I'll be very interesting in this thread. I'm in the process of releasing a LifeRay portal for a web application I wrote, so I'll be following this thread very carefully.
I'm far from an expert in hosting services, but I currently use SliceHost which offers VPS (only VPS actually). I've been very happy with them. I can tell you from experience that LifeRay will struggle with 512MB of RAM. When I first got SliceHost, I signed up for the 512MB slice. I have MySql, LifeRay + Tomcat (not even full fledged app server), plus the basics for a mail server so LifeRay can send mail - and although it sort of worked, I wouldn't come close to recommending it, even for a test application. I guess you mileage may vary, but this wasn't nearly enough. With this amount of RAM LifeRay took 4-5 minutes to start up. Web pages were served up VERY slowly, even on really simple pages, once in a while, they'd time out.
Currently, I have 1GB. I know this won't be enough for production but for testing purposes it actually works fairly well. It can handle a couple of users comfortably. I know though if my site will have any traffic, I"ll need to upgrade.
Victor - what kind of traffic do you think a 4GB plan would support? I know there are a lot of variables that could skew it, but for a standard LifeRay install with Tomcat and MySql, would 4GB handle a good amount of traffic for a website with a few custom portlets that access MySql along with a few blogs/forums and web content.
As for SliceHost, one of the things I like about them (and not sure if other hosting companies do this as well), if you decide to upgrade or downgrade, they'll basically copy your whole server over to the new upgraded package. For instance, when I upgraded from 512MB to 1GB of RAM, in about 5 minutes I had everything I had already configured and installed ready to go. I didn't have to do anything - including reinstall LifeRay, MySql, set up accoutns again, even the databases within MySql were copied over. Maybe all hosting companies do this, but if not, this is what attracted me to SliceHost - if I need to upgrade in the future it wouldn't be a monumental and tedious task for me to do it. SliceHost basically gives you a virgin environment with little to nothing on it. IF you aren't a linux admin, they have really good trails/tutorials that offer a step by step guide on setting up pretty much everything - users, firewall, email, etc. I have my LifeRay running on a 1GB slice w/ Ubuntu Linux on a 64 bit machine. Rackspace owns SliceHost now, but they pretty much keep SliceHost completely separate from "RackSpace" iteself - in fact, i didn't know RackSpace owned them until I googled SliceHost and saw an article on it.
Just my 2 cents... good topic
