Search for virtual servers: VDS.menu

Today I want to introduce you to a new project to search for hosting, virtual and dedicated servers . Due to the limited budget, only the part dedicated to virtual servers - vds.menu is working now , but the other two parts are also being developed and soon I will be able to present them.

I am often asked to choose a hosting or virtual server. It is very difficult to remember the tariffs of different hosters, especially since they sometimes change, so I used the aggregator sites. However, all the sites that are currently on the market have quite a lot of inconvenience - someone has a lot of advertising, someone has the tariffs filled incorrectly. In other words, to use such sites is very inconvenient. So I thought that I needed to solve this problem once and for all and started creating my own website .

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Above the domain name, I thought for a long time: how to name a ship - so it will sail. Naturally, all the “good” domains have long been occupied, so it was necessary to come up with something unusual. Relatively recently, new domain zones began to appear, and I decided, following fashion trends, to take a domain in one of these zones. After long hours of selection, I decided not to dwell on the same domain, but to take three at once in the same domain zone, so that each of them reflects the essence of the subproject. Thus, I have registered the following domains:

shared.menu - under shared hosting
vds.menu - for virtual servers
dedicated.menu - for dedicated servers

In parallel with the choice of the domain, I was looking for a developer who could create an excellent product according to my requirements. Literally a week later, the developer was found, and in a rather unusual way, and after discussing the future project, we started to work. The standard bootstrap template was chosen as the basis and I was lucky, because in parallel with my project, the programmer was doing another site on the same template and I could see how some elements of the project would look.

Bootstrap was not chosen by chance, since one of my requirements is a high-quality display of the site on any display: from a mobile phone to a widescreen monitor, and this template fits perfectly. It will automatically adjust to the width of the screen and the user will never see a horizontal scroll. For example, the main page in four different display options, depending on the width of the screen, looks like this:



There are two options for displaying tariffs - this is a tile and a table. Both options occupy approximately the same area, so one cannot definitely say which one is better or worse; in any case, you can always switch the display mode.



In addition to numerical characteristics (disk, memory, processor, traffic), tariffs indicate the country where the equipment is located and the type of virtualization. Also, the presence of IPv6 addresses, and the windows license and the ISPmanager panel included in the server price are highlighted in blue.

Since the site is optimized for all screens, the tabular mode varies slightly depending on the width of the screen. If the screen is wide - the tariff parameters are shown in separate columns, if the screen is not wide enough to display several columns, then all tariff parameters are “merged” into one column so that the table columns do not overlap each other.





Also, depending on the width of the screen, various page fliers will be shown.





In addition to the option of displaying tariffs, it is possible to select the number of tariffs on the page and currency. Tariffs will not automatically be displayed in the host currency, but in the one that the user chooses at the current conversion rate.



You can search for rates by almost all parameters by which you can search: disk space, disk type, RAM size, processor frequency, price, country, virtualization type, operating system, payment method, administration type, traffic amount. It is also planned to add the following checkboxes: presence of ispmanager included in the license cost, presence of windows included in the license price, IPv6 availability, automatic activation, no need to pay the tariff for more than a month.



Each element of the search block was thoroughly thought out. By default, all blocks for the search are in the closed state, however, if this parameter is searched, the block is automatically expanded and the resulting values ​​are indicated for it: for numerical elements (disk size, processor frequency, etc.), this value is from and before, for checkboxes, this is the number of checkmarks selected.



For numerical values, there is a possibility of quick selection of predefined values ​​from the drop-down list, and for values ​​with check marks there are three buttons: inversion, select all, remove all.





Country selection is two-level, so you can quickly select a whole group.



You can also select the order and parameter to sort. By default, the price is sorted by price.

When you go to the tariff page, the user sees the information about the host and detailed information about the tariff. In addition to the parameters that are being searched, on the fare page you can see the cost when paying for 3 months, six months or a year: quite often hosters make discounts for long-term payments. Also, you can see information about the speed of the channel, type of activation (automatic or manual), free administration and included options in the price of the tariff: windows license and ISPmanager panel. If the fare has a minimum payment period, then the fare page will contain information about that.



When you go to the hoster's page, you can see detailed information about it: screenshot, domain, date of registration of the domain, e-mail, phone, links to the hoster's pages in social networks, number of tariffs, base currency, billing type, date of addition to the site and payment methods . Also on the host page you can see a list of all its tariffs.



The page with all hosters is pretty simple, but there is a possibility of sorting according to different parameters: alphabetical order, time of existence (sorting in this case goes by the date of domain registration) and the novelty of adding to the site.



At the beginning of work on the project, I thought for a long time - how to organize a system for adding tariffs. There are two options: either let the hosters themselves add information through their personal account, or they need to fill in everything themselves.
The first option is inconvenient because, firstly, writing a personal account is quite a time-consuming exercise, and secondly, there is a need to verify the correctness of the filling. The disadvantage of the second option is that the hosters on the site do not always provide full information, and secondly, it will take a lot of time. Therefore, I chose an intermediate option: now there is a table template in Excel , which I suggest to fill in to hosters. After a quick check of the table, the tariffs are automatically added. Similarly, I plan to do and when updating the tariffs - the hoster will just need to change the data in the table, and for my part I will just need to download this file again in the admin panel.



I have no special criteria for adding hosters, the only condition is that the hoster should have a working site and billing.

In the future, I want to talk about two other subprojects: shared.menu and dedicated.menu - similar sites for searching shared hosting and dedicated servers.

By the way, the site has full support for the IPv6 protocol: http://ipv6.vds.menu

I want to thank the administration of HabraHabr for the free blog that I was provided.