Is it possible to get a rough description of the benefits of a VPS host over a shared host?
1) Support. Should support with a VPS host be better than my current shared provider? They offer live chat and a ticketing system. Tickets can take hours to get a response, live chat minutes but often there are no support operaters to answer the question.
2) Uptime. Will uptime be improved upon? My current host tends to range from 97%-99% in a month. Importantly will it suffer from soft outages where parts of the account are down (such as MySQL or http)?
3) Traffic. What levels of traffic will base VPS packages handle? Will a few semi active forums (say max 20 users on 3 forums) be manageable alongside several PHP/MySQL galleries and several hundred normal PHP pages?
4) Load. Does the load usage of other customers on the same server effect your account in the same way it does in a shared environment? Can one user bog down the entire server for everyone else?
5) Management. How much control is given to a user in managed VPS environment. Can you restart OS yourself (and do things like edit the firewall blocks)? Do you have to keep the OS (Linux in my case) and things like Apache and PHP up to date yourself or is that done for you.
6) Usage Policies. Are the usage policies in place in a VPS environment (limiting the amount of CPU process and memory you can use). If yes are they higher than in a shared environment.
Is it possible to get a little more on a few of the hosts I've looked at (if possible I'd like to be below the $50 a month mark).
Is it a case of picking any of these and getting a similar support and hosting service?
WiredTree seems to offer a decent compromise of price against value. Given that my site is still pretty small at the moment, would the smallest JaguarPC package be a better fit (so I'm not spending money for specs I'm not using).
Unfortunately disk space is a fairly big factor as the site uses quite a few image and small video files (I'm using something like 2GB at the moment but this would increase fairly rapidly over time). Does that mean a shared host is better suited for my needs?
I know to some of you this may sound like a totally silly question. But I would like to know what the main advantages are if you have a VPS instead of a shared reseller hosting.
I notice some of the basic VPS packages give you 512MB of memory. Other than that, the rest of the stats seem to be along the lines of what you might get in an advanced reseller hosting plan such as one available from Reseller Zoom.
I am looking into VPS as a dedicated server is a little over my budget, however, I am not entirely clear what makes VPS better.
This thread [url] is a perfect example of how some shared web hosts act to sell. This one might not be posted from someone who plays for the web host but it illustrates a shameless promotional model.
You just need to hire 10 dudes to give them a blog or small web site and "some orders" to post threads about your business. They get paid per result (paid per sale made) Nothing wrong if those guys go to promote in "advertising and requests" sections. But they come to flood sections where we're comming to meet each other, to talk and share some knowledge and information.
Forums like SitePoint were the first quality social networks. They came out many years before anyone knew what Web 2.0 was? Let's not allow good communities to be conquered by adv posts.
I'm with one of the big shared hosts. Support is patchy at best, which isn't a problem until you require help at which point it's agonising as you have to wait an age to get an unsatisfactory response.
At the moment the server I'm on is suffering from consistent outages (it's been up and down over the last few days). Support has been hard to get hold of at times (right now my site is completely unacceptable for me and there's no-one tending the live support chat - which is the only chance of getting a prompt response).
My question is should I be actively looking to improve my situation (it's amazingly frustrating to spend the best part of a day doing small updates, which because of instability, take hours instead of minutes) or should I just wait until it blows over (to be fair server issues tend to be fairly infrequent, but they do flair up every so often). I can't really afford to pay that much more than I am (say $20-$50 a month max) so am I stuck with shared hosting or is there anyway to pay a little more (my current package costs around $10 a month) to get better support and stability?
After a initial look around would something like MediaTemples GS or the low end MediaTemples dedicated virtual service be suitable? The pages do have moderate database use (a few forums and galleries) and use around 50GB a month bandwidth (which would climb slowly in future months)?
This is my first time with shared hosting and I went with hostgator because they are well known. Well, my site is getting decent traffic but well within my disk space and data transfer allotment, and I get this email saying my site has been suspended and my site is inaccessible.
Dear customer,
Due to an excessive amount of Apache requests on our gatorXXX server we have been forced to suspend the directory /home/username/public_html/sitename at this time as all other users on the server are experiencing issues due to this :
...http requests list...
Please let us know when you're ready to investigate and address this issue so we can work with you further. Thanks.
Sincerely, Ford Merrill Systems Administrator Supervisor HostGator.com LLC
Is this what most shared hosts do? Just suspend your account once your site starts getting traffic?
why so few shared hosting companies enable a php op-caching system on their system (xcache, apc, eaccelerator).
Is there some specific technical reason in place?
Usually I run my own servers, but it happens from time to time that you need a quality shared hosting in order to reccomend it to a friend, for a personal blog, a small website, maybe your own personal blog that you're not keen to host on your dedicated servers already used for big projects ...
