Great hosting

As well as a couple of virtual hosts at Strato.de, I manage quite a few for customers, hosted at http://Bytemark.co.uk

The Bytemark self-service virtual hosting management portal is the best example I've yet seen of how to give customers complete control and flexibility about their virtual hosts, whilst almost eliminating any personnel involvement from the provider.

Once you have an account, here are the steps to create a new virtual machine:

  1. click on "add a cloud server"
    • (in my opinion, calling it a "cloud" is just a marketing buzzword, because you know exactly where the machine is physically located (in fact you get the choice while you're creating it, see below); once it's created it just runs continuously (it doesn't "go to sleep" like many cloud services do when there's nothing for them to process); and its specification is fixed (unless you choose to change it) - there's nothing "dynamic" about the machine based on how busy it is)
  2. enter the name you want for the machine
  3. choose which data centre you want the machine to be hosted in
  4. choose the number of CPU cores and the amount of memory you want (these are linked; you can select from 1Gbyte to 180Gbytes of RAM, and you get from 1 to 16 CPU cores along that range)
  5. choose your operating system (from Bytemark's own version of Debian Jessie, 3 standard versions of Debian, 4 versions of Ubuntu, 2 versions of CentOS, or Windows 2012); alternatively just create a machine without installing anything on it (you can come back and do that later), or (and I think this is a really neat part) point the installer at any bootable ISO image accessible by HTTP somewhre on the Internet, and it'll install that for you!
  6. choose your disks - a minimum of 25Gbytes SSD (expandable to 2Tbytes), plus up to seven additional SSD or HDD drives, each up to 2Tbytes capacity
  7. optionally supply a script to run on the first boot of the machine
  8. optionally provide an SSH key for the root account (it always gets a password anyway)
  9. there's even a "compatibility mode" you can select, for O/Ses which don't support virtio
  10. as you select each of the above options, you can see the price for each of them, plus a total at the bottom, so you know exactly how much that spec of server is going to cost per month (there's no setup fee)
  11. finally click on "Add this server", and you then get a progress bar showing you the machine being created - immediately (none of this "within 1-2 hours" stuff like you get from Strato)

The last time I did this, for a minimum-spec machine, it took just under 5 minutes from me entering the details above until I was shown the IP addresses of a running machine to log into.

Prices

How much does all this cost?

It depends what you want :)

The basic, lowest spec server is:

  • 1 CPU core
  • 1 Gbyte RAM
  • 25 Gbytes SSD
  • 1 IPv4, /64 IPv6
  • £10 / month (oh, and they give new customers a £10 credit, so a basic machine like is free for the first month)

The most expensive machine I could create in the configurator was:

  • 16 CPU cores
  • 180 Gbytes RAM
  • 8 x 2 Tbytes SSD
  • Windows 2012
  • £5240 / month

I'd say it's unlikely anyone's going to actually want a machine such as that, but it's possible :)

Once you've got your machine, you can also adjust any of the above settings (with one exception - you can't make disks smaller) at any time you like (although for a lot of them, a restart is needed for the change to get noticed by the O/S).

Included with all machines, you get:

  • an out-of-band console accessible by SSH
  • facility to insert a virtual CD (any ISO image reachable by HTTP)
  • browser-based VNC console access
  • reverse DNS (both IPv4 and IPv6)
  • an API for managing servers without any human intervention (ie: not even yours)

…and the responsiveness of the do-it-yourself management portal is impressive - you request a change, and it happens then - there's no waiting around for someone to do something, and creating a server or changing its disk configuration is as fast as a script should be for doing these things.

They've done a good job with this setup, and they've even documented a lot of how it works behind the scenes.

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