Servers

[Tiberius]

Whether you use shared hosting, a VPS, or a dedicated server, you are sharing bandwidth with someone.

Dedicated you get complete access to the CPU.

VPS is pretty much the same, only the CPU is virtualized.

Shared, you are sharing direct resources with other people.

[Tiberius]

Also I’m pretty sure Azure is mostly VPS instances right?

[bennyboy]

Godaddy sucks terribly.  For shared hosting, I found ICDSoft to be the best.  I mean, it’s shared hosting, but they did as well as possible with it

I made a phone app which exposed Android audio to my homepage, and uploaded files to the server's FTP. Godaddy was so fucking unreliable that the app would literally time-out about half the time it tried to connect to the FTP server.

That being said, I do like Godaddy for registering my domain names.  Very easy to go through the process of generating the SSL certificate, a nice little interface for updating fowarding etc.

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Also I’m pretty sure Azure is mostly VPS instances right?

Azure runs virtual machines.  So short answer-- right; my server is basically a VPS, but I believe it's distributed in a local cloud rather than installed on a single rack.  Long answer-- I think Azure is more of an enterprise environment than just a VPS. There are a lot of plug-ins you can add under license, and in addition to the VM, you have a virtual network, separate data storage that can easily be plugged in and out of this or that server, etc. Because it's so modular, you can move items among resource groups, up or downgrade components easily, and so on. I have only my previous web hosting people to compare to, so I don't really know how much of this is standard or how much is unique to Azure.

But my main reason is that it just works. It works well, 100% of the time-- no slowdowns, no mysteries, no restrictions whatsoever that I've come across. Everything just does what I want it to do, and does it better than I thought the cloud possibly could. It's possible I might one day go with a different cloud solution, but to me the idea of having a share in one hardware rack somewhere has gone the way of the dodo.

I'm going to keep recommending trying the free trial until someone actually does it. I'm curious what more experienced admins think of the bells and whistles.

[Tiberius]

Azure runs virtual machines.  So short answer-- right; my server is basically a VPS.  Long answer-- there's a lot more to Azure than the FPS.  You can pick up or drop all kinds of apps, services, analytic tools, etc. etc. that I wouldn't normally consider part of a VPS. I strongly recommend signing up for a free month. Maybe you can look at some of the features and let me know if you think they're just BS, or if there's more going on there.

When I migrated the site, I planned for it to be temporary. However, the site actually runs faster from the cloud than it did on my (admittedly shitty) small 3rd-party-provided server. I'm paying a pretty penny for it, but in my company budget, $100/month compared to say a day of downtime or some unexplained crashes is just not worth trying another solution.

So VPS with some bells and whistles. I don't really need to sign up for a free month, because unless I'm going to consider paying for it after, there's really no point. I mean, I just looked at the pricing calculator. For what I pay $40 a month for now (4 CPU, 8GB RAM) they are charging $139.43. Plus, that only comes with 40GB of "temporary" storage, whatever that means. If I want to add 128GB of space (current VPS has 160GB) it would cost another $5 a month.

No amount of fancy bells and whistles are worth that much for me, I don't have any use for them. With a regular Linux VPS, I can install a web server in 10 minutes, I have a load of config files that I have backed up from previous servers which I can just copy / paste across. Applications aren't that hard to install if you know what you are doing.

[WinterHold]

Digital Ocean's VPSs have no support like the usual "shared servers". I guess it will be a turning shift in my approach to website management if I chose that route, because no support=more leaps of faith; but the prices are very exciting !

What do you mean "shared servers"?

Like Kevin said: shared "hosting". That describes it better.
My needs didn't require any dedicated hosting to keep my site online 24/7.

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Godaddy sucks terribly.  For shared hosting, I found ICDSoft to be the best.  I mean, it’s shared hosting, but they did as well as possible with it

I dealt with host4asp.net -ASP.NET Hosting-, too "Microsofish". I tried both their dedicated & shared hosting, all I can say is that their support is awesome. But sometimes the server goes off with both the shared and the dedicated service. But since I need the support; I truly appreciate their quality.

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So VPS with some bells and whistles. I don't really need to sign up for a free month, because unless I'm going to consider paying for it after, there's really no point.

That 1 month is convenient for learning some stuff -for the new guys; at least-. Azure is a cloud computing environment and that is quite a confusing field for me.

[Tiberius]

That 1 month is convenient for learning some stuff -for the new guys; at least-. Azure is a cloud computing environment and that is quite a confusing field for me.

Oh I'm sure. I've been in this game a long time, this site alone is 10 years old this year, and every year it gets a little trickier to maintain due to this or that. Digital Ocean recently doubled all their specs and kept the costs the same, which helps. If you've never used Linux before, or never set up a web server from scratch, then VPS / dedicated isn't the way to go. I can see Azure as a good solution for inexperienced people, and that's reflected in the cost. I'd never use it, there's no point seeing as I can get a more powerful server for much less, and just set it all up myself.

[WinterHold]

That 1 month is convenient for learning some stuff -for the new guys; at least-. Azure is a cloud computing environment and that is quite a confusing field for me.

Oh I'm sure. I've been in this game a long time, this site alone is 10 years old this year, and every year it gets a little trickier to maintain due to this or that. Digital Ocean recently doubled all their specs and kept the costs the same, which helps. If you've never used Linux before, or never set up a web server from scratch, then VPS / dedicated isn't the way to go. I can see Azure as a good solution for inexperienced people, and that's reflected in the cost. I'd never use it, there's no point seeing as I can get a more powerful server for much less, and just set it all up myself.

