Here we go! I’m going to explain how I got this blog running, more or less smoothly, with $12 per year.
First of all, let’s see where those $12 have been spent.
- LAMP – FREE
- WordPress – FREE
- Varnish – FREE
- VPS – $12 per year
As you can see, I’ve used all free and opensource software, the only cost was for the VPS itself, which is impressively cheap.
Right, the specs of the VPS are quite low but enough to run a small blog as this but let’s talk about it.
The VPS has a single Intel Xeon CPU E3-1240 v3 @ 3.40GHz, with 128MB of memory, 10GB disk space and 100GB of data transfer allowance, which is not bad at all.
Talking about the data transfer allowance, I want to make a point about the bandwidth as it is pretty impressive for a cheap VPS. Here is a speed test screenshot:
The VPS is located in Chicago (USA) and, as I’ve mentioned earlier, it’s running on a LAMP within Varnish on top.
The OS is obviously 32bit, CentOS 6, and all software come from the CentOS repositories, without any “performance-related” tuning (yet) except for varnish as it need to be installed from a third party repos.
I’ve been wondering quite a while if Varnish could play an interesting role on a VPS of this size and the answer (IMHO) is: “yes, he can”.
Varnish, as memory is the weakest point of the available resources, is currently configured to use only 30MB of memory, witch are almost nothing but enough to improve the performance and save resources.