Why not just co-locate a box of your own?

What I did:

Assemble random crap box from parts (Athlon 2100+, 512 MB RAM, 80GB HDD) This was free for me, and should be cheap or free for you. It was also two years ago, so you can probably find better hardware now.

Leave box at parents' house using cable modem for 2 months (free, but slow)

Co-locate box at Sprocket Data in Dallas for 6 months ($60/mo for 100 GB traffic, 100 mbps burst)

Then things changed a lot, but my startup has always owned all the equipment.

I like being able to fix problems myself when needed.

I did this a few years ago.

Grew a site to 10k+ daily uniques while it was running over a DSL connection at my parents house!

"Why not just co-locate a box of your own?" "Co-locate box at Sprocket Data in Dallas for 6 months ($60/mo for 100 GB traffic, 100 mbps burst)"

Because it's too expensive when you're just starting out. I could afford $60/mo, for instance (because I'm older and have lots of kizzash) but I'm hosted for $8/mo with 1.5TB of throughput.

If your site gets much traffic, you'll be over 60GB before you know it. :-o

problem with the $8/mo-type services is that you're limited as to what sort of tech you can use

True, although some providers are more liberal than others. Dreamhost lets you run your own stuff, like ruby, php, rails, etc. But yeah, it's a limited environment, and you're sharing. When you're first starting out, you may not care about that. But eventually ...

The other big downside is that you can't just go in and kill an errant process if your alpha version does something weird.

And you're also in the dark about what those other processes (those not owned by you) might be doing at any given time.

Controlling the entire server as root is just better.

well, to be honest, you get a shell account. I'm hosting stuff on dreamhost, and it's entirely possible to killall my-errant-script when you need to. Just realize that you're a pretty low-priveledge user.

It's a great deal for static file hosting though, if you're a data intensive site as opposed to CPU-intensive site (or even a data-intensive site in addition to cpu-intensive)

If you use FastCGI/Rails with Dreamhost, as soon as you get any traffic they will shut down your account for "Excessive CPU Usage". I've seen it happen to a lot of sites hosted there that are linked from Reddit/Digg.

I use SoftLayer http://www.softlayer.com/ .. I used to use EV1 but since they merged with The Planet they've not been as good. SoftLayer is made up of many of the "old" The Planet guys and offer some amazing stuff like free private LAN between your servers.

Of course you're going to start at no less than $150 per month, and I spend almost $1000 a month, but.. this is business and you have to pay to get the goods. People who run their businesses on naff shared hosting are crazy unless they think the odd hour of downtime here or there is acceptable.

Of course, shared hosting or a VPS (my personal recommendation if your budget is small) is a good way to start, but once you make revenue, it's time to upgrade :)

SoftLayer is indeed very good. The virtual LAN is awesome - you can even setup a PPTP VPN connection and access your virtual LAN from it.

VPN in your gateway box at home and it is almost like having the servers in the other room. They don't charge you anything for data that goes over the VPN, so you can upload/download from your server without using your bandwidth quota - it is a great for pulling off site backups.

Ouch ! They're expensive ... but as you say, maybe when it's time to upgrade.

likebetter.com's on softlayer and we're happy

You have some pretty strict requirements there - I am curious as to why. Is your app really that complex where you require these services or are you planning ahead for scaling issues?

Personally, I go with Dreamhost. The price is right, their service is awesome, and customer support is willing to help you with whatever you need. If scaling becomes an issue - then go looking for a dedicated host.

For 90% of the startups that launch, scaling will never become an issue.

It's not a scaling issue, I just prefer to be in control of the server.

Virtual hosting is always an option, then -- cheaper than having to pay for a physical server (or its rental).

And eventually we'll have Amazon E2 ... eventually ... and with that, you can control the (virtual) server and deal with scaling issues.

Try a Xen VPS, you get full control of your own OS image with no hardware to worry about. Amazon EC2 is Xen-based but you can find much better prices. I recommend serveraxis.com where you can get a VPS with 1GB of RAM and unlimited bandwidth @ 10mbit/s for $130/m (or $45 for 200GB/m).

Another interesting option and cheap too, thanks.

I'm looking for a hosting provider who offers a full server package with root access. The server should run Fedora or Red Hat Linux with at least 1Gb ram.

Any suggestions ?

The cheapest provider I can find offers the above for about $120 per month (with unlimited bandwidth).

We use Server Beach -- http://serverbeach.com/ -- and have had few problems.

They have a wide range of options, with several servers under $100 per month, but they limit bandwidth to 2,000 gb of transfer per month.

We find the 2,000 is a lot, though, (we've come close, but yet to go over), and you can control it further by using AWS.

Thanks, that's great :-)

Theye're very good value for maoney and the bandwidth limits are reasonable too.

The value servers from aplus.net are pretty good. They're last-gen hardware for cheap. I have a 2.5 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM and a 120GB HDD for $50/mo.

Interesting ... they're very cheap and the standard servers are not bad either.

I just found http://www.linode.com and it looks like a winner. $20/month you get a virtual server (so w/ root access.)

256mb ram, 8Gib disk, 100Gib/month $20

1gb ram, 32 gib disk, 400gib/month $80

I went with MediaTemple. They are cheap and seem to offer scaling possibilities. Some people have warned me about them here on YC. I haven't launched yet, so I can't really give you feeback on them

Just wondering...what's wrong with MediaTemple?

I'm on a (dv) 3.0 rage and it's great. With plesk and root ssh I can do anything, even install another OS. default is RHEL.

So you control the entire server as root, you get 1 TB of bandwidth, and it's $50 a month?

Wow, that's the best combination so far... they do skimp on RAM and HD size, compared to some of the others.

Is it too good to be true? What disadvantages or problems have other people seen?

LayeredTech.com. You get a big bang for your buck.

Service? It's ok.

Totally unmanaged, so don't expect much on that front.

Primarily Serverbeach. Have one server with Layered Tech and one with Linode for internal

Glorb. Great Value, Great Service

http://glorb.com

Future Hosting at http://futurehosting.biz

I have to advise against these guys. Hate to do it, because the support is good, they seem like nice guys, and they are reselling SoftLayer servers, so the network is amazing.

But I've had VPS's on three different physical servers with them and they were all starved for disk IO. They take quad core servers with 16-32GB of RAM but only put two 7200 RPM IDE drives in them. A 7200 RPM IDE drive is good for about 120 I/Os per second, so if the server has 20 users you get a whopping 6 I/Os per second.

Check it out:

$ time ls -l /etc /dev/null

real 0m12.530s user 0m0.004s sys 0m0.046s

12.5 seconds to list a directory with ~150 files. This is from a VPS account I have with them with nothing running on it.

To be fair, most VPS hosting probably sucks just as bad.

Hmm, never noticed poor disk performance. I'm not doing much with the server besides web and SVN right now, but it's something to keep in mind. Thanks.

Good guys though.

Are you looking for a Rails host or...?

Unfortunately not, I'm using PHP ...

Do TextDrive do Lamp ?

Yes. They do it better than most.