How is this server deal - 3 months dedi @ $99 (19)

Hey stackers,

Take a look at this:
http://certifiedhosting.com/dedicated-server-blowout/

They're offering a dedi for $99 for 3 months & $199 for 6 months so its a lot lot cheaper than the vps I'm currently on (beyond hosting $80 per month). Can some of the technical guys here take a look at this deal & tell me how does it compare with beyond hosting's vps servers?

cheers

It's a great deal.... 6 months for $200. 4 cores with 8GB of RAM. Managed too!

But it doesn't really make sense unless you cancel at the 6 month mark UNLESS you are maxing out your P202 install on BeyondHosting. I have a unmanaged server at Ramnode that can handle shit loads of traffic, and I'm thinking that BeyondHosting are a tad more optimized for P202 itself, considering the guys have experience with it. I think your BeyondHosting plan is good for 100k clicks per day if it's spaced out evenly throughout the day. WIth that said, it can probably handle sudden bursts of clicks (like 10 clicks/second for a short period of time).

If you're looking for a cheap VPS with similar (in my mind, better) performance than your BeyondHosting plan, check out the Ramnode KVM plan, with 4 cores and 2GB of RAM. With the coupon LEB35, it's $31/month and has more RAM and more cores than your BeyondHosting plan. It also saves you $50/month. The only thing is.... it's an unmanaged VPS though. But all that means is you have to login to your server every week and run an update command (I'm convinced this is a big part of the premium you pay for managed services). You also have to setup the server from scratch, but that's easy with Tuxlite.

BeyondHosting is good, is "P202 optimized", and can handle a shitload of traffic. A dedicated server would be better, but are you running enough volume to justify it?

Yeah I think there are a lot of considerations here... For instance, if the volume isn't high enough, the BH VPS may outperform it simply due to SSD vs mechanical storage and perhaps RAM performance. If you're doing database heavy things then SSD storage would be a big factor - note upgrading to the smallest SSD available doubles the cost of those plans.

It looks like a good deal... but probably because they are getting rid of their lowest quality gear - it wouldn't be a smart business decision to write off high performance hardware for that cost, that's for sure.

In any case, it's $99 - why not get it and offload some campaigns onto it and monitor performance with something like NewRelic? Could even duplicate some campaigns to split to each server and see how they go.

Thanks Gritz & Zeno

I dont usually send more than 20,000 clicks a day to my BH VPS P202 but there is this one campaign that I've been testing on facebook thats giving sudden bursts of more than 1k clicks per minute, multiple times a day & whenever this happens my server goes down. I submitted a ticket & the BH guys said their VPS could only handle around 100 clicks per minute & that I need to get a dedicated server. They are currently offering 50% discount on some Dell R610 plan which still comes down to $275 per month.

Now since this is a new campaign & I dont know how long will it will be allowed to run on fb, I'm not sure whether I should upgrade to something this expensive. I'm not a technical guy when it comes to hosting & servers so wouldnt the dedi server $199 deal for 6 months outperform any VPS out there, and handle anything between 500-1k clicks per minute?

EDIT : Will shifting my campaign to CPVlab make a difference?

By shifting to CPVlab you'll get one more problem, its database adds up very fast and everything gets slower over time.

If you're not sure about your new FB campaign just use self hosted tracker like tracker.mobaff.com or imobitrax.

yes I can use mobaff for tracking but I need to host my LPs somewhere that can take 1k clicks per minute

If you're doing 1,000 clicks per minute, why don't you eliminate P202 for the time being and just pass an ad id straight to your aff link? You could host your LP (i'd use Nginx) and just pass the ad id through ?ad=someid. So on Facebook you'd just submit a link like...

http://yourdomain.com/campaign/page.php?ad=a1

Originally Posted by gritz

If you're doing 1,000 clicks per minute, why don't you eliminate P202 for the time being and just pass an ad id straight to your aff link? You could host your LP (i'd use Nginx) and just pass the ad id through ?ad=someid. So on Facebook you'd just submit a link like...

HTML Code:

http://yourdomain.com/campaign/page.php?ad=a1

And then on your CTA, just pass the a1 to your network link.

[php]
<a href="http://affiliate.blah.com?a=xxxxxx&c=xxxxx&s1=<?php echo $_GET['ad']; ?>">Join Now</a>
[/php]

your conversion reports in your network will say...

a1 | 7262 clicks | 145 conversions | 2.0% CR | $x.xx EPC
a2 | 8521 clicks | 127 conversions | 1.5% CR | $x.xx EPC

You can clearly see what is working without even using P202 at all. I'm pretty confident a 1GB server wouldn't crash if you just bypassed P202 altogether and served up a super simple PHP page.

Straight HTML pages can handle retarded amounts of traffic, especially if using Nginx. It's the complex PHP + MYSQL that requires power.

do as above and host the images on some free CDN.. Ive used cloudinary for some larger images for mobile before, and helped loading speed/size..

Originally Posted by ohaiguyz

Awesome ++ bro

So you you mean its the P202 thats taking up resources & that my LP is not much of a problem? My LP is just a one pager with all text + some small images so I can definitely go with what you said above.

Infact my fb ad is direct linking to my LP which is being tracked by P202 so all I'll have to do is just switch the CTA link to point directly to the offer instead of P202's tracking link. Correct?

http://www.serverbidding.com/, bid or get their root server, great offer, remember get SSD

thank god for tech savvy homeys

Originally Posted by hd2010

http://www.serverbidding.com/, bid or get their root server, great offer, remember get SSD

Originally Posted by ohaiguyz

Thanks Gritz & Zeno

I dont usually send more than 20,000 clicks a day to my BH VPS P202 but there is this one campaign that I've been testing on facebook thats giving sudden bursts of more than 1k clicks per minute, multiple times a day & whenever this happens my server goes down. I submitted a ticket & the BH guys said their VPS could only handle around 100 clicks per minute & that I need to get a dedicated server. They are currently offering 50% discount on some Dell R610 plan which still comes down to $275 per month.

Now since this is a new campaign & I dont know how long will it will be allowed to run on fb, I'm not sure whether I should upgrade to something this expensive. I'm not a technical guy when it comes to hosting & servers so wouldnt the dedi server $199 deal for 6 months outperform any VPS out there, and handle anything between 500-1k clicks per minute?

EDIT : Will shifting my campaign to CPVlab make a difference?

Hetzner - Different people have had different experiences. I know one pretty large company running all their enterprise apps on there - serious, high-volume stuff - and they love 'em.

As always, though, affiliate marketing ain't like other industries, and it's definitely worth looking very closely at the specs you're getting.

Originally Posted by caurmen

Hetzner - Different people have had different experiences. I know one pretty large company running all their enterprise apps on there - serious, high-volume stuff - and they love 'em.

As always, though, affiliate marketing ain't like other industries, and it's definitely worth looking very closely at the specs you're getting.

They are EU-based - UK, primarily. Their business isn't terribly latency-sensitive, though, so I suspect they aren't noticing that.

Originally Posted by caurmen

They are EU-based - UK, primarily. Their business isn't terribly latency-sensitive, though, so I suspect they aren't noticing that.