[HCoop-Discuss] VPS hosting

[ntk at hcoop.net]

> Just curious.
> What does a VPS mean.
> Does this mean that suppose I have 10 websites I can host them on this
> server? Also what is the disk space and monthly GB limit.
> Some people I know may be willing.

VPS is Virtual Private Server.  Also called VDS (Dedicated) or various
other names.  No, it's not just that you can host 10 websites on this
server--you can already do that with your HCoop shell account.  What it
means is that we have one big server running a Hypervisor (Xen, in this
case) which allows us to install several operating systems in "virtual
servers."  To each one it looks like it is a self-contained machine.  You
get root access and are totally responsible for administering it, just as
if it were a dedicated server.  If other servers are not utilizing the CPU
or disk, then your server gets near-native CPU/disk performance, but you
are guaranteed some minimum chunk of CPU time.

I was thinking of installing 8 servers, with 256 M of RAM and 350MHz
dedicated to each.  Disk space is undetermined but I think I'm going with
73G drives, which would be about 9 gig of disk space per person.  Monthly
GB limit is totally undetermined as yet, since we have 5Mbits at 95
percentile for our whole cabinet, but it would at least be in the 10s of
gigabytes, if we bill based on total transfer.  If these specs weren't
enough you could buy more thank one "chunk" of the servers for a more
powerful VPS.

HOWEVER, I'm not going to open this up until the rest of our base system
is installed and running for users to move into at Peer1.  I don't want to
distract from the attention and substantial admin work that is going into
that.  Once we're up and running at Peer1 I can set up VPS on my new
machine if there is enough interest in short order, either temporarily as
my own colo machine that I "resell" as VPS to members, or as an official
HCoop box that I am the primary admin for.

-ntk