borked

Just to add, if you require an admin for managed services, then a single box at OVH will probably not be financially beneficial. But if you require an infrastructure or a number of boxes, then it very much becomes a viable option.

I don't know how others do it, but I charge much less for a cluster of servers to manage than the sum of the cost of managing the individual servers - which is normal since managing 10 boxes for 10 clients is much much more work than managing 10 boxes for a single client.

One really cool setup that is incredibly resistant for high traffic sites is a nice frontend box with nice RAM/NIC/SSD drives that serves as database server and load balancer (running nginx) to X number of backends which are lower grade and lower cost web servers (that can also replicate the db server if needs be).
Throw in a beast of a storage server and you have a kick ass infrastructure that can redundantly handle many hundreds of connections per second and push 100s mbs for less than a grand a month.

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For coding work - hit me up on andy // borkedcoder // com
(consider figuring out the email as test #1)