Poor Man’s Linode, VPS Hosting On A Budget

Posted on 10 March 2012

Having used several shared webhosting companies, I’m now wary of the security of servers using cPanel or Directadmin. Call me paranoid but I prefer to keep my data on a server that serves only one user… me. Of course a dedicated server would be overkill so we’ll settle for a VPS as the next best thing.

But… a reliable VPS cost no less than $20 from providers like Linode and Slicehost. Now going from $2/mo shared hosting to a $20/mo VPS is a hefty amount to pay for privacy and security, especially for those only needing to host low traffic sites. So whats cheaper than Linode but comparable in terms of what you’re getting out from a VPS ?

Here is a solution for those that can only afford to shell out <$10 per month for getting their sites up and running. A combination of budget VPS + backup service.

Lets take a look at the services involved with corresponding costs…

	Poor Man’s VPS	Premium VPS
VPS Plan	Budget 256MB Xen VPS $5	Linode 512MB $19.95
Backup Solution	10GB Amazon S3 ~$2	Linode backup service $5
Total	$7	$25

At the moment this site is hosted on a 512MB 2Host Xen VPS, backed up weekly to Amazon S3 using Duplicity. The whole setup costs less than $7 per month. If for some reason my VPS provider goes bust, all that is needed is another $5 VPS plan and 2 hours to setup the VPS and restore from backups. Sure I don’t get to customize my partitions or use other optional features like with a Linode VPS, but the cost savings is pretty darn significant. The challenge here would be to find a relatively reliable budget VPS provider, preferably on Xen or KVM platform. For starters, those wanting to go with this setup should consider prgmr and rapidxen.

If you have a similar setup or better ideas to host sites for cheap, do share your thoughts!