How to choose a VPS host.I posted digitalocean.com but there are many others. digitalocean.com may not be and is probably not the best one. You need to try others.
Hosting companies, like any other business, operate to be profitable.
Most, if not all, hosting companies oversell their resources, due to thin profit margins.
Many oversell them aggressively, some - ridiculously aggressively.
For a VPS customer this means that rare resources are shared between many VPSs.
NXT software at its present alpha stage requires quite a lot of RAM as it turned out, 512 Mb is a bare minimum under normal conditions for a non-halmarked host. 1 Gb is minimum for a hallmarked host with a relatively small Weight value. Large Weight value nodes require more RAM. If the node is under DDOS, even more RAM is needed. In short, RAM is very important.
VPS technologies allow hosting companies to share resources between many VPSs running on 1 server/hardware unit.
We're particularly concerned about what a hosting company can offer in terms of guaranteed and burstable RAM.
We need the VPS hosting company to offer guaranteed RAM just like advertised on their pricing page. When you choose a VPS hosting company, email them and ask them if the 1 GB they offer on the VPS hosting plan is guaranteed or is it burstable? You need to hear the answer 'guaranteed'. Only this ensures NXT can run safely on this host using all the allocated RAM as advertised.
Example of how VPS technology allows overselling:
We have 1 server with 16 GB RAM.
You can host on it:
16 VPSs with 1 GB guaranteed RAM <- too honest hosting company, probably not profitable for them, doesn't exist in nature
32 VPSs with 512 MB guaranteed/1 Gb burstable RAM <- most serious and honest companies do this, thin profit margins, they can advertise this as 512 Mb or 1 Gb RAM VPS on their website, but in reality you'd only get 512 Mb most of the time and 1 Gb some of the time if other VPSs don't interfere and the server has free RAM for your sudden burstable usage. Pretty stable hosting environment.
64 VPSs with 256 Mb guaranteed/1 Gb burstable, advertised as 1 Gb on their website. Unstable, too many VPSs interfere with each other, sharing the same limited resources. Too many problems, web scripts generate error messages, etc. That's your $1-2/month VPS host. That's a company to avoid.
How do you know, that a company aggressively oversells?
Well, first of all, read reviews on
www.webhostingtalk.com forum, it's the best source of information. Run a search form on that forum for the VPS company you want to find reviews for.
Look at pricing. $10/month per 1 GB VPS seems reasonable to me. Anything cheaper than that - you can expect various issues. I do encourage everyone to research for different VPS companies and post their reviews, ask their support, especially in terms of whether they allow Java processes to run on the VPSs and if Java is allowed to use all advertised RAM, is the advertised RAM guaranteed or burstable? Ask their support and you want to hear the answer 'guaranteed as advertised'.
You don't want to add hosting instability issues to the NXT software instability issues, you'll get a lot of headache doing that
$10/month is not too much money after all. Don't go for too cheap. If it looks too good to be true, it's most likely not true.
