I purchased shared hosting service from Midphase years ago and that is where this site is hosted. It is up for renewal before 10/11.
Every year during this time, for the last 2 or 3 years, I toyed with the idea of switching to a different hosting company, because the inflexibility of not having root access. The current annual price from Midphase is around $136 with this breakdown: haidongji.com (MPan) $96 and DevPack – Unlimited MySQL & Subdomains $40. Here is some server specs:
# Percona Toolkit System Summary Report ######################
Date | 2012-09-27 21:13:49 UTC (local TZ: MDT -0600)
Hostname | some server name
Uptime | 197 days, 12:31, 1 user, load average: 5.87, 4.95, 4.89
Platform | Linux
Release | CloudLinux Server release 5.8
Kernel | 2.6.18-374.18.1.el5.lve0.8.57
Architecture | CPU = 64-bit, OS = 64-bit
Threading | NPTL 2.5
Compiler | GNU CC version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-52).
SELinux | Disabled
Virtualized | No virtualization detected
# Processor ##################################################
Processors | physical = 1, cores = 8, virtual = 1, hyperthreading = no
Speeds | 1x2400.000
Models | 1xAMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6136
Caches | 1x512 KB
# Memory #####################################################
Total | 15.5G
Free | 500.9M
Used | physical = 15.0G, swap allocated = 4.0G, swap used = 397.2M, virtual = 15.4G
Buffers | 835.2M
Caches | 5.3G
Dirty | 254020 kB
UsedRSS | 18.6G
Swappiness | 0
DirtyPolicy | 10, 80
DirtyStatus | 0, 0
I looked at some Virtual Private System (VPS) providers. Linode’s smallest offering, Linode 512, provides 512MB of RAM and 20 gig of storage at a cost of $20 per month. NTC Hosting’s VPS Hosting vBox 1 provides 1 gig of RAM and 10 gig of storage at a cost of $20 per month. I’ve also browsed Rackspace, InMotion, and others. I don’t know, if I do decide to go with VPS, I will probably pick between Linode and NTC Hosting. Either way, it looks I need to pay $100 extra per year if I go that route. And I need to transfer domain name, which I’ve never done before. There is also the factor if my site is still accessible in China if I change hosting companies…
Anyway, if you have any recommendations on hosting service providers and comments, I am all ears.