the Price of Web Site Hosting

A pretty new trend in Webhosting are so-called vServers. They cost only slightly more than traditional Webspace accounts, but give their customers full control like with a dedicated webserver. This is accomplished by virtualization - several customers share one physical server, which runs several instances of the operating system, usually Linux.

vServers are an amazing thing: They are available in various price classes, starting at around 6.00 $. This, for example, currently gives you around 10 GB of disk space and 100 GB included traffic per month. A vServer appears like a real dedicates Linux server that it standing somewhere in a data center and is constantly connected to the Internet. You have your own IP adress and full control over almost any aspect of the operating system. This gives you total freedom - for example, if you want to install a game server, an IRC server or just any Linux component that you like. But, of course, this also requires responsibility: A vServer is not a fully maintained product that you can rely on "out of the box". You usually start with an outdated standart Linux image, provided by your provider, and then you're self-responsible for security updates, maintaining the firewall and everything around it.

So, if you don't know much about webhosting, you should rather stay with full-service webhosters, but if you've always dreamed of having your own server on the Internet but didn't have the money for it - the latest price drops for vServers might offer an incredible value for you.

The only mayor downside besides "real" dedicated servers is that you share the physcial server with other vServer customers - this means, it is slower in calculation, there might be less RAM available and you never know if there might be the risk of not-yet-discovered security holes in the virtualization technology used to accomplish this relativly new kind of webhosting services.

-Only install applications that are not very consumptive in CPU power and memory usage, as you share the physical performance of the machine with other customers. If you want to built a heavy game server, you might better stick with a more expensive dedicated server

-when starting to use a vServer service, make sure that you install ALL available updates and security patches for the Linux version that your provider is running for you. This is your responsibility as a costumer of this special kind service! Your provider will be in no way liable for any damage through a security breach caused by your misconfiguration

-install scripts and cronjobs that constantly check the available disk space and monitor the traffic coming in and going out through the (virtual) network devices of your vServer. There are a lot of free Perl scripts available on the net. You can install them as cronjobs, so that they automatically send you warning messages when certain limits are hit.