I have been involved in a few 'share a server' arrangements, and on the whole they work very well. Aside from the obvious cost benefits, the main thing for me is being able to share the responsibility of keeping the thing running. When you are a one-man operation, it's nice to have other people available to deal with server issues at times when you are busy / on holiday / drunk / etc.
I wouldn't recommend going into a share-a-server arrangement with more than 3 parties though. Unless you are all hosting static or simple web pages, it will quickly become apparent that not all PHP scripts and sites are created equal. Busy sites will destroy the miserable amount of international bandwidth that you get with a NZ based server / VPS. So on a shared arrangement, expect to be paying extra each month for bandwidth. We were paying something like $10 per gb after the initial block, so it's not a trivial amount and accounting for 'who used what' is a big pain. I wouldn't enter into an "unlimited fair use" plan unless I knew exactly what that meant. Last thing you want is to have to deal with moving your sites somewhere else once they start getting busy. I remember when I signed up with Woosh (the very first month they launched) I asked them what 'fair use' meant, and they said 'about 50-60Gb'. A few months later they started getting busy and PC World published an article quoting them as saying '6-10Gb'. Big difference. Disk space can be another issue - disk space itself is reasonably cheap, but backup space is not and is something you will want to manage. On top of that, CPU and RAM usage can easily knock over a VPS, so I would want to limit the number of people using it, and making sure everyone understands which sites are likely to cause issues (anything with video, anything busy, anything complicated, anything likely to attract hackers etc). Depending on your software setup, it's not always obvious which sites are hogging all the resources (but then I'm not a command-line guru who knows how to install the good tools myself). I have found that servers / VPS just work better with loads of RAM. When you have 2+ parties paying the bill, you can afford to put a couple of extra sticks into the server. The cost of having more RAM than you need is offset by not having to waste time dealing with 'issues' that crop up. RAM pricing on servers is probably better than on a VPS, so this might not work out for you. But 640Mb doesn't seem like a lot to go around when there are several parties involved - you definitely wouldn't want me sharing the VPS with you. Make sure the parties you are sharing with are a good fit - if you are doing similar things with the server/VPS, you will find there are less arguments down the road. eg someone wanting to host video has quite different requirements to someone wanting to host mail, or static sites. One of our arrangements didn't work out that well, partly because the 2 parties were doing completely different things with the server - and the technical expertise on both sides didn't overlap at all so being able to share the burden of maintenance didn't really happen. Once you are up and running, communication is everything. You need to know what the other parties are up to, what has been giving them grief, and what changes they want to make in the future (so you can plan for it). Those are my experiences - definitely a good way to host sites, but the arrangement needs to be managed, just like anything else. Harvey. Daniel Faulknor wrote: > Sure have. but they are $30 for 128mb, where i can get $30 for 640mb > with this arrangement, if i can get a few more people > > Cheers > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
