I’ve been hosting all my websites on a WiredTree Managed Hybrid VPS Server since July 2009, and the plan has not changed a bit until this week. For the past year and a half, WiredTree offered 1GB RAM, 80GB disk space, 2TB bandwidth, and 1 processor core for $99 per month. Starting Monday, this plan has changed to 2GB RAM, 100GB disk space, and 3TB bandwidth, with no increase in price. These stats are real—WiredTree does not oversell and this resources are always reserved for your account. If you aren’t using all your RAM or disk space, nobody else gets to use it—it stays unused and immediately available to you.

Hybrid Servers are actually beefed-up Virtual Private Servers—the name VPS is not used because they provide the resources of a low or medium end dedicated server without the expense. For instance, a WiredTree server might contain two 1TB hard drives, 16GB RAM, and two quad-core processors. Such a server might host 7 Hybrid Server accounts, giving each 2GB RAM, 100GB RAID10 mirrored disk space, and a processor core. The remaining core, RAM, and disk space would be used for software called Virtuozzo, which partitions the server into virtual machines. Such a powerful server may cost under $400 a month to operate—WiredTree would get almost $700 from seven different clients. While offering the server directly to clients is an option, most people do not need and cannot afford such a powerful machine. A Hybrid Server is a much better option.

Prior to this, WiredTree Hybrid Servers were not a spectacular deal—you could find faster servers at cheaper prices elsewhere. Thousands of people choose WiredTree not for their rock-bottom prices, but for their superior uptime, customer support, and reputation. You can send a support ticket to WiredTree any time of the night and you’ll get a response in under 30 minutes. While other web hosting companies make a point of hiding their phone number, you can call WiredTree toll-free at 866-523-8733 with any questions or problems. Combining 24/7 custom service with the new Hybrid Server specs, WiredTree blows all other mid-range hosting companies out of the water. This is truly a game-changing announcement.

My website gets over 1000 visitors a day, and I host other websites such as Composer’s Journey and Thripp.com on this Hybrid server too. I also host the Th8.us URL shortener here, which shortens 1.3 million URLs per month and receives over 10 million requests, including pageviews and API calls. Th8.us is not simply a URL shortener—I display Google AdSense ads on every short URL in an iFrame, which requires PHP. This alone generates over $100 per month. The Th8.us database is a single InnoDB table in a MySQL database with nearly 20 million rows. The size of the database is 3.2 gigabytes, and it’s never been corrupted. Th8.us barely makes a dent in my Hybrid server’s resources.

WiredTree provides detailed statistics about your server. Here are just a few of those from my server, for the past month:

The above stats are with the OLD server specs. I had 1.5GB of RAM because I used the coupon code HYBRIDFREE512RAM when I signed up. The spike on August 18 is when I did a full backup of my cPanel account including all files and databases, which totaled 7GB and took only 30 minutes. I only use 150GB of bandwidth a month tops, and that’s with lots of large Canon RAW files (10MB each) hosted on my server for direct download by the public. With the new upgrades, I could use 20 times the bandwidth and still be fine.

WiredTree says all existing hybrid customers will be upgraded within a month, but if you’re a new customer, you can get a hybrid server with the new specs right now. If you use this affiliate link, I will get one month of free hosting a month after you sign up. You can register as an affiliate yourself and receive 100% of the first month of any sales as a hosting credit or 75% to your PayPal account. This could potentially pay your hosting bill every month.

WiredTree Hybrid servers run CentOS 5, a Linux distro that is the defacto standard for VPS hosting. Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python, FTP, SSH, cPanel, Web Host Manager, phpMyAdmin, Cubemail, and plenty of other stuff is available out of the box, and WiredTree technicians watch your server for problems and improve its security. You can have WordPress set up on your own domain in under an hour, and if you don’t know how, you can put in a support ticket. They’ll even transfer your files from your old host for you if you provide your usernames and passwords (they are trustworthy and I often provide them my root password).

The Radified blog has a great guide to VPS hosting, focused on WiredTree, and you can read Mr. Rad’s experience in making the switch here. It’s 2 and a half years old, but besides better specs and cheaper prices, WiredTree hasn’t changed a bit.

This is straight from the WiredTree “Grove” admin pages:

“We have made major investments easily in the tens of thousands of dollars this year upgrading our Hybrid infrastructure, retrofitting existing servers, and introducing new servers to support these increased allocations and to ensure you are getting the best value for your money.”

Though I don’t know how many clients they have, I wouldn’t be surprised if they spent $100,000 on these upgrades. RAM is cheap, but it isn’t dirt cheap, especially if you want quality. WiredTree performs automatic nightly backups of all your files and has multiple layers of redundancy, so giving a customer 20GB extra disk space might require 100GB extra disk space in their infrastructure. Ditto for RAM and bandwidth.

WiredTree has disabled the coupon codes HYBRIDFREE512RAM and 10PERCENTOFF on the new Hybrid plans, presumably because the prices are already rock-bottom, but you can still receive a 5% discount by paying for a year in advance. This is what I do, and I will be paying them $1128.60 in February unless I get a bunch of affiliate commissions. Start off paying by the month until you find out how special WiredTree is.

Unless you have a large, successful website already, you should start out with a Virtual Private Server ($49 per month) or even shared hosting, which WiredTree does not provide. At the VPS level, there are many WiredTree coupons available—don’t sign up without one.

You can host an unlimited number of websites on all WiredTree’s plans. Your only limits are how much RAM, disk space, bandwidth, and CPU power these sites consume. If you have a bunch of small sites, there’s no reason to pay a hosting bill for each one. Consolidate them under one VPS plan. You can even use your own DNS name servers like NS1.THRIPP.COM and NS2.THRIPP.COM.

While the new Hybrid Servers were announced two days ago, I couldn’t find any articles in the blogosphere about this ground-breaking change—just verbatim copies of the press release. I’m sure this will change before the week ends, and WiredTree will become one of the world leaders in web hosting. They may even need to open a second data-center outside of Chicago.

Check out WiredTree today. Even if you already have a good web host, WiredTree is better.