TheRaven64's Journal: Hosting Resolved

I had another chat with my hosting company's CEO today, and he agreed to give me one of their standard plans for slightly less than it usually costs with twice as much bandwidth and a second IP. While this is still a bit more than some other companies, knowing that if stuff goes wrong I have email and IM addresses for the CEO, CTO and head tech and can bitch at them until someone fixes it probably makes it worth while. They extended my existing contract by a month to give me time to shop around for a new host, and then agreed to the suggestion I felt fair after I'd looked at some of their competitors.

Mac Mini Colo are now back on my 'would recommend' list. Anyone looking for hosting that falls somewhere between low end dedicated servers and high-end virtual private servers would do well to check them out.

In a year, I will probably move to a Xen-based solution, but at the moment they tend not to have enough RAM or disk space. Anyone looking at starting a hosting business should take note of this. There is a serious shortage of VPS solutions with decent amounts of disk space and RAM. Get some 750GB disks (maybe RAID-1, two per machine), and 5-6GB of RAM, and you can put 10 VMs with decent specs in each node. CPU is rarely the limiting factor for budget hosting, and live migration can help out a lot here if you choose to go for a SAN backend and just have a lot of disks somewhere in your rack.