Maybe here i should drop some words about where this page is hosted…
Normally usual web hosting would be enough. Yes, it may have some limitations like no ssh access (which most ppl wouldn’t even know what does this stay for), it may lack some modules, but anyway usually it would not be a problem for most content management systems ppl are using. But the thing is that first of all i just wanted to have more control over what i’m doing and also i thought that maybe i’ll want to build something else available on internet, besides my web server. It could be communication server for my gaming needs for the cases when raidcall server stops working next time. May want to write some kind of automation scripts for whatever fantasy would go for. So i decided to look for a VPS (Virtual Private Server) solution. Of course, same as most of the inhabitants of the planet Earth i wanted to have more and better for a smaller price. I started googling for different VPS comparisons were published during the last year i have found what i was searching for: Contabo.com. Was a bit risky, because there’s no much review or forum posts about this company, and these i have found there was one that was saying that this company had another name in the past and had not really good reputation. Though i still the price was affordable for a try. Especially i really get what they say… So, 10, EUR per month and 20 EUR for initial configuration which you pay only once (price may vary depending on how many months you pay at the beginning, i paid for three months). So what to i get for this money? 200GB of disk storage, 4GB of RAM guaranteed, 100mbps unlimited internet traffic and more. Look here for details: http://contabo.com/?show=vps. Disadvantages? For now there’s just one i have found. Once i’ve got a message(got it one week in advance) from the company that my VPS wont be available for some hours during they do some maintenance works on their hosts, which means they do not do live migrations to other hosts for such cases. AFAIK even freeware Xen server provides this functionality, but… well, for the price i pay it is acceptable for me if such cases may happen once per month or so. Still hope they’ll discover the great advantage of VM live migration one day or another. I’ll wait =)
Where do the hosts actually are? The data center is in Munich, Germany, which is good for European customers. There might be cheaper/better solutions are provided in US, but the quality of connection will suck for europeans, so if you and most ppl will use your published services are in europe you better look for VPS provider is alse somewhere here around and not overseas.
So, when you have a VPS you can choose what OS system will be installed from their images. There are several linux distributions available and 2008/2012 windows server. For windows server there are some euros you’ll have to pay extra every month for the license. First i have chosen to use Debian stable, but then found the packages where too outdated, and to get newer packages right from repository i had to change the sources to the testing repository. I had some negative experience when going from stable to testing just by changing the source lists, so i just went to Contabo’s control panel and chose to reinstall the system to Debiann wheezy (Testing) where they update their packages +/- weekly.
I’m using standard LAMP (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP) configuration with virtual hosts enabled. Domain name i bought from GoDaddy is using CloudFlare DNS servers (without using CloudFlare CDN function now). Site is based on wordpress engine with default there. Maybe once i’ll get to create my custom there for this site, but… later )
As far as i all i get from Contabo is just a Virtual Server that’s my duty to think about backing up everything needs to be backed up. At the moment i think about using Dropbox for droping my backups there. Not really much space when using free account, but should be enough for me. The good advantage of this service, is that it’s pretty easy to get it working on linux machines that do not use any graphical desktop environment. I’ll write about this later.
Good luck!