Low End VPS boxes
I love a bargain; we all love a bargain. It’s even better when you get something really good for a dirt cheap price. One of the things I have been meaning to get for quite some time is a VPS, but I haven’t found a provider which meets my requirements in terms of price and reliability.
I’ve wanted a VPS to do so many things. As I work in radio, one of the primary things I’ve wanted to do was setup my own streaming media server. However, as I don’t have much cash to spend, it has been hard to find a reliable VPS provider within my price range.
The key word is here is ‘reliable’. There are countless dirt-cheap VPS providers out there, but when it comes to their network latency, uptime, and other factors, well, that is another thing all together. Not to mention the tendency for providers in this area to be here one day, and gone the next!
There are entire websites setup to track this whole ‘low end hosting’ market. One such website which I’ve been following for some time is low end box. They track the very low end of the market. In fact, their criteria for listing is under US$7/month. Now, that’s pretty cheap by anyone’s standard!
After umm-ing and err-ing for a while about singing up with one of these services, I finally decided last week to take the plunge. US$6/month and a few days waiting for PayPal to clear my money, I had signed up for Delimeter USA, which ironically, has their servers located in Germany.
For US$6/month, I got 256MB of RAM, 10GB of hard drive space, and a seemingly unlimited amount of data transfer (terms and conditions apply, of course). The data transfer was the deciding factor for me to choose this provider; I was happy when I found a provider which wouldn’t shut me down if I used a bit of extra data transfer.
As far as the stability of this service goes, I currently have no clue what to expect. They boast 99.9% uptime, but I’m not holding my breath. As long as they don’t go down for hours/days on end (as a previous Shoutcast host has done to me in the past), then I will be happy.
Right now, I have Icecast2 and Apache installed on my low end box, and it’s serving up 2CCR’s MP3 and AAC+ streams. I setup Apache as a reverse proxy, so I now have our station streaming on Port 80 (in addition to our legacy ports still working). I’ve also configured it to ‘pull’ the data from our encoder, rather than our encoder ‘pushing’ the stream out to the server constantly. The advantage of this is that if no one is listening, then we don’t use any bandwidth. So far, so good.
It’s great to finally have my own server running. Being able to do whatever Ubuntu supports is great. No longer am I restricted by what Plesk or cPanel wants me to do, or what my shared hosting provider dictates. I hope it stays up and running, and the provider doesn’t collapse. But if they do, there’s a whole world of other providers out there to choose from. To me, it’s a great adventure!