Choosing a "home" for your virtual server

There comes a time when you realize that a home project, once done “on the knee”, has long since grown from the category of “hobby” into something serious. Especially when this project is quite automated and brings a small, but profit. And then the question arises about choosing your server.

A home server is nice, but how reliable is it? Especially when you are in fairly frequent traveling and you can not constantly control the iron? Plus, fire safety and not least important - uninterrupted Internet. It is not necessary to speak about the latter, it suffices to recall the failure in Corbin of March 25.

Servers at work also have their drawbacks. For example, what to do when you need to give a project to support third-party people? The standard situation went on vacation, asked friends to check the automation and press a couple of buttons if necessary. And the Internet on corporate rates is not always unlimited.
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In my case, the choice naturally fell on the “Virtual Dedicated Server” - VPS (eng. Virtual Private Server) or VDS (eng. Virtual Dedicated Server). Those interested can get a basic knowledge of this technology from Wikipedia materials . At the moment, the market is quite saturated with offers from hosting and data centers providing VPS solutions with Linux OS. With Windows as a guest OS, things look a little worse, but not as sad as a few years ago. In my case, I needed exactly Windows VPS.

VPS selection.

The selection process itself consisted in reading Habra, the Internet, and other popular literature. There are lots of review articles and, as a rule, it all comes down to how well you own the search and know how to analyze information. The signal for action was an article from the company Infobox .

To begin with, I was followed by an attempt to "carry out the brain" to the caliper on the topic 152 FZ and protect personal data to get a test server. Despite all the questions and answers, my point of view that the passport data for the test period is not needed, and remains mine. With my rightness, you can argue, but the introduction is not entirely accurate (and I would even say "left data") Infobox is not insured. In this case, it is better to request a cell phone number.

The second pretender "brain endure" was not for that, because I do not consider my cell number as confidential information. In both cases, support was adequate and fast enough. In both cases, the next day I received a test server.

In the end, according to my wishes, it turned out like this:

	www.infobox.ru	www.hyper-vds.com
Rate	PROMO-512	Hyper-512
Processor (stated)	300 MHz	1000 MHz
Memory	512 Mb	512 Mb
HDD	25 Gb	25 Gb
Price	Action, 400r 6 months, then 1300r.	19 cu about 570r.

Tests

Next came the tests. Yes, tests, for some reason, some users forget this important moment in the life of their future server. Visually, hyper-vds.com slowed down on my applications just because I was confused and the processor frequency was set to the wrong rate. Testing was done by the MetaBench utility. In fact, this was the first thing that caught my eye when it worked and produced a useful result. More recent versions can be found on http://www.7byte.com/ .




The starting point was my working machine, it gave out 3960-4078 “parrots” and 1.80 Mhz MetaMark with a processor frequency of 2.2 Mhz.




The first went to VPS from www.infobox.ru , the program showed 1263 “parrots” and 0.48 Mhz MetaMark. I take the last parameter as the processor speed, which is good. According to my calculations, the “useful frequency of the processor” is of the order of 390 Mhz compared to the 300 MHz stated (considered simply: 1.8 / 2.2 = x / 0.48, hence x = 390).

Caliper commented on it like this:

> After I ran the tests, it turned out that you had a frequency
> 400Mg processor, although it should be 300Mg (10% of 3 Hz.) So
> should be?

Usually, we have allocated a processor frequency slightly higher than the stated. This is not a mistake, it should be so.

The second one got a VPS based on 2003 from www.hyper-vds.com , the test took place as many as 3 times, due to the fact that for the first time the wrong processor was installed. The program showed 1,484 “parrots” and 0.58 Mhz MetaMark. The “useful frequency of the processor” turned out to be about 470 MHz from the declared 1000 MHz, i.e. We have the opposite effect compared to the tariffs.

And again, caliper comments:

On Win 2008 - performance will not increase.
Get exactly 1 Hz in the tests you will not work - because The CPU is spent on hardware emulation, including a network adapter.

Pivot table after testing:

	www.infobox.ru	www.hyper-vds.com
Rate	PROMO-512	Hyper-512
Processor (stated / fact)	300 MHz / 390 MHz	1000 MHz / 470 MHz
Memory is actually / free after OS boot.	512 Mb / 180 Mb	512 Mb / 300 Mb
Hard disk / free after OS installation	25 Gb / 16 Gb	25 Gb / 20 Gb
Price	Action, 400r 6 months, then 1300r.	19 cu about 570r.

Findings:

I want to make a reservation right away that everything written above reflects only my opinion, technical characteristics are also perceived in their own way. In order not to hope for me, you can always conduct your own research on any servers available to you in any companies.


Judging by the logs, on both servers, my program, which deals with active calculations and work with the mysql database, worked almost equally. The difference in 15 minutes, with which the server on www.hyper-vds.com won with 4 hours of 100% load, in this case is not significant.

In the second pivot table, we have almost identical servers, from a technical point of view. In the pricing policy, the second applicant wins almost 2 times after 6 months. The cheapness of foreign decisions on the face, pouring oil on the flames of the latest events in Russia aimed at the Internet.

For myself, I have already found a decent solution. What to do in this situation is up to you.