Just a few questions about VPS Hosting

[robertzo]

My First question is, is the storage calculated in HD or SSD? Also is there a guarantee uptime or is that only for the shared hosting? Lastly what are the differences between Ubuntu, Centos, or Windows does one cost more or less?

[wolstech]

Spinning HDDs. We don't provide any official guarantees, but I can say that the uptime is much better than the shared hosting assuming you configure your server correctly, since the only thing that really affects a VPS's uptime is network connection failure or the OS crashing. The only outages you'd experience are scheduled maintenance (which is announced) or problems with our upstream provider Hurricane Electric having network or power issues.

 

VPSes come empty with a bare operating system, you have to install everything yourself to run whatever you wish to host.

 

For the OS, you want to pick Linux (Ubuntu most likely) unless you have a license for Windows Server. We don't provide the license for the Windows option, it comes with a 120 day trial version, after which you have to purchase a license for Windows Server Standard, which is nearly $800 from most reputable sellers (you cannot use the Essentials edition as it has license restrictions that cannot be met using a cloud VPS).

Edited April 21, 2021 by Jenova
120 "day" trial version

[robertzo]

Another question is the VPS hosting hosted on my computer or online.

[wolstech]

It runs on our servers, but you administer it from your PC over SSH (or RDP if it's Windows). Buying a VPS is literally just renting a virtual machine on our server. It comes with a chunk of resources, an operating system, and an IP address. That's it. You install and configure everything else yourself.

 

Just based on this question alone, if you were considering one, I can say that a VPS is probably not right for you.

 

There's a steep learning curve to using one. We can help set it up, but there's time you'll need to spend and knowledge you need to have in order to maintain it down the road (applying updates, configuration changes, troubleshooting, etc.), which we don't really provide.

[Krydos]

My personal test vps has been running for over a year. During the last 12 months I've had about 140 minutes of downtime. There were two scheduled maintenance during that time that were probably about an hour each, but they were both announced several days in advance, and then another 20 minutes of random stuff like me rebooting my own VPS. That's 99.97% uptime for the whole year.

 

A lot of users don't have as good of uptime because they do silly things like install a gui on a headless vps and end up crashing the server with a memory leak and stuff like that. Things that are perfectly avoidable if you know what you're doing like Wolstech says. Your uptime mileage will vary depending on how many mistakes you make.

 

Don't be too scared though. Vps are a great opportunity to learn if you're willing to do some google searching for command line instructions. No matter how many mistakes you make you can always always just give up and say "wipe it clean!" and I'll reinstall the os for you and you can start over with a brand new fresh operating system again. It's not a big deal at all to reinstall the os, and I don't mind giving people pointers or instructions if they get stuck. You or I can probably google up a guide for you to do whatever you're trying to do and then you can just follow the instructions. If you want to try one out for 3 or 4 days just let me know and I'll spin up a basic 2 GB memory, 2 cpu, and 50 GB hard drive vps for you to try out for free. Then if you want to keep learning after you've tried it for a few days you can pay $4 to keep the vps you have for a month or you can upgrade to a faster machine and go from there.