Low End Box

Via this WHT offer, CheapVPS.co.uk is offering some very interesting product — part time servers, starting from a low &pound2.38 (around USD$4.37) per month, and you get:

• 128MB RAM
• 10GB storage
• 150GB monthly data transfer
• CentOS/Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu/Gentoo/OpenSuse/Slackware
• OpenVZ/HyperVM

UK or Dallas servers (if I remember correctly).

Now, the trick is that they are supposed to be “part time servers”. From their description page:

With our Part Time Servers you can purchase any of our servers for 50% less than the normal price but based on the idea of fair sharing. Like a desktop PC you turn it on when needed and when finished turn it off…

For this we do operate a “fair share” approach in that we ask users to aim for 50% usage over a month (i.e. 2 weeks usage out of 4 weeks) and anyone over this we will contact and ask to limit usage or to upgrade to a normal plan.

So basically you pay 50% the price and you can not turn on your server for more than 50% of the time. Nice if you are not serving something that require being 24/7 online. There are already many companies that give you per-day (Linode/SliceHost) even per-hour billing (Amazon EC2), but for the part time server, your files stay in tack when you switch the server off so it might be useful for backups.