Help choosing VPS or Dedicated!

[phil-mize]

Hey guys, I'm looking to setup a video chat website for users to access from a few forums I am apart of, similar to just the chat rooms on www.Stickam.com (http://www.stickam.com). The software I have chosen to use is AVchat.net's (http://avchat.net) videochat software and not their conference software. I am looking to rent a dedicated server and am having trouble on finding one that's affordable and can run a video flash website smoothly. It needs to be able to run the AVchat software as well as Red5. Should I invest in a Virtual Private Server(VPS) which is cheaper but doesn't have great performance specs or a true dedicated server which is more expensive but uses all the available hardware on the physical server. Also, can you guys tell me the pros and cons of each and possibly recommend a few hosting companies that I can check out? I am a college student with a part-time job so my monthly budget I can allow is around $120 a month. Also, I estimate i will probably have around a ongoing 300 person user-base accessing the site daily.

I'm in over my head here any incite you guys can provide is much appreciated. :)

Thank you

[davmoo]

The first thing you're going to have to decide is do you want unmanaged hosting or managed hosting.

Unmanaged means you do it all yourself. If you want something installed, you install it. If you need new users added, you add them. And so on. They give you the hardware (and any hardware failures are usually their responsibility) and put an OS on it...the rest is up to you. If you screw it up by installing the wrong thing, tweaking the wrong bit, etc, its your problem. You want backups? That's you're problem to set up. Its not hard to manage a server yourself, but there is a learning curve if you're not already in to that sort of thing. At the same time, this gives you by far the most flexibility.

In managed hosting they hold your hand and do all that for you...and you pay extra for it. If you want something installed, you merely let them know. If somethign breaks in the software, its their obligation to get it going again.

Its possible to get both managed and unmanaged as a dedicated server or VPS.

Another consideration you need to think about is bandwidth needs. Any host that promises you "unlimited bandwidth" is effing lying. No exceptions. Period. Bandwidth costs money, and that's a fact of life. If you sign on with one of the "unlimited bandwidth" sites and your site gets popular, you *will* have issues with them pointing you to the fine print in their terms of service agreement.

And that brings up something that I think is *very* important that a lot of beginners do not do. At any place you are considering buying from, READ THE TERMS OF SERVICE AND ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY!!! Make sure you understand it *before* you give them money. Know it as well as you know your own family.

In the beginning you can probably go with VPS and save some money and gain some experience. But as soon as you set the site up, be thinking about migrating to a dedicated server of your own as soon as you get even slightly popular, just in case.

I have several unmanaged servers at The Planet (http://www.theplanet.com/), have had them there for years, and have been very happy. The price is right, it includes buckets of bandwidth, and I've never had an outage that lasted longer than 5 minutes.

[phil-mize]

well unmanaged is what i was planning on going with. The operating system im going with is CentOS and will be running the latest apache en such.I have little to no experience with running a linux based server. I only know windows server 2003-08. Theres not a drastic difference ive noticed so far, i am proficient in ubuntu. Linux is waaay cheaper so thats what is right for me at this point. I have been playing with apache and red5 a little on my local machine and learning. I cant run my own server locally because of dorm restrictions. I will check out the planet thankyou for ur recommendation!

[computoman]

Centos and rh are pretty much the same. I would recommend that you learn about chroot. Also you can always put a second nic in your machine and have apache only server that second nic with special settings and not the one on the college network. That way you can have more fun with your server. Get a switch or a hub connected to the second nic and have everyone plug into it that way. p.s. You may have to modify your firewall a bit.

[technojunkie]

I've been happy with Future Hosting (http://www.futurehosting.com/). They regularly post discount codes in the Web Hosting Talk VPS Hosting Offers Forum (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=104). There's a lot of good info on WHT, you should spend some time there. Future Hosting and most other providers gives you a 10Mbps pipe, which can be upgraded to 100Mbps but honestly it's very tough to make use of more than 10Mbps. Service has been excellent. If the OS revision offered isn't new enough for your liking, ask them for what you want. They'll even enable TUN/TAP so that you can run OpenVPN (http://www.openvpn.net). They have several data centers to choose from. Pick the one closest to you. I get great ping times. Their Elite plan seems optimal, after using one of the promo codes to increase RAM and bandwidth, but for your app you may want to go higher.

I would start out with a VPS and only move to a dedicated server if the VPS proves inadequate. You will need some idea of how much RAM and CPU power you'll need. The OS itself doesn't count towards your VPS RAM allocation so it'll go further than you might think.

You can install X and GNOME and remote control your server with NoMachine (http://www.nomachine.com/) if you want.

[Mal]

Might be an idea to set up a test centos based server first, or a virtual machine on your PC, just to make sure you can install and configure everything before paying someone a monthly fee.

[phil-mize]

my supervisor at work had recommended i try using Lamp (http://lamphowto.com/) if im still learning how to configure a linux based sever. What do you guys think?

btw thankyou for all your insight so far!

[davmoo]

my supervisor at work had recommended i try using Lamp (http://lamphowto.com/) if im still learning how to configure a linux based sever.

I'd agree. Pretty much everything that is done on my servers depends on the lamp stack. Even if you don't use the whole thing in the beginning, no matter what you do you're going to be using the Linux and Apache part.