If you’re just starting out to play around with servers and don’t have the budget to pay 20€/month then I’d suggest you try http://123systems.net/ it’s just 3$/month and you get your own VPS (virtual computer).
I have used quite a few before I stumbled upon linode and never looked back. I used rimuhosting and slicehost before.
I need the shell access as a root and I can say I never had my server rebooted in the las 2.5 years with linode. I rebooted it myself whenever I needed to but they never did. Support is just amazing and the total control you have…oh love it.
As for uptime and money back, I couldn’t care less. I need uptime and access to it as ideally the server generates more money than 50 cents an hour.
I was also made aware of a new hosting company for Java apps. http://jelastic.com/.
They claim to run any Java app.
I have only signed up with them but never had the time to properly play with it. Someone mentioned needing Java support for testing, this might be the place to go for free. I think the free account doesn’t allow top level domains, but for testing one can get away with a subdomain.
I’ve been using http://kattare.com for years. Very impressed with their uptime, support, and Java knowledge.
It seems that VPS is now the rage though (kattare is managed hosting).
Apart from the obvious (e.g. it won’t stop you from doing an rm -rf / as root) are there any other drawbacks to VPS?
VPS just gives basically a computer on the internet where you can run your java application in (or any other application). If you only want to host a website then VPS probably isn’t the best way since you’d have to do a lot of configuration etc from scratch and install apache manually or some such and basically spend all of your time hosting your website instead of creating your website. But you could still beautifully use the VPS to host a website + your programs if you so desire.
I’m currently still using DreamHost VPS. They’re very Web-site oriented, so it actually took some steps to make the server unmanaged and turn off apache, which is installed and running by default. Once I had that worked out, it’s a basic VPS and reasonably priced. They have a slider control in their panel for configuring the RAM on the fly, with extra cost per MB (computed per minute I think). You could also adjust RAM programatically via their API, if you wanted to get real fancy. So far, I’m operating on the lowest rung (300MB).
Just having a VPS is great. It’s very liberating to be able to run server software on a machine other than the one under my desk.
if you live in the UK I’d recommend JVMhost.com. They’re really friendly, and inexpensive too! But if you’re in the US like I am their servers might be a little laggy (Note: or it could just be my bad programming). Anyway they’re like < $10 so give them a shot if you ever need a VPS :>
I can agree with the generally positive comments about Linode. Had a server with them for well over a year now and it’s only been rebooted once - and that was to take advantage of some extra disk space they were giving me as a free upgrade 
Wow! Bookmarked.
is 123systems good for testing? and hold a website with hardly any traffic?
For european folks I can recommend Xencon, it’s based on Xen (so you get dedicated memory and disk resources) and thus more appropriate for serious usage than cheap virtualization solutions that overaggregates these resources. They have good support and the prices are nice too. Been using them for more than 2 years and have 829 days uptime on the VPS 
Absolutely!
You get access to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) which is essentially a computer that is always connected to the internet and that you have full access to (through an SSH client (I like ‘PuTTY’), which is basically a command line like interface).
You have a handful of linux OS you can install through the website (web panel) - this all happens automatically. Some of them even come with Apache pre-install (a webserver, i.e, a program that listens for incoming connections from port 80 (it responds to HTTP requests)). You have a folder called /var/www/html/ where Apache looks for your web pages. If you don’t have one, Apache provides a default page that says something like: “Apache installed, bla bla”.
Your computer has an IP address, so you just go to that address with your web browser and voila Apache will display your pages for you.
If you want a name for your website you need to buy a domain name (which is completely different from hosting your website). A Domain name simply points a registered name (e.g. google.com) to an IP address. Domain names cost around 3-10$ per year, depending on the suffix (e.g: .com costs about 8$, .org costs about 5$ etc).
If you google “Free DNS” you might find free domain names like “blabla.freedns.org” which are free names that point to your IP address (your VPS) that you can use.
If you’re looking for DNS, I can recommend Godaddy.com. I’ve used dotster.com but they have so many mini fees you need to pay for other stuff like url-forwarding that it’s really annoying, Godaddy.com has url-forwarding for free and IMHO is less of a nuisance.
Also, a lot of DNS providers also provide Web hosting. But you won’t need Web hosting since you can host your own website at your VPS and have full control over it.
