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.