That's quite some time, but assume it's gotta get tricky, things are advancing like crazy.
I think VPS is not the way for me; honestly without the control panel (GUI) provided by the host + Visual Studio I'll be dead by now.

You are right about Azure. I also think it's more useful for teamwork on large projects, then its cost would be justified.
Only used Ubuntu once or twice, so I guess it's very early for me to move into a VPS.

[bennyboy]

Azure runs virtual machines.  So short answer-- right; my server is basically a VPS.  Long answer-- there's a lot more to Azure than the FPS.  You can pick up or drop all kinds of apps, services, analytic tools, etc. etc. that I wouldn't normally consider part of a VPS.  I strongly recommend signing up for a free month.  Maybe you can look at some of the features and let me know if you think they're just BS, or if there's more going on there.

When I migrated the site, I planned for it to be temporary.  However, the site actually runs faster from the cloud than it did on my (admittedly shitty) small 3rd-party-provided server.  I'm paying a pretty penny for it, but in my company budget, $100/month compared to say a day of downtime or some unexplained crashes is just not worth trying another solution.

So VPS with some bells and whistles. I don't really need to sign up for a free month, because unless I'm going to consider paying for it after, there's really no point. I mean, I just looked at the pricing calculator. For what I pay $40 a month for now (4 CPU, 8GB RAM) they are charging $139.43. Plus, that only comes with 40GB of "temporary" storage, whatever that means. If I want to add 128GB of space (current VPS has 160GB) it would cost another $5 a month.

No amount of fancy bells and whistles are worth that much for me, I don't have any use for them. With a regular Linux VPS, I can install a web server in 10 minutes, I have a load of config files that I have backed up from previous servers which I can just copy / paste across. Applications aren't that hard to install if you know what you are doing.

Yeah, I get it.  The cheapest option I could find was:
0.75 GB RAM / 1 core / 32GB hard drive with Linux installed = $14.68 / month.  Adding an extra core and 8BG ram will put that price up really fast though.  I'm curious though. . . do you know what a "core" means?  Does it depend on the base hardware, or is it a standard # of Teraflops, or what?

I actually opted for a 2-core 8GB system, and I have to say it's performing like a real champ: very nice and quick page loads handling a couple hundred customers who use the site daily for an hour or two. I'm also curious-- is your $40 / month billed by hour? Do you have any commitments other than paying for what you use each month? I ask because I may put up a sister site on a US server some day.

IIRC, the "temporary" storage is true temp storage. . . used only for page caching etc., but not to be expected to maintain state reliably, especially if you restart the server/site.

I went to Azure after shopping around in Korea, and then Singapore and other Asian countries, and not liking their offers or the reviews about them.  My budget for a managed server for my company was going to be $300, so when I realized I could get a setup that would meet my needs for $100, and that it would be hosted in Korea but with full English support, I was pretty ecstatic.  Korean internet = extended LAN.

Also, I like Windows.  So, there's that.

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You are right about Azure. I also think it's more useful for teamwork on large projects, then its cost would be justified.
Only used Ubuntu once or twice, so I guess it's very early for me to move into a VPS.

I'd agree with this sentiment-- Microsoft charges a premium for the name, for sure.  In my case, having trust that things will work properly was worth much more than an extra $60/month. But based on what Tiberius is saying, it seems that however I push or pull my order, it's going to be about 3x more expensive than some other offers out there.

With regard to a VPS-- I very highly recommend it.  I've discovered that any bargain fully-managed dedicated server is almost for sure using hardware so old that a good-quality VPS will outperform it.  But the extra control you get over your site on a VPS is pretty much the same as a fully dedicated device, and it's not really that hard to set things up.

I think you should try Azure for free, since you can scale your VM up or down as much as you want, then consider one of the options Tiberius mentioned once you know how much power you will/won't need.

[Tiberius]

Yeah, I get it.  The cheapest option I could find was:
0.75 GB RAM / 1 core / 32GB hard drive with Linux installed = $14.68 / month.  Adding an extra core and 8BG ram will put that price up really fast though.  I'm curious though. . . do you know what a "core" means?  Does it depend on the base hardware, or is it a standard # of Teraflops, or what?

"Core" is apparently the new standard for selling CPUs, and it's pretty dumb. It just hides information from the user, there's no standard speed each core should be. You can use some comparison sites though, for instance: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/docean_vs_azure

If you scroll down to the "Sysbench CPU Performances" and compare the Azure B1MS plan to the Digital Ocean Standard 2GB 1 core plan (both have 1 core) you'll see that the Azure instance CPU is about 1.44 times faster than the Digital Ocean instance CPU in terms of ops per second. Advantage Azure in that respect, however that still doesn't justify the cost.

I actually opted for a 2-core 8GB system, and I have to say it's performing like a real champ: very nice and quick page loads handling a couple hundred customers who use the site daily for an hour or two.  I'm also curious-- is your $40 / month billed by hour?  Do you have any commitments other than paying for what you use each month?  I ask because I may put up a sister site on a US server some day.

Yup, everything on Digital Ocean is billed per hour, as far as I am aware. No other commitments, what you see is what you get. I also pay for weekly backups which is billed at 20% of the monthly cost (so for my $40 / month server, I pay an extra $8 / month for 4 backups).

IIRC, the "temporary" storage is true temp storage. . . used only for page caching etc., but not to be expected to maintain state reliably, especially if you restart the server/site.

I use CloudFlare for page caching, which is free.

Also, I like Windows.  So, there's that.

*vomits*

[bennyboy]

For the VM power, your place is still outdoing MS by like 2:1 price per unit I think. I'm pretty sure I get free backups tho. How about internet bandwidth? Unlimited?