Our new Developer VPS is a sandbox for experimenting on a new project, or a safe environment to get hands-on experience setting up and maintaining servers.
New ways to tinker and test
Developers have long appreciated the infrastructure that we offer for production environments. However, when it came to testing and tinkering, our Virtual Servers were perhaps over-specced.
That’s why we’re adding a lower-cost way to host testing environments. Until now we haven’t really offered designated servers for testing and development. Our popular Cloud Containers and Virtual Servers can be used that way, but they’re not designed with it in mind.
Developer VPS, however, is exactly that: a $7.50 per month sandbox environment to develop, test, build and break your projects.
While high speed servers ensure fast performance for production sites and other situations where time is money, we know there’s a lot of preparation and testing work that goes into development before features can go live.
A different purpose
When it comes to Virtual Servers, we normally talk about the blazing fast speeds our High Performance Virtual Servers reach. Our Developer VPS is a bit different. It’s an environment designed-specifically for building and testing purposes, at a much lower entry point than our other Virtual Servers. They still pack NVMe storage for snappy read/write times, making testing a breeze, but they’re built on legacy CPUs and not intended for production workloads and traffic.
We’re always thinking of new ways to make development easier, like the powerful open-weight AI models that we’ve added to our repertoire. We’ve also been exploring ways we can make our servers useful for purposes beyond production.
As always, we’ve got the gear and safe hosting environment, you’ve got the projects to develop and ship. This time, the Developer VPS is all about facilitating the work you’re doing before going live.
Normally we put our support service at the forefront of any new product. We’re dialling that back for the Developer VPS. It’s a server space designated for testing and breaking things after all, so we’ll only be supporting it on a best-effort basis. As always, if it seems like something on our end isn’t working, you can always reach out over email.
Why bother with a sandbox?
A low-cost sandbox VPS gives you a safe environment to learn, make mistakes, grow a project, and test new ideas.
You won’t need to worry about impacting anything in production or getting in your teammate’s way, because it’s all on its own isolated VM.
You can be messy, you can make mistakes. There’s no consequences to breaking things, and no safer environment for learning and trying new things.
For customers, and students
Because these servers are explicitly geared for development and testing, we’re limiting the Developer VPS to customers with a current production server.
We also want to make learning server management more accessible and give the next generation of developers a price-conscious way to get hands-on experience. That’s why we’re opening up the Developer VPS offer to students currently enrolled at an educational provider. Contact us and send us a scan of your student ID to get verified as a student.
To make sure there’s enough machines to go around, we’re putting a limit of two Developer VMs per SiteHost customer.
If you have any questions about the limitations or are unsure if you’re eligible or not, then get in touch and we can sort it out.
Specific scope in mind
The Developer VPS is limited in scope by design. Each server is provisioned with one IPv4 address. There aren’t any native IPv6 or other network upgrade paths.
To keep things simple, every Developer VPS has the same set of specifications. There’s no need to choose between different options. Upgrading resources is unavailable.
While we normally recommend Server Management for Cloud Containers and Virtual Servers, these dev servers aren’t meant for production. That’s why Server Management isn’t available on Developer VPS. To put it another way: if a server is important enough for management, it’s too important to be a Developer VPS.
Get building
If you’re looking for a sandbox to build projects, try out new frameworks, or get hands-on experience with new tools, our Developer VPS is the safest, most affordable place for that kind of work.
And if you’re looking for a more powerful, production-ready, setup, our Cloud Containers and Virtual Servers are always ready to go.