Seven years ago I wanted to move on from the small virtual machine I had to a larger one. Looking at the the options available it seemed the best approach was to rent a big host, and divide it up into virtual machines myself.

Renting a machine with 8Gb of RAM and 500Gb of disk-space, then dividing that into eights would give a decent spec and assuming that I found enough users to pay for the other slots/shares it would be economically viable too.

After a few weeks I took the plunge, advertised here, and found users.

I had six users:

• 1/8th for me.
• 1/8th left empty/idle for the host machine.
• 6/8th for other users.

There were some niggles, one user seemed to suffer from connectivity problems more than the others, but on the whole the experiment worked out well.

These days, thanks to BigV, Digital Ocean, and all the new-comers there is less need for this kind of thing so last December I announced that the service would cease - and gave all current users 1 year of free service to give them time to migrate away.

The service was due to terminate in December, but triggered by some upcoming downtime where our host would have been moved, in the back of a van, from Manchester to York, I've taken the decision to stop it early.

It was a fun experiment, it provided me with low cost hosting (subsidized by the other paying users), and provided some other people with hosting of their own that was setup nicely.

The only outstanding question is what to do with the domain-names? I could let them expire, I could try to sell them, or I could donate them to other people running hosting setups.

If anybody reading this has a use for kvm-hosting.org, kvm-hosting.net, or kvm-hosting.com, then do feel free to get in touch. No promises, obviously, but it'd be a shame for them to end up hosting adverts in a year or twos time..

Tags: kvm-hosting | 4 comments