VPS Overview


Previously, this site was hosted on Hostable, a managed web-hosting service. I had signed up for a free 3 years with them; that was about to run out, and, cheap as I am, I wanted to look for a cheaper alternative. Actually, I didn’t find a cheaper alternative - quite the opposite - but at the same time, I was interested in finding a host for a King Arthur’s Gold server. The interests happened to coincide in the form of a VPS. Here’s my very brief experience with VPS:

I had never heard of VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting before a month or two ago. I’d heard of dedicated servers since back in the olden days of self-hosted servers for games like Quake or UT2004. However, those are quite expensive; usually around the $100 mark. I’d guess that’s because you’re not only paying for the hardware, you’re paying for the rackspace; after all, hosting companies want to maximize the amount of computing power per space they have in their server room, so the machines have got to be fairly high-end.

An alternative to this is VPS hosting. In VPS hosting, one machine is divided into smaller “virtual” machines, so that each virtual machine is using some portion of the computer’s resources. For example, my configuration has 2 cores and 2 GB RAM - probably a rather small amount of the total cores and RAM in the actual server it’s hosted on. However, you almost never need an entire server, and so a VPS is more than enough.

There’s another thing called shared hosting, which I’m not too familiar with. My impression of it is that different people all share one dedicated server running a single OS, and each person has an account on that server. However, I stayed away from this option because of the issues with security you’ve got to remember in such a setup.

VPS come in two variants, managed and unmanaged. In an unmanaged setup, you get access to the CLI via SSH, and that’s pretty much it. In a managed setup, you interact with the system via control panels and other tools. Being the Linux nerd that I am, I went for an unmanaged setup.

I had heard of Amazon’s EC2 service, which seems to be just a VPS that can change depending on the server’s resource needs at any given moment. The more you use, the more you pay. However, their site doesn’t seem to be too user-friendly, and I didn’t like that you couldn’t set ceilings on how many resources your server can use (or maybe you can, and I just didn’t explore enough). In any case, I went on the hunt for budget VPS providers.

First, I signed up for NodePop. At $7 a month, it seemed quite a steal - and the service itself was actually pretty good. The first thing I noticed, though, was that the control panel lacked a lot of features. Sure, it had graphs and the ability to restart the VPS, but it was very bare-bones. The second thing was the more important one. I noticed that when querying IPv4 services, like icanhazip and whatismyip, the IP returned was different than the one given to me to SSH into. This wouldn’t have been too important, except that the KAG server uses their own IP service to grab my IP for their API; since the IP returned was different, the game thought my server was unjoinable. I opened up a support ticket, and… they never responded. Actually, that’s not quite true. After a week, I canceled my service, and only then did they respond - with a link to a control panel which I couldn’t log into. I wasn’t too happy with that, so the cancellation stood.

I then found Linode, which came highly recommended by many online sources, primarily for their support. At $20/month, it was a little steeper, but I figured, well, why not give it a shot. However, I encountered huge lag issues with running a KAG server. I opened a support ticket, and they indeed proved that their support was much better than NodePop’s; I received a response within minutes of opening the ticket. However, despite a free migration to another server, we were unable to resolve the lag issue, and so I canceled that service too.

While searching for Linode, I came across Digital Ocean. While a clean design never necessarily means a good service, I have got to say, they have got probably the best looking webpage out of all of the VPS providers I’d seen. There were a lot of comparisons out there on the web between the Linode and Digital Ocean, and it seemed like most people favored Linode. Since Linode disappointed me, though, I figured I’d give Digital Ocean a shot at their $20/month level.

So far, it’s been great. Deployment was very quick and easy; there were several OSes and datacenter locations to choose from. I, of course, chose Arch. The clean design of the webpage pays off when you get to their control panel, which is very well laid out. It’s got nice features like the ability to take and restore from a snapshot, several different graphs, and a VNC client you can use to login to your server. Support isn’t too far off from Linode’s; I submitted a ticket about the graphs not showing up when I first signed up, and their response was also within a few minutes. The graphs issue was apparently a problem with their NYC2 datacenter, and got resolved after a couple days - admittedly, not the fastest.

All the same, the lag issues are gone from the KAG server, and I’m hosting this website on there as well with no problems. There hasn’t been any downtime, but I’ve only had the service for about a month. I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it until I stick with them for a while, but I will recommend them with at least three-quarters of my heart.