One month ago, my hosting plan with Dreamhost finally expired. For the past 2 years, I felt like I had been paying too much for “unlimited” when all I needed was “limited“. So when the contract ended, I decided to move to A Small Orange instead.

I have heard only good things about this company and the tiny plan is really cheap at $25/year for 150MB space, just what I needed. But there was a setback: ASO does not offer PHP5.3. So when I wanted to use FuelPHP and their technical support could not promise a timeline for upgrade, I knew it was time to get a refund.

And I moved to a virtual private server (VPS) at Kiloserve.

Why a VPS?

While all these were happening, my final year project happens to involve setting up some web services on a Linux box and it occurred to me that I should get a VPS to play with, if only because I could use the experience.

Why not Linode?

At $20/month, even the starter Linode’s VPS is out of my budget. Besides I didn’t need the resources (which is the reason I moved away from Dreamhost in the first place) and could settle for less. I searched around and was delighted to find lowendbox.com which discusses/promotes low-end VPS.

As a complete newbie, many deals looked incredibly cheap for what they offer so it was important to utilize common sense (if it’s too good to be true, it probably is) and read the comments about them. Apparently many companies closed down after offering yearly contracts so if you are just like me looking for cheap VPS, think twice if you see people offering 2GB RAM for $5/month. Find out more and you will see a trend for acceptable pricing for the different kind of virtualization. I am not expert but this is what I learned.

Eventually I settled with Kiloserve (fingers crossed) and so now all my sites are running on the XenPV1 VPS at $5.25/month (50% discount), cheaper than what I paid for Dreamhost shared hosting.

But like they say, pay peanuts, get monkey. There are several caveats:

• This is an unmanaged server. I haven’t found any official definition but it usually means the host takes care of the hardware and network while I am solely responsible for the software. So if you don’t know how to use Linux, you’re mostly on your own.
• Inconsistent customer service. I have sent 2 support tickets and the first one received an answer without 1 hour (it was regarding whether they provide DNS hosting) but I didn’t receive any reply to my response and subsequently the ticket was closed due to idle. The latest (non-technical) ticket is still awaiting a reply since about 2 days ago. The server has been doing fine so far so fingers crossed when I actually need technical help.
• There is no DNS hosting service included. I am currently using FreeDNS by Namecheap now and it hasn’t failed me yet (fingers crossed again). Turns out there is a DNS service if one asks. I am currently using the H-Sphere DNS only control panel at Kiloserve after sending a  support ticket about it.
• You need to protect your own data. This isn’t really a huge deal-breaker since you should really back your stuff up no matter where you host especially so if you are hosting some important data that cannot be replaced. I am currently testing a combination of rsnapshot + rsync.net for remote backups.
• Security. If you’re new like me, you probably won’t be versed in securing a Linux box. On managed/shared hosting, this would be up to the company to keep the box safe.

Is it worth the trouble?

Just for me, yes. Because I want to get experience in playing with Linux environment at the cheapest, most reasonable price. I could set one up in VirtualBox but that does not even come close to setting up the real thing. And the worse that can happen? I make a wrong judgement and the company closes down with my data or my server gets compromised because of my lack of knowledge in securing it. That practically has no real negative effect to me at this point (and also because I have remote backups). I have to start from somewhere and let this be it.

So now I have 2 wikis, one WordPress (and one more coming for the girlfriend) running off this VPS for a price lower than shared hosting, and though I traded my time learning and setting things up for money, I think it’s a pretty good trade-off in the long run.

PS: This post took me about 2 hours to write, it should not be this hard. Well, at least now I know twitter has not impaired my ability to write long essays.