Xen Hosting to lower costs

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Sodele… der erste Arbeitstag in Berlin ist nun vorüber und es war recht anstrengend. Vornehmlich aufgrund des sehr warmen Wetters und der Tatsache, daß ich mit dem Fahrrad hin- und auch wieder zurückgeradelt bin. Pro Wegstrecke sind das rund 30 min Fahrzeit bei ca. 5.5 km Fahrstrecke, wobei ich das derzeit ohne Fahrradcomputer nicht so genau sagen kann.
Aber die Fahrtstrecke geht ein bißchen an der Spree entlang bzw. kreuzt diese mehrfach, am neuen Hauptbahnhof, der Waschmaschine aka Kanzleramt vorbei und auch die Dächer des Reichstags kann man ebenso sehen wie den Friedrichsstadtpalast. Mal vom Kopfsteinpflaster und den ganzen Autos abgesehen, eigentlich eine recht schöne Route, wenn man das in einer so großen Stadt sagen kann. Eventuell werde ich auch mal eine Alternativroute durch den Tiergarten ausprobieren, wenn das Wetter nicht mehr ganz so warm ist.
Aber derzeit fahr ich noch mit (geliehenem) Navi im Rucksack. Klappt ganz gut, wenn nicht grad lauter Verkehr an einem vorbeirauscht. Wird Zeit, daß ich mir dann mal einen eigenen kleinen Navi zulege. Wenn jemand einen Tipp für ein Gerät hat, daß gleichermaßen im Auto, beim Fahrradfahren als auch zu Fuß taugt, dann immer mal her damit! 🙂

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11 thoughts on “Xen Hosting to lower costs”

  1. Interesting suggestion — I have in the past wondered about sharing a powerful dedicated server among several xen domUs.

    You suggest getting “dual AMD64, 4 GB RAM, 2x 400 GB harddisks, a /29 net and umlimited traffic (…) for € 59.-“. Could you recommend a provider that offers that? I have to admit, the price you quote seems rather low compared to others I have seen…

    – P

  2. If you have spare CPU cycles and memory, consider running [url=http://boinc.berkeley.edu/]BOINC[/url] on it (“boinc-client” is available in Debian).
    Other useful services would be running a [url=http://freenetproject.org/]Freenet[/url] node or a [url=http://yacy.net/]YaCy (distributed search)[/url] node.

    Also, you might consider using [url=http://wiki.openvz.org/]OpenVZ[/url] for virtualization (which should work inside a Xen domU). Given the lower footprint of OpenVZ containers vs. Xen domUs it makes sense to put e.g. the database server inside an own container, separated from the mail server etc.
    The same applies especially for the above mentioned services – this way you can easily restrict resources and in case there's a security problem only the container itself should be affected.

    The cited offer appears to be from [url=http://hetzner.de/dedizierte_server.html]Hetzner[/url].

  3. I'm using a DS5000 from Hetzner (www.hetzner.de). Hetzner is not necessarily the best hosting option, but a reasonable one.

  4. Well, although I helped one of the Boinc! maintainers back then with packaging, I don't think that running Boinc! is a good option as it increases the CPU load, resulting in using more electricity.
    Consolidating several real machine onto one host by using Xen (or any other virtualization) usually reduces the environmental footprint.
    Running YaCy was indeed a thought I already had. Maybe I'll follow that path somewhen, because I think that Google power in the search market is not good.

    Your hint with OpenVZ is nice and maybe I'll try that somewhen. The prioblem with the way you proposed is that each container will need an public IP address when the service needs to be reachable from outside of your server. That would increase the costs by another € 15.-/month.

  5. Ingo: I don't think it'd be € 15 per month, but as a one time fee (looking at Hetzner's site).
    Anyway, how's the Hetzner service working? I'm thinking of getting a server (and divide it into VPSes for some my customers) but I have to choose a nice and not-too-expensive provider.

  6. FlexiPack costs a 15.- € fee per month. You can only order additional IP subnets when you have ordered the FlexiPack option already and then every subnet costs you about 15.- € setup fee once.

    Hetzner is surprisingly working quite well, but it has some drawbacks of course:
    – port 6667 is blocked by Hetzner
    – no serial console as standard, just on request
    – no dedicated network port, i.e. you can sniff data from your surrounding co-costumers of your networking block and it might even happen that someone can take over your IP. IIRC Zugschlus wrote something about that issue in his blog somewhen.
    So, when you want a server for a professional service, better invest some more money and look somewhere else. But for private hosting purposes Hetzner has quite nice offers, when you can live with the drawbacks.

  7. Thank you for the explanation. I was wrong 🙂
    I am a bit scared of the last drawback: even if I tend to use a lot of SSL all around, I'm quite disappointed by that kind of setup. I've tried to translate Zugschlus's blog article (it is in German) and what I've read is not so nice, and I think things haven't changed since 2006, when the article was written.
    I'll deeply look into it. Thank you again for pointing that out!

  8. Oh, according to some additional info I got, it actually changed since last year for new servers and has now changed (last week shortly after the blog post) for all old machines as well.
    So, Hetzner is doing the right thing[tm] now, except for blocking port 6667.

  9. Where did you get that “additonal information” from? I'm thinking about getting a server there for a startup, as a compromise – no income yet, therefore it's (IMHO) no good spending money on getting from 99.x to 99.xy uptime. Even though 99% uptime – which is all Hetzner dares give as a number – is very low for business purposes. I know I'm taking a risk with a “best hoster for private servers”, but may be willing to take it, given more information, since that recent information seems to indicate an improvement of their hosting towards basic “business level”…

  10. I was told on IRC that owners of old servers received an email regarding that issue and took a look in the Hetzner forum where some discussion was going on about that issue.

  11. BOINC sure uses some more electricity, but considering that a machine is running anyway, the extra cpu power is well spent IMHO.
    What I mean is, better to have a machine running all the time, but also using idle cpu cycles (without causing them to increase cpu frequency), makes the power used for the idling machine much more valuable.
    By default, “nice load” does not cause the CPU stepping to increase – this way the CPU still runs only at e.g. 1GHz.
    (It's different on windows, where the CPU stepping gets increased and it therefore also causes fans to turn on etc)

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