If you’re like me, you like to have a ‘machine’ somewhere that hosts all your crap, and hosts any little side projects you get involved in.  

I’ve always had this domain (www.stupendous.net) hosted somewhere, generally on a box that is connected to the internet via my current employer.  Since moving back to Australia, however, my employers to date have been unwilling or unable to provide a box and free bandwidth/rack space to host my personal crap, so I’ve had to find my own solution.

Last year I settled on a Quantact Xen VM for $25/month (US). I strongly recommend them if your needs are modest (a http server and mail, for example) and want a whole ‘machine’ as your own. The performance was ‘ok’ but with memory only at 128MB you had to be a little circumspect on how you set things up. The bandwidth is generous of course, being hosted in the US, and you can’t argue with the price.

The support from the owner, Tim, is great – you can generally find him on his IRC channel and talk to him when things go boom, which is rare. I think I had 2-3 reboots in the entire time hosting with them, which isn’t bad considering it’s a VM.

But, recently, I’ve been annoyed by the speed of some PHP applications that make extensive use of MySQL on the VM, and I decided to investigate a dedicated server here in Australia.

Every company I looked at wanted at least $150 a month for 1U of space and 5-10GB of transfer … not enough! My modest site goes through 10-15GB a month so I’d always be paying excess charges .. or paying more per month to get a higher cap. Screw that.

After some research, I found Hosting Shop, a no-frills colocation company that offers rented dedicated servers starting at $170/month, with 100GB of transfer included and a 100Mbit connection. Their farm is based in Brisbane, Australia, and seems very well connected – I get full transfer speeds from my Internode ADSL and the speed from the office is very good (considering the office link is fubar).

Hosting Shop have to be offering the best deal right now for colocation/dedicated servers right now in the country. If you can find a better deal, let me know!

With regards to the support, its fine, if a little opaque. (If anyone from Hosting Shop read this, it’d help if your Helpdesk software would reply to the user when a ticket is opened and assigned, just so they know that someone is looking at the ticket). It helps if you’re a technical user though; don’t expect them to set up apache for you :) They are pretty quick at getting stuff done. I applied for the server at 6pm and it was set up and ready by 10am the next day. The only issue I had with it was it autonegotiated at 10base-T instead of 100base-T, but a email to support had that fixed in a few hours once they bounced the port.

The machine is great, though it would be nice to get a second disk for a one-off cost at setup time, so unfortunately I have no redundancy in my server. But, really, thats ok. I can rsync anything important. It’s blindingly quick at serving PHP, MySQL, doing my mail stuff, all the important things. 1G ram is plenty compared to the 128M my VM had :)

So yeah, probably the best deal in colocation and dedicated hosting that you’ll find in Australia. Especially considering the 100G transfer bundled in there. Check em out! http://www.hostingshop.com.au/