Cheap "dedicated" hosting
There are many excellent hosting companies out there that offer high-end dedicated hosting for high-end applications.
However, many people don't need 80GB of disk and 1GB of RAM. I take myself as an example - the production servers for our company run on monster machines with a gazzillion gigabytes of storage and as much RAM.
But for myself, in my private capacity, I need a much less powerfull server at a much reduced price. This drove me straight into the arms of virtual computing.
Linode.com is a company that offers exactly that - they run multiple virtual servers on their own monster machines.
Linode.com recently upgraded their offerings, and for about R140.00/month (that's Rand, not dollars) you get a "machine" with:
- 256MB RAM
- 8GB of disk (RAID1 redundancy)
- 100GB of traffic transfer
You can install most of the popular distro's (CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware) in minutes. You can even divide your storage up into two sections, install two distro's and decide which one you like better, then later delete the one you don't like and add that storage back into the pool of the distro you want to keep.
On top of that you also get a dedicated static IP to which you can assign a reverse DNS address and they also offer a free DNS *primary* hosting service with a really nice web interface.
I've been using these guys for just under a year, and I must confess, I'm addicted.
--deckert
