Non-US based hosting?

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On Monday 27 November 2006 19:06, Jamon Camisso wrote:
> http://www.canadianwebhosting.com/vps.asp looks like it has what
> you need. Problem is you never know where their datacenter(s)
> is/are and they cost way too much for what you get.
>
> Seems a little pricey compared to someone like Quantact.com in the
> US that offers a Xen based virtual server for 14.99/month, or
> linode.com or unixshell.com, all of which are mostly in the same
> price range and offer you full root in a XEN or UML virtual server.
>
> I agonized over the aformentioned 3 virutal providers last week and
> settled on Quantact.
>
> For shared hosting I use dothost.ca who are based in Markham, and I
> hear excellent things about blacksun.ca (python support on some
> plans). Dothost doesn't have shell access which really gets to
> being a problem.
>
> Go for a virtual server, for the price and the control you get,
> they can't be beat. It's too bad they're all in the US which
> doesn't fit your criteria, but everything else you're asking for
> you can setup, with a selection of various distros as well.

My company does shared hosting and offers Xen virtual servers (*) and 
all our servers are at a collocation facility right here in Toronto. 
The Xen virtualization model forces one to allocate RAM and disk 
statically. With the price of disk these days, it isn't such a big 
factor but RAM is still a scarce resource. All hosting, shared, VPS, 
or dedicated, depends on sharing scarce resources. At the low end of 
the price scale, it makes no sense to go with a VPS. I'd argue that a 
shared hosting account on a server that isn't overloaded is more 
useful to someone who just wants to host a blog than a Xen VPS with 
only 96M of RAM. A 96M Xen VPS could make a useful DNS or mail server 
but installing, say, Plone or some Java app server, or a database 
backed application that sees heavy use, would cause the VPS to be 
overloaded. In fact, $15 per month for a 96M Xen VPS is probably too 
low and should raise a red flag about how (over)loaded the underlying 
physical server will be. Even though Xen does a great job of 
virtualization, you still have I/O contention to deal with. One VPS 
with an I/O-intensive, database-backed web site can bring a whole 
server to its knees.

One may be doing some mental arithmetic right now trying to figure out 
how many 96M VPS one can cram into a machine with 2GB(**) of RAM and 
scoff because one *knows* one can buy a low end $1000 1U server that 
can be divvied up into 19 x 96M VPS (the dom0, the Xen monitor uses 
the balance) and "make" $285/month (19 x $15). Such incredible 
payback! Just over three months to turn a "profit"! That ignores the 
other costs that one has in hosting, depreciation of equipment, 
bandwidth, electrical power, rack space (which is the most expensive 
real estate one can rent), ancillary support equipment such as 
switches, remote power management units, and remote console servers 
(price a KVM over IP unit sometime). Even if we assign a value of $0 
to configuration, maintenance, and technical support, that leaves 
little to nothing in profit if one charges only $15/month for a VPS, 
not to mention that a low end server with 19 Xen VPS running on it is 
not likely to be a very pleasant server for any of the tenants of the 
individual virtual servers unless none of those servers are doing 
anything particularly intensive in which case a shared hosting 
account would have sufficed anyway.

We're conditioned to expect prices of computers and associated 
technologies to always go down but the capital costs of servers 
constitute a decreasing proportion of the overall costs. Collocation 
pricing has been firm and, in fact, has gone up in the last couple of 
years. The owners of the colo facility in which we have our servers 
tell me that electrical power is one of the fastest growing costs for 
them and that it constitutes a significant portion of their costs. 
You may be surprised to find out how much an extra 15A circuit costs. 
With a 42U rack, typically, you get one 15A circuit, which is not 
enough to power 42 1U servers, assuming you could even put 42 1U 
servers in that rack due to heat load. (An extra 15A circuit will 
cost you $250 per month.) All that equipment has to be kept cool by 
chilling units and there has to be reliable power, which means 
keeping battery backup units and diesel generators at the ready. I 
wouldn't be surprised if two out of every three kW of power is 
consumed by things other than the servers in a typical colo facility.

> You can also block those pesky law enforcement types with iptables
> (on your virtual machine of course) and a blocklist from
> bluetack.co.uk ( http://tinyurl.com/yc49ug for a full list of
> bluetack's blocklists ).

Any party who is determined to get to your site can do so through a 
proxy so such a scheme is nothing more than a placebo.

> Unless we can get some TLUG'ers to get together and start up a
> properly competitive XEN or UML hosting company, I think south of
> the border is your only intelligent choice (in terms of cost), but
> I'm with on wholeheartedly on having my data across the border as
> the DMCA and Patriot act bother me greatly.

All of our servers are right here in Toronto but I still wouldn't make 
any guarantees that they would be beyond the reach of authorities 
anywhere. In fact, my working assumption is that spy agencies can 
monitor any electronic communications they want at any time. We've 
never been approached by the authorities for anything but my response 
if approached would be, "We will comply with any request that is 
backed up by an order from a court with jurisdiction in the Province 
of Ontario." and leave it at that but I don't think they even have to 
resort to approaching us in all cases anyway. The authorities can 
just intercept traffic as it passes through the U.S. and no one would 
be the wiser. We have no control over how packets get routed between 
Toronto and Vancouver, for example. They can pass through the U.S. 
along the way. Many of the bandwidth providers are American companies 
anyway so even if the traffic stayed entirely within Canada, nothing 
prevents American spy agencies from monitoring that traffic, with or 
without the cooperation of Canadian authorities, if they lean on the 
companies in the U.S.

There are good reasons to deal with local providers, such as being 
able to look the people whom you're dealing with in the eye, if you 
wish, potentially better routing for your target market, potentially 
better latency on shell accounts, protection from foreign exchange 
fluctuations, but protection from real or perceived threats from U.S. 
authorities isn't one of them.

* Whether it's shared hosting or a VPS, Python and PostgreSQL are an 
important part of our hosting offerings. Plone, Zope, Django, 
TurboGears, Pylons, mod_python, and PostgreSQL are all treated as 
first class technologies here. Many hosting providers treat Python 
and PostgreSQL as if they were some exotic technologies and that is 
to their detriment.

** Low end servers tend to be Celerons and limited to 2GB of RAM.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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