The Computer Whiz » Web Development http://nnucomputerwhiz.com Web Design, Performance and Computer Repair Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:16:25 +0000 en hourly 1 Cheap VPS ~ 512mb for $4.76/monthhttp://nnucomputerwhiz.com/cheap-vps-for-5-95month.html http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/cheap-vps-for-5-95month.html#comments Sat, 23 Jul 2011 21:03:15 +0000 admin http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/?p=312 If you need root access but don’t want to any more than a shared hosting account price then check out burst.net. I have found them to be reliable and fast with reasonable support.
UPDATE: Now till end of March get %20 off. Use promotion code “WINTER20″. Check their twitter feed for more promotions. So instead of $5.95/Month you can get a 512MB VPS for $4.76/Month and this rate is not limited to the first 3 months or 6 months it is used as long as you keep the product.

I was in the market for a VPS and found one that was only a few more dollars than I was currently paying for my shared hosting account with full root access and all the other frills of owning a VPS. I needed root access to setup the Nethack game portal I was making and I needed enough ram to run Ruby on Rails. There’s lots of companies offering a VPS for under $10 these days but burst.net had good reviews with no complaints except from spammers complaining about getting suspended. I started out with they cheapest option of 512 MB RAM and 20 GB of space for $5.95 / month and latter upgraded to 1.5 GB of ram and 100 GB of space for $19.95 / month.

Performance is obviously not has good as any dedicated machine would be but is just as good as any shared hosting account. I ran phpspeed which is a nice quick MySQL/PHP server benchmark on the VPS right after it was setup. The score I got was about 25% higher than when I ran the same test on my existing shared hosting provider. I’ve clocked the bandwidth I’m currently getting at 7 MBps with a simple process of downloading a large file from burst.net to a dedicated host I have access to.

Uptime has been pretty good. Over the past year and a half there have been a few power failures resulting about 8 hours of downtime. A couple of times I’ve been migrated to a new node with just a few minutes of downtime. So it’s very good for a host at this price. Support requests have been handled in a timely manor usually just a few hours. They were very knowledgeable too especially with usually problems like when I was using too much Disk I/O running Squid Cache Proxy software.

There other products are very reasonably priced with dedicated hosting starting less than $50. So unless you need absolute 100% uptime and support that will hold your hand and set everything up for you I highly recommend burst.net

No related posts.

]]> http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/cheap-vps-for-5-95month.html/feed 0 11 Good WordPress Pluginshttp://nnucomputerwhiz.com/welcome-to-wordpress.html http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/welcome-to-wordpress.html#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:29:58 +0000 admin http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/?p=95
  • Eshop Authorize.net AIM Integration
    • ]]>     I just updated my site to use wordpress instead of Etomite and I must say it’s a huge improvement. WordPress has such a large database of plugins you can make it do just about anything you can think of. If you are setting up a wordpress blog I’ll share my list of plugins so you won’t have to do the research to find the good ones:

    • All in One SEO Pack – Great SEO plugin does just about everything automatically but will let you tune things for those that want complete control.
    • Custom Page Extensions – I used this to add the “.html” extension to my pages to preserve the same urls I used with Etomite.
    • Exclude Pages from Navigation – This plugin lets you specify pages that don’t appear in the top navigation. Useful because I needed to migrate several pages but didn’t want them to clutter up my top navigation.
    • Google Analyticator – Quickly add Google Analytics code to the site. Easy to setup.
    • Google XML Sitemaps – Creates a site map. Easy as clicking install.
    • NoFollow Free – Removes the nofollow attribute from the link backs in comments. Encourages people to comment on your blog.
    • Post-to-Post Links II – easily link pages and posts together. Truthfully this should be built into WordPress.
    • Quick Adsense – Quickly add adsense to your blog posts and in the sidebar. I chose this one because it’s easy and it actually randomly chooses the ad format so people are less prone to ad blindness.
    • Really Simple Sitemap – Creates an HTML sitemap so people can easily see your whole site.
    • Sociable – Adds the share javascript to the bottom of each post so people can easily share your blog on social media.
    • Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – A good plugin that adds links to related post after each post so your visitors will be more likely to read more of your blog.

    Related posts:

    1. Eshop Authorize.net AIM Integration

    ]]>     http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/welcome-to-wordpress.html/feed 1