One of these days I should do a follow-up response to the ever so popular WoW vs FFXI post from 4+ years ago since folks still seem to respond to it o_O. I’ve been pleased with how WoW has noticeably evolved as a game over the past 5 years. I’m curious if FFXI players feel the same way about their game or if it has stagnated, especially in lieu of the FFIV MMO announcement.
It’s hard to write responses to responses to topics like that because most people, myself included are naturally biased towards the game that they play. Not too many people do high end content across multiple games simultaneously. I can’t imagine how much time that would take, it’s hard enough as it is squeezing WoW time in. Anyway, the main topic of this post:
I swapped web hosts around two months ago. I was previously hosted with Hostican on their basic shared hosting plan and am now on a Linode VPS server. In a nutshell: Shared hosting means that there is a web server with many folders on it. Each user is assigned one of these folders.
Shared hosting is great for small sites: It’s cheap, easy to use, and (usually) fully supported. But while most shared hosting solutions offer near unlimited bandwidth and disk space, the CPU quota per account is usually very low. Shared hosting is also very inflexible in terms of server configuration if you wanted to say…use something other than Apache or install server toys for the hell of it.
Linode offers Xen powered VPS hosting (Virtual Private Server). This means that there is a big machine divided into many smaller pieces. Each of these pieces is essentially a separate server with its own IP, CPU allotment, RAM, disk space and operating system. It bridges the gap between shared hosting and a dedicated server (way too expensive).
I’m on a month-by-month payment schedule for my Linode because I wanted to try it out before purchasing a longer commitment. Since I’m pretty happy at the moment, I think I will just go ahead and pay for a whole year since it’s cheaper. Anyway, I’m very happy. The server was fairly easy to setup and is fairly easy to maintain…I don’t really have to do a whole lot to it other than pretty basic maintenance and stuff like that.
Obligatory self promotion: I have a referral code if anyone by chance is interested in signing up. I would highly recommend using them as a VPS host if you have Linux knowledge or are interested in investing time to learn.