As an example, my website at www.heartpirates.com is hosted completely on my VPS (applets, html files, css files etc etc). I’ve registered the domain name “heartpirates.com” from godaddy and simply point it to the IP address of my VPS (which you can easily find out e.g with http://www.selfseo.com/find_ip_address_of_a_website.php).
I play around with my VPS a lot and just now I happen to host a web page with an applet on there. You don’t HAVE to host a website, you can turn Apache off or even uninstall it completely and browsers connecting to your VPS will simply get error messages (since your VPS won’t respond, or even listen for that matter, for incoming connections on port 80)).
To connect to your VPS through SSH you download a client like e.g PuTTy, choose port 22 (default for SSH connections) and connect to your VPS ip address. You will be prompted by a login name + password. For admin the login name is usually “root” or “admin” and the password is the one you provided at the web panel on 123systems. You can create other usernames for your VPS too (it’s just a computer (with unix OS), you can do anything, but you’re “limited” to doing everything through the command line)).
You could possibly also connect to your VPS and get a Desktop GUI view but that is INSANELY BAD. The command line like interface (shell/bash etc) is much more efficient.
If you’ve never operated a computer from this point of view, you should learn. Basic commands are:
Windows : Unix
cd : pwd - print current directory.
dir : ls - print current directory’s files and sub-directories.
cd : cd - change directory to .
mkdir : mkdir - make a new directory.
etc etc, just google unix commands.
A few useful commands:
The double dot “…” means go up a directory. e.g: [cd …]
wget, download an url (website, file, image etc) from the web into the current directory. e.g: [wget www.google.com]
just type “help” and use google to learn the commands for stuff you want to do.
Yeah, I knew I wanted a VPS, but always saw them as oh $20 - $30 a month, and was like I cant afford that XD, but 123systems has one for $3, id probably go for the $6 for the extra ram, and its only $3 extra. The main question is at this such low cost, am I getting a good deal? or am I looking for trouble with bad uptime etc?
If I decide to get it, I think I would need someone to help me set it up at the beginning, I looked at the order page, and you have to choose the operating system from the beginning.
EDIT: Thanks btw for the detailed post, I dont know too much about VPS, just knew they virtual and you can run java apps on them, like a server and that
You can switch, reinstall, reboot etc the various linux OS at any time from the web panel even after purchase. Go for the cheap 3$ since you’re just starting out, the 6$ would be overkill. My site at www.heartpirates.com is run on a 15$/year deal (limited time offer) which has 192 RAM, and the 3$/month is 256RAM.
Kinda plan to run a private Minecraft server for me and a friend on it, why Im thinking of maybe the $6 one, but 256 should probably handle 2 - 3 people. I’ll probably order it tomorrow, and is your VPS with 123systems? If not which company?
aswell as a website and practice server games etc
For Minecraft server’s I have no idea. My VPS is indeed at 123systems.net. I still have another VPS at oderland.se which I barely use since it had trouble with running the java compiler.
I think there are specific sites for buying and hosting MineCraft servers? I don’t know their prices but you might be better off with something like that instead since they probably make it a lot easier to manage as well.
The word “Server” is just a fancy word for saying “Computer running a program that is listening for input”. The input being the keyboard, mouse or network socket etc.
hosting a minecraft server on it, turning it on and off is just a bonus, as my router doesnt like port forwarding, I have followed multiple guides, videos, texts, each time it fails, and the last few times iv tried hamachi, it hasn’t worked either.
I quickly realised after posting I forgot to add its not just for minecraft, when I first saw the post about 123systems.com I was like "Oo I could start developing multiplayer games (at least attempt), I would probably set it as a goal, my last project for my high school subject for software design and development, we get to choose what we want, I thought it would be cool to make a multiplayer game, for a school subject, it should probably get me full marks, seeing as what our class is at the moment, is struggling to make a calculator, and I was the only one who could make a binary calculator, yet alone add hexadecimal, octal, (it had to convert from binary to decimal, so it doesn’t work decimal to binary).
But their still stuck at learning vb.net, they basically had to make a binary converter in english, when I used java, because java is just awesome, am I right?
EDIT: It was more my friends idea that was like, you should host a server on it for us aswell
If you are hosting Minecraft with OpenVZ servers, be sure to get those with VSwap otherwise it can get nasty with memory.