Searching for Vps - Vps Questions

[borobhaisab]

Hello There,

I am searching for a vps host that will give me unlimited bandwidth as I want to run a searchengine from scratch after I build it and I do not want to get any monthly limits and find I have gone over the limit and my website has been suspended or get a huge bill at the end of the month if my website does not get suspended for the remaining days of the month after the bandwidth reaches it's limit.

Q1. How much bandwidth should I opt for at the beginning ? And how many visitors can simultaneously visit my searchengine without my website slowing down if I get that amount of bandwidth you suggest ?

Q2. How much ram should I opt for at the beginning ? And how many visitors can simultaneously visit my searchengine without my website slowing down if I get that amount of ram you suggest ?

Q3. Recommend any hosts ? If so, whioch of their packages ?

Q4. Anything else I should know ?

I do not want to pay too much right at the beginning. Do not want to be renting too much resources right at the beginning. But fair amount of resources and enough so if my searchengine goes viral then it does not get clogged or slow down or freeze. Else, it will get bad name.
You know the drill.

[borobhaisab]

@Dani

Which vps host this website uses ?

[Dani]

A VPS is when you have a physical server that has virtual machine (VM) software installed on it. The web hosting company then “rents” each VM to a different client. The benefit here is that small websites don’t necessarily need the full strength of the entire server, and so it’s cheaper to rent just a part of a server instead of the whole thing. However, as each client has full access to their own VM, they have full admin access to their operating system, and live in a silo from other clients on the same server. Of course the big downside here is that, with multiple random clients of the same hosting company sharing a server, server resources are split. I’ve never used a VPS, but if I recall from back in the day, it was a flat monthly rate with no bandwidth usage costs. I’m not really sure if that is still true, especially since AWS is now on the scene.

Cloud services such as AWS work similarly. You have access to an VM hosted on Amazon’s infrastructure. The big thing here is their pricing model is pay-as-you-go. This is great for small businesses that are rapidly growing, or sessional businesses. You can start off paying very little, and as you grow, your infrastructure grows with you. This is great because it’s a huge hassle to switch servers as you grow, and there’s no risk of unexpectedly going viral and running out of resources, causing your website to go down when it’s the most popular, and potentially taking days to migrate into more powerful hardware. However, you pay a premium to have that flexibility. You pay for all resources you consume, from CPU cycles, to disk space, to bandwidth. The more resources you consume in a month, the higher your bill that month. Luckily, the less popular your site is, the less you have to pay.

DaniWeb is actually hosted on a private VPS. What that means is that I rent a few bare bones metal servers directly from an IBM data center in Dallas, Texas, I physically rent the actual hardware. Then, our systems admin, James, installs VPN software on them, so that our web servers run in virtual environments. If we need to add or remove servers from our private cloud, while it may take a day or two for the hardware to be physically set up and connected to our router, the VPN software lets us quickly spin up another instance of our web server software.

We do it this way because, with DaniWeb being 20 years old, our days of unexpectedly quadrupling in traffic from one day to the next are long behind us. Therefore, it’s not advantageous to pay such a high premium for instant flexibility.

I am not a sysadmin person so I might have used incorrect terminology here in my explanation. However, this is how it works to the best of my understanding.

[borobhaisab]

@Dani

Mmm.
You mean by barebone a dedicated server. I believe.
A computer you rent with no sharing with other customers of the host.

Anyway, I prefer a flat rate per month as I won;t be earning anything at the beginning, if I earn anything atall.
I diod once rent a vps. Experience was awful as they were down most of the time.
I have now been suggested to start off with 1 processor and 2GB ram for my vps.
I was gonna start off with 2 processors and 4/8GB ram, actually.
Now, I just need to find the vps host that will give me unlimited bandwidth without charging me an arm or a leg. Or, even a head, for that matter. Lol! ;)
Been failing to find any vps packs with unlimited bandwidth. That is my issue.

[Dani]

You mean by barebone a dedicated server. I believe.
A computer you rent with no sharing with other customers of the host.

Yes, I do.

Anyway, I prefer a flat rate per month as I won;t be earning anything at the beginning, if I earn anything atall.

That is the reason that I am recommending going with a cloud service and not paying a flat rate per month. At the beginning, you won't be making money, but you also won't have a lot of traffic. So it makes more sense to pay-for-usage and just pay a little bit for bandwidth, but you won't be using a lot of bandwidth, so your costs will be very, very low. Then, if your traffic suddenly spikes, you pay a little more. Versus paying $500-1000 per month to start for unlimited bandwidth with a dedicated server, and then if traffic suddenly spikes, your server goes down.

It looks like Liquid Web offers a VPN with 2 gigs of ram and flat bandwidth costs: https://www.liquidweb.com/products/vps/ and I believe they've been around quite a long time. Their name sounds familiar to me.

HostGator does as well: https://www.hostgator.com/vps-hosting/ and they're pretty well known.
As does bluehost: https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/vps

I believe HostGator actually rents their servers from the same datacenter that I do. Or at least that used to be the case many, many, many years ago.

It looks like they're all roughly in the $40-50/mo price range with discounts for signing year-long contracts. However, at that price point, it's probably going to be against their terms of service to use their server resources to crawl the web.

[Dani]

You mean by barebone a dedicated server. I believe.

Yes, but we have a bunch of them all next to each other, connected to a router that we also rent, in our own private cabinet in the data center.

[john_111]

While planning to build a search engine, you might want to read this to get an idea of the amount of data involved.
https://lewisdgavin.medium.com/googles-data-footprint-will-blow-your-mind-2237cf8e0d4

and perhaps this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_data_centers

[borobhaisab]

@john_111

Let me start small. No good hiring a data centre building at the beginning.
Can upgrade as needed.

Thanks!