A little over a year ago I spent weeks trying to find the most affordable way to host cachefile.net (now defunct) among a few other things in a reliable manner. I didn't want my site shared with a bunch of other sites, and I certainly did not want plain-vanilla Apache/mySQL/PHP. I wanted my very own instance of Linux on which I could feel free to do anything--rig Apache to my liking, host my e-mail, install an XMPP server, you name it, anything. I also ended up hosting this blog--jondavis.net--on my home PC with the Linux instance acting as a reverse proxy so as to bypass my cable modem provider's blockage of port 80.
The best deal I could find was ServerPronto. These guys seemed to have adequate bandwidth and gave me solid specs for the dollar, for what they said was a dedicated physical server.
But even that was priced out of my range, because up to this point I have not been trying to make a profit / living off of my Linux instance, although at this point I think I might as well. I was paying out about $180 per 3 months, and that gets expensive especially in this economy.
I also found that while BlueHost has proven adequate for my own e-mail, and I'm REALLY not happy with the ASP.NET web host offerings out there since none of them support IIS 7 module installations, I could probably be just fine hosting everything on my BlueHost account and on my home PC through my cable modem, if only I could retain that reverse proxy out there, somewhere, without spending $180 every three months.
Last night I went shopping around again to see if there were any other solutions for me, when, lo and behold, I came across a VPS (Virtual Private Server -- Xen virtual machine hosting, basically) host that came at the same price as a typical shared web host: VPSLink. For less than the price I was paying every three months before, now I can get two years of my own Linux instance. Indeed, if you're reading this right now (and of course you are, as am I posting it), that's my new VPSLink account working for me.
Now, granted, I lose out on what I originally sought after: very high availability and scalability. I am back on a shared host, after all, and I have little doubt it's gonna get crowded over here. But, as I said, cachefile.net is now defunct, and really this only serves for reverse proxying to my cable modem and for lightweight LAMP hosting; if I ever really need high availability I'll also need a good reason, and if it's for profit then I'll be able to afford something more. But I get everything else here: my own CentOS instance on the 'net really, really cheap.
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UPDATE: Of course, upgrades to Apache when migrating from FC6 to CentOS 5.2 would force me to add these directives to my httpd.conf:
SetEnv force-proxy-request-1.0 1
SetEnv proxy-nokeepalive 1
.. or else I get proxy errors:
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET.
Still not sure if I have rid myself of them entirely yet...