server. From a purely legal and business point of view, it
seems to make sense.

What if someone registers for more than one vps (or dozens with the help of
proxies and gmail account) and runs illegal activity like spamming or DDOSing
some other site? These are all plausible scenario and having valid CC number
is the most reasonable thing to do.

------
spooneybarger
if i needed need stupid easy backups, i would go with linode, as it is, i go
with slicehost.

------
wlievens
hosteurope.de

dirt cheat: good vps with loads of ram, disk and traffic for $20 or $30 per
month.

~~~
middus
Absolutely! Great company. Though the KIS is a bit clunky.

------
jason_g
Another vote for Linode.

------
awt
github for static pages + heroku.

------
yannk
linode++

------
docpepin
webbynode

------
vlisivka
RackSpace Cloud ($10 per month for 256MB instance w/o traffic). RSC allows me
to follow modern administration practice (
<http://vlisivka.pp.ua/en/modern_administration> ) even at my own private
host.

------
jasonlbaptiste
Geocities bitches.

