I was looking at the costing of my Internet hosting a few weeks ago and decided I’m paying too much.
I have a couple dedicated servers in a few locations, mostly at iWeb. For the purpose of this blog I’ll do the costing on just one of them which was $104 USD per month.
The main reason I was keeping the hosting at iWeb was for Icecast servers as I operate the Internet streams for several FM radio stations which can consume a bit of bandwidth. Last week I was able to locate several Virtual Private Server packages with sufficient bandwidth for my Icecast servers from $3 USD per month. Quite a difference. Even if these VPS providers are overselling or are flyby companies, with good backups and my credit card I should be able to install replacement servers in a matter of hours.
Lowendbox proved to be a useful resource in tracking down VPS packages.
I decided on taking the approach of migrating all web, email and DNS hostings to Australia with Jumba. 90% of these sites target Australians so it will serve to improve the performance of these websites for the target audience.
I also decided to get accounts in Los Angeles and The Netherlands for mail and DNS backups. I will later do some works on clustering web servers and utilize GeoIP support in BIND to direct visitors to their nearest server and will end up migrating a few websites across. I’ve already successfully setup my Icecast servers to cluster and am in the process of stability testing that system.
So all up to replace one machine costing $104 per month… I ended up buying:
- 2x VPS with Jumba – 512MB Memory, 10GB Hard Disk, 100GB Network Transfer – $20 AUD per month
- VPS with Hostitek – 1GB Memory, 80GB Hard Disk, 2000GB Network Transfer – $6 USD per month
- VPS with VMPort – 256MB Memory, 20GB Hard Disk, 250GB Network Transfer – £3.52 GBP per month
So for around $35 per month… I’ve successfully reduced that hosting cost of $104 per month. Sure I don’t get the same processor, memory, hard disk and bandwidth… but I didn’t need such large quotas anyway.