Web hosting in the UK: green and cost effective

I’ve used several hosting providers, but I settled on Brightbox for Rails hosting, and Memset for everything else. Neither provided cheap Virtual Private Servers (VPS), but their environmental stance, and quality of service and support, helped me rationalise the cost.

Whilst the Brightbox Rails hosting stack is very focused, my general purpose hosting has been based on CentOS, a free flavour of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the WHM/cPanel server management interface; a scatter gun approach I don’t like: it was time to change.

Keep the servers clean.

I find that removing complex GUIs and reverting to command line management results in cleaner servers, with more control over software baggage and file structure.

On top of this I found that most clients have little interest in accessing the server, preferring that I take care of everything. I’ve no intention of entering the reselling business, so exit cPanel, the extra cost, and the hassle.

Standardise to maintain quality.

I’ve standardised my Ruby maintenance scripts and wanted a set of VMWare Fusion based staging virtual machines for deployment testing. To reduce the workload, and the chances of mistakes, using a single operating system seemed logical.

Since I started using Ruby on Rails, I’ve converged on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as my server operating system of choice: I find that it is a neater implementation of Linux, especially when it comes to Apache configuration.

Competitive pricing.

At around the same time as these thoughts were flowing through my head, Memset changed the way they implement their VPS leading to better specifications and significant reduction in price.

Initially I was sceptical, it looked too good to be true, but I have completed migrating my existing websites and Subversion repo to a VM1000 and it has run well over the last couple of months. I haven’t run any performance tests, but subjectively these websites seem a little more responsive, and all at a quarter of the price!

A good result.

This is great news since I’ve been wanting to supplement my LAMP based work with more significant applications using Ruby and/or Java stacks, and running all that on a single low resource server is not a good idea.

To sum up I’m still happy with Memset…… probably happier, since the price reductions have made it possible to experiment freely without having to use a US based host with an unclear commitment to environmental impact.