I haven't seen much interest here (obviously) and only a bit more by email.
I'm a little surprised. We've had thread after thread from people looking for hosting for cheap. I'm hoping its just because those of us in the States may be on holiday this week.
I did some testing, some comparison shopping, and installed/built/configured Aolserver/PostgreSQL/OpenACS more times than I'd care to remember while getting virtual machines working on a dev box. After some tweaking, it works well with Mandrake 8.0, and should work with RedHat too.
So let me modify what I said a little bit. You'd get a virtual machine running RH7.2 or 7.3, on a real machine, shared with a few other users. You'd have a familiar platform. :) You could do root-like things.
The real machine would be in the 512MB-1GB memory range, 1-1.5GHz, single CPU. You'd get 2-3GB of disk space, at least 10GB of bandwidth on a server living in a nice colo with a huge pipe. And your very own AOLserver process that you could restart x times an hour while doing development.
Price? About $25/month, maybe less. I'm hoping that this price would make it attractive for club sites, fan sites, sites under development, sites run by small non-profits. That would include DNS, the option to use a subdomain of one of my domains if you're REALLY tight on cash, and email.
So, if any of the folks who've asked for hosting in the past are reading, I'd appreciate some commentary on whether that would be interesting. You don't have to commit to anything (I don't have the server yet!), but I'd like to know if you consider that a reasonable price. I don't anticipate a way to make the prices lower than $25 while keeping the number of users on the machine reasonable and keeping performance high.
