RE: schemewiki.org temporarily offline

Noel Welsh wrote:

> I'm looking at getting a Linux VM from bytemark.com:
>
>
> http://www.bytemark-hosting.co.uk/vmhosting/prices.html
>
> They have fairly low default bandwidth allocations
> (tens of GB/month) but you can purchase additional
> bandwidth (and get a discount if you do open-source
> dev.)  The exchange rate will probably kill you but
> there must be an equivalent (and probably cheaper)
> service in the US.

Yes, one of the options I'm considering is powervps.com, which has similar
plans.

Of course, I want more than I'm willing to pay for.  The RAM limitations on
the UML-type plans can be a problem if you want to run a number of different
applications - things like Java, MySQL, MzScheme, Apache with mod_perl, spam
filtering, IMAP...

> I can't say how well it works -- only just started
> talking to bytemark.

UML is great.  Aside from the explicit resource limitations which the
provider imposes, the only real problem with it is that since you're running
on a shared machine, there are going to be times when you'll notice that, in
the performance of your VM.  With a good provider who isn't overloading
their boxes, that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

I see bytemark says in their FAQ that they run around 25 VM's per CPU.  I've
seen other providers who say 10-20, depending on plan price.  14 or 15 is
common.  Of course, what you can't really tell is how busy the other VMs on
your host are going to be.

One thing to ask about would be whether you have the ability to get stats on
your host box, e.g. some providers let you see the load average on the host
box, through a web interface.  That way, you'll at least have a solid basis
for complaining if the host is overloaded, rather than having to say "my VM
seems slow".

Anton



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