Forum OpenACS Q&A: OACS hosting plug

1: OACS hosting plug

Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 06/11/03 07:02 AM

http://www.goldvision.com/us/en/microrack.html

You get a virtual server, root access, pretty much like any other hosting option for openacs but half the price.
You're limited to 65MB of memory per process on the lowest pricing option so obviously you're not going to be hosting huge sites on it but for $15/m this is by far the closest I have seen to anyone matching the kind of pricing you see for Apache shared hosting. And obviously a virtual server is so much better than shared apache, there's no comparison.

I signed up Saturday. The last time I used anything BSD-related was SunOS in 94 -- goldvision is a freebsd shop -- so it's been a while. This is to say that I've sent several mails to mailto:support@goldvision.com, including one before I signed up. The longest wait time for a reply was _maybe_ 10 minutes. That's including one Sunday and one late at night.

Frankly I'm pretty impressed so far.

2: Re: OACS hosting plug (response to 1)

Posted by Patrick Giagnocavo on 06/11/03 07:10 AM

I don't know about half the price - my company (Zill.net) offers hosting from $19.95 per month.

A default OpenACS (depending on config) takes about 40MB RAM for the AOLserver process, plus a few MB per Postgres connection (although a lot of RAM is shared between the Postgres connections).

Busy sites (10GB traffic per month or more) usually take a lot more, up to 128MB per AOLserver process, plus Postgres connection overhead. Of course RAM usage is dependant on how much you cache, how much stack you use, number of threads etc. etc.

3: Re: OACS hosting plug (response to 1)

Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 06/11/03 07:15 AM

Cool, I didn't know that. (I've seen rosehosting -- generic virtual server -- and acornhosting -- oacs specific -- both at $30.)

4: Re: OACS hosting plug (response to 1)

Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 06/11/03 04:29 PM

What about performance guys?
that is what I always been concerned about virtual server.
For a oacs installation with no big load, small traffic how is the performance?
and what about dotlrn also with small traffic?

6: Re: OACS hosting plug (response to 1)

Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 06/11/03 05:34 PM

I have a demo ecommerce site up on my goldvision account and I'm quite happy with performance. Definitely better than when it was competing for resources with carnage blender.

5: Re: OACS hosting plug (q on performance) (response to 1)

Posted by Patrick Giagnocavo on 06/11/03 05:47 PM

Rocael, you ask about performance.

In our (Zill.net's) case we ensure that there is always enough RAM to support the number of servers being run. That is really the only way to make sure that performance will be OK when running on a shared server.

Roughly 50MB per OpenACS instance is usually good (in our case, as mentioned before, the database server is on a different machine), plus 32-64MB for the operating system.

The dotLRN instance can take a little more RAM depending on configuration. Also the number of threads you are running can increase RAM usage.

7: Re: OACS hosting plug (response to 1)

Posted by Cathy Sarisky on 06/11/03 06:48 PM

Nice to see more hosting options coming online. The situation has certainly improved in the last year!

Just to correct the record, AcornHosting's (http://www.acornhosting.net/devdeal) smallest package starts at $25 (not $30) and has more disk space and bandwidth than the $15/month package you're comparing it to.

If people are excited about a $15/month package, I can probably come up with one. It will not have the flexibility of being able to run a production and development instance at the same time (or two low-traffic sites at the same time), or being able to run apache/php and OpenACS while migrating from one to the other. Food for thought. :)

8: Re: OACS hosting plug (response to 1)

Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 06/11/03 07:21 PM

BTW guys, what do you use for doing the "virtual server" stuff?

10: Linux, FreeBSD virtual hosting (response to 8)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 06/11/03 08:45 PM

Anybody doing vitual server stuff on FreeBSD is virtually certain to be using FreeBSD's jail facility. AcornHosting is using a Linux kernel patch inspired by FreeBSD's jail. There's some info on the virtual server patch at www.paul.sladen.org and www.solucorp.qc.ca. See also some Feb. 2003 discussion of such.

9: Re: OACS hosting plug (response to 1)

Posted by Patrick Giagnocavo on 06/11/03 08:50 PM

re: Rocael's question on virtual server: Zill.net does not use virtual servers, instead using OpenBSD (relatively secure) along with each user's space having strict permissions on it. I am not trying to cast FUD about virtual servers however.

11: Re: OACS hosting plug (response to 1)

Posted by David Kuczek on 06/12/03 08:33 AM

A huge German provider is now offering a *dedicated* Celeron 1200 + 256MB Ram + 25GB Traffic + Suse 8.1 for + root access etc. for *only* 29Euro a month + 49Euro set up fee. This equals $34 + $57 at the moment (http://www.xe.com/ucc/ - currency converter)

Here is the link (everything in German):

http://hosting.1und1.com/xml/static?__page=root.start

12: German Hosting (response to 11)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 06/12/03 09:03 AM

The only bad thing about the size of this giant is the fact that, if you have problems, you are in trouble :). OTOH, if you live outside the European Union, you will be able to deduct 16% VAT from the amount.

13: Re: OACS hosting plug (response to 1)

Posted by David Cotter on 06/12/03 12:15 PM

Here's a plug for Cathy.

I am very happy with the performance I get from acornhosting.

I have a reasonably busy site - peaking at 2000 visits/day serving 160M/day data.

I get a full virtual server with root access, 2G disk, 20G traffic - so it's like I have my own machine for $25/month.

Cathy has fixed any problems I have had usually within a few hours any time I've had them including weekends.

14: Re: OACS hosting plug (response to 1)

Posted by Lachlan Myers on 06/13/03 04:23 AM

Acornhosting is great!