Greetings - Im looking for a very cheap and hoefully free start up for a small company looking to build a simple application and host it on.  I have looked at Microsoft Azure and thinking of going with that but wanted to get some feedback on how its gone with anyone on that platform or if there are any cheaper better solutios for hosting an outsystems application?
Thanks in advance.
Dave

Hi Dave,

The cheapest option I've found so far that holds up to the platform systems requirements is this one:
http://contabo.com/?show=vps

I tested both their VPS M and VPS L offerings last weekend.

• ~30 minutes to install the Community Edition
• wayyy to much time to publish the Directory app
• 40 seconds to deploy a change on the Directory app

Thoughts: kind of slugglish.

VPS L - 2 CPU / 8GB RAM / 400GB / Windows - 16.99€ + 4.99€:

• ~15 minutes to install the Community Edition
• 5 minutes to publish the Directory app
• 20 seconds to deploy a change on the Directory app (it used both CPUs with a small peak with 100% usage).

Today I'll start a new [sticky] discussion to crowdsource the discovery and comparison of the various hosting options to help everyone that wants to use the Community Edition without breaking the bank.

Edit: the other discussion on hosting is now up.

Cheers,
Davide

Hi Guys,

Here is my solution; probably for Small and Medium Business setup but with easy scalable
functionality for Windows servers and Windows Desktop / Linux / Android etc.
Also a good speed, good backup and snapshotting functionality.

Hardware

1 x NAS - Synology DS-412+ (€535)
     Supporting both NFS and iSCSI and works great with VMWare
     Upgraded to 4Gb RAM (non-official)
4 x 2 TB Harddisk in Hybrid Raid setup (Sort of RAID 5) (€110 x 4) (€440)
1 x Gigabit switch(€25)
1 x Heavy Desktop machine (€600)
     Intel mainboard preferred
     Intel multicore (i5 quadcore in my case)
     Separate VMWare ESXi supported Network Interface Card (Check for HP / Intel / Dell)
     Stacked with a lot of RAM! (16 Gb in mine)
     If speedup needed stack a 128 Gb Solid State Disk for caching / performance increase (€100)
1 x Usb Stick 4 Gb; Running the VMWare ESXi Hypervisor 5.1 on this machine (€10)

Existing Internet connection (50 Mbit Fiber)

Software

- VMware ESXi 5.1 Hypervisor
  Providing snapshotting / Easy cloning and Multi-Server on only one PC.
  Create Thin Harddisk space so your backups will take-up a minimum.
- 3 x Windows 2003 SB Server (Buy OEM versions with your mainboard / other hardware!)
- 1 x Windows 7 machine
- 1 x Windows 8 machine
- 1 x Android x86 (Live CD)
- 3 x Linux Ubuntu / Debian (Mailserver, Separate Webserver, Guacamole)
- NGINX HTTP Proxy Linux Ubuntu 12.10 (Use a proxy server like NGINX to maintain your internal domains and to support hosting of multiple domains and redirecting local on just one HTTP port)
- Guacamole Linux Ubuntu 12.10 (Use this to quickly connect web-based to your server; 100% HTML5 and AJAX - RDP / VNC connection)

Backup

You could schedule backups using the Synology Software (RSYNC) or Onliny through Third Party software Synology also provides.
I've setup a small HP Terminal for both Proxy and Backup, flashed the 2Gb internal memory with Ubuntu 12.10 and put an NFS server on it.
It has an external harddisk of 1 Tb plugged in.
I've got a scheduled job ghettoVCB running at night that makes daily snapshots of my VM's and backs-up my VM Snapshots without interfering the running environment. I can go back a full week, and to the start of 2 months.
The backup of 8 VM's takes about 3,5 hours but goes by unnoticed since the environment has enough bandwidth and enough CPU power and memory.
Ofcourse another cheap solution would be a router that Supports NFS.

Moving to Enterprise

Since VMWare is pretty wide accepted and the Enterprise version has the same file structure upgrading would be pretty straight forward.

Extra costs

Power consumption is something that might differ and since I don't monitor the consumption of the devices I don't have a direct estimate for that.
Using green disks would decrease that cost.

Post a message if you want more info.

Hetzner 49 EUR (16GB RAM)

HostEurope 39.99 EUR (16GB RAM)

Note: I have not used these service providers.

Hi Robert,

I'm interested to know what hosting provider a fellow Australian is using.
Unfortunatetely, hosting locally is far more expensive than overseas.

Could you provide information such as cost and possible your opinion on performance and service availability.

Thanks mate.

Robbie N.

Hi Robert,

I've just signed up for Contabo just over a week ago, so far it's been all good but it is early days,  I had an issue with two machines not able to 'see' on another and it was resolved quickly by support.  The only issue I have is that support operates from 8 am - 11 pm  in UTC +1 time zone so the 'closed' period pretty much coincides with our working day meaning support is an overnight thing.  I dealt with the issue in my evening time and I received quick responses to the three emails it took to explain and resolve the problem.

You are right about local VPS hosting, the difference in price is ridiculous.

Cheers,
Gavin

Robbie Nati wrote: Production servers
Unmanaged - Amazon EC2 and Softlayer is recommended  
Managed - Rackspace and Peer1 is recommended.