I was wonding what people would expect to see as the base specifictions as a low end VPS host box.

Having a look at some dedicated server deals it seems something like a 1x Intel Xeon x3460 at 2.8 GHz with 4 GB DDR3 ECC — would be the minimum to make this viable to sell 128mb VPS servers off at a lowend box rate.

So what I’m going to put out to the community is what do you expect to see as the hardware for the host node?

Okay. I have never been on the provider side of the table so I have no idea. However from what I can see here, it tends to go two extremes

• Cheap desktop Pentium box or 3-4 year-old old server hardware with small amount of RAM (4-8GB) and software RAID1 of SATA2 drives. Sell 10-15 VPS on it.
• Expensive dual quad core Xeon boxes and latest hardware, with 32GB+ memory and 6x SAS drives. Sell 50+ VPS on it.

Well the numbers are purely pulling out from nowhere so don’t be surprised that they are completely out of whack. Both are acceptable for slicing up to provide low end boxes I guess, and I guess the performance would be similar. You either get less contention on cheap box or more on high performance beast.

However at the sub-$7 end I am actually not “expecting” any kind of performance. I would actually much prefer stability and consistensy than being able to burst to 4x 2.8GHz one day, and complete unresponsive because of IO-wait on the other.

Anyway. Xeon X3460 is a good quad core CPU. Up the memory to 8GB so you can jam more virtual servers on it. Also don’t forget that RAID1 would be the bare minimum :)

As potential customers of a low end virtual server, what is your expectation?

I know virtual servers at the price listed on LowEndBox can sometimes lead to impulse buys. Hey it is cheap! I have this great project coming up and it ought to be on its own server! The next thing you know, I am $6-$7 poorer but am a proud owner of a shining new low end VPS. Except a few weeks down the track that “great project” did not turn out to be too great.

So I am left with a some virtual servers lying around doing nothing. Sometimes they can lie around for a couple months because I prepaid them for up to a year. D’oh. Assuming that you are not interested in using it as a seed box, but would like to use it for something interesting, or useful, or something with minimal effort but generate enough revenue to recoup the cost.

Any good idea?

I consider installing a control panel to debian which is IspCP Omega. Do you advise me to install it or not? To a 256 MB VPS from Server Complete. I will use that vps for my main web sites.

Well. Don’t. No self-respecting low end admin would use a control panel to administer his/her elcheapo virtual server with limited memory. Actually I have never heard of IspCP Omega until today since I did most my admin on port 22, so I attempted to install it on one of my spare VPS. Not Server Complete one, but reasonably comparable.

Installing IspCP Omega is pretty trivial. You’ll find the doco for Ubuntu here, and for Debian here. Just make sure you have multiverse included in your /etc/apt/sources.list to get all the required packages. Took a while to make on this small VPS. After installation & restarting Apache, you should be able to access the control panel from the URL you specify during installation. It’s now running MySQL, Apache2 with worker MPM, PHP in FastCGI, Courier IMAP/POP3, Postfix with Postgrey + Policyd, Bind9, etc.

Yup. It’s all up and running with 256MB burstable memory. However,

• Need to turn off MySQL Innodb and tune courier authdaemon to start just 1 daemon to reduce memory usage.
• While it uses only 78MB committed memory, it allocates 186MB! That’s without any PHP FastCGI running. Which means it will hit my 256MB limit very soon when I have a few sites low traffic sites running. Server Complete allows also only 256MB burstable memory for their $5 VPS.
• I found IspCP a bit too complicated to host a few websites. It’s designed to run a shared hosting service so you get to define reseller, users, hosting plans, etc. For something simpler that just used by yourself to host a few websites, try Webmin/Virtualmin. Or learn to work on shell :)

Hopefully that helps.