Now, as everyone using php applications knows, software like xcache or eaccelerator gives a nice speed bost to page generation. I run xcache on all my servers and vps (mainly running vbullettin and wordpress) and never encountered any issue.
Installing one of those (eg. xcache) is a 5minutes procedure, and even for kiddie-hosting companies that won't know how to build php, the ability to compile eaccelerator is in the cpanel easy php build software, so you don't even need to know how to rebuild php to enable eaccelerator in cpanel.
Despite all these facts is quite impossible to find a decent webhoster with xcache or apc/eacc enabled ...
The only one claiming to have eaccelerator is medialayer : "# Zend Optimizer, IonCube, and eAccelerator" this is a quote from their website.
How come nobody else undertakes this step?
What I have been noticing is most premium shared-hosting provider I encountered run their server with a lot of free memory .. so why not impress the customer with blazing fast page generation times (wordpress footer displaying "page generated in 0.071 seconds" impresses also the non-technical savy customers) enabling such a simple feature ?
Im a webdesigner so when looking for hosting i try to find one that is simple to manage, hardware powerful, lots of ready to install scripts and a beautiful webmail like Atmail or Zimbra.
So im looking for a powerful / quality high end "shared" hosting package.
Until now i have looked at: - Mediatemple (as @mail, exelent support but slow in Europe)
- Mosso (is always good to be powered by rackspace but i think that the cloud hosting concept is still unsstable. Any experience?
- SimpleHelix (realy fast magento demo store, lots of scripts, @Mail and seems to have a fast network to europe)
So any advices on premium shared hosting?
An in Europe, any company similar to mediatemple or simplehelix?
I know most webhosts run Apache and it seems to server their needs very well. However LiteSpeed is new and fast, assuming you have relatively static content. At least that's what I've heard. Beyond this, I don't know much, though a year ago I worked with a guy who hosted an iPhone software repository (smallish files, huge demand), and he put LiteSpeed on the servers to deal with the load. Running at 30+ Mbps, with spikes above 60, the server never went above 0.2 load as far as I remember, and it was just a 2GB Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86 GHz machine.
I'm setting up a new VPS, and I have the option of a number of Linux distributions to choose from. There's all the usual suspects: CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora Core, SuSE, etc. Why would I pick one over the others? I've used CentOS before, but I'm open to trying other distros. There's been lots of fuss over Ubuntu on the desktop, but why would I choose it for a server?
I've been leaning toward going with WestHost for a medium-sized project. They offer VPS without root access, though, and much of the advice in the "HOW TO: Secure and Optimize your VPS" thread requires running commands as root.
My experience has all been with colocating my own servers in a data center, with everything accessible when I log in as root (though of course I ordinarily logged in as a normal user instead). This was three or four years ago, and a lot has changed since then.
Can someone who's up on this stuff please describe the pros and cons of non-root VPS service such as WestHost provides? Cost seems to be one advantage :-} and I imagine it's wise for inexpert Webmasters not to have a completely wide-open system. Are there other pluses to non-root VPS that aren't as obvious?
Most importantly, what kind of operations will I not be able to carry out if I go with WestHost or a similar non-root VPS host? Can I reasonably expect the hosting service to perform the kind of locking-down described in WHT's tutorial on VPS security?
I'll be asking similar questions of WestHost's support people but thought it would be a good idea to ask people without a stake in either the root-access or the non-root way of doing things.
I'm starting to see this, or maybe it's always existed, but it seems like bigger sites are hosting their images on external servers. I've even seen some sites use Flickr as the host for all of their images. I guess for Flickr that means you have a guarenteed image CMS, but I really don't see that as why Flickr was created.
I'm sure there are bandwidth advantages, and maybe that's the main reason. Is there a point where the traffic gets so high that moving images off site would improve load times and sever loads? Is it a worthwhile endeavor for smaller sites? I'm curious to see what the thoughts are on this trend.
I see Site5 have a 5 dollar deal on their homepage, but I don't know if it's any good. I hear from a lot of people to get a reseller account if you plan to make a lot of websites. It's more expensive than the 5 dollar plan with less bandwidth and storage, so there got to be something to it. What are the benefits of a reseller account compared to that 5 dollar deal plan?
As far as I see each hosting company uses various methods to make customers buy their domains. They can provide free domains, free Fantastico scripts, website building software, templates etc. I am planning to launch my hosting company really soon. Also I think to include free internet marketing services in some hosting packages. I am just wondering if such internet marketing program can be considered as a significant competitive advantage stimulating customers to make a purchase?
I was in the market for a new dedicated server after a couple of years with my previous provider. The previous provider did nothing wrong but they were no longer competitive when it came to CPU and memory.
I moved first to geekrack. And I left them after a week and a half as they never were able to get my rDNS records setup.
I found Universal Hosts on this forum and gave them a shot. I had asked for an operating system that they didn't offer normally (Debian 64 bit) and they said that they could do it. However, when my server was setup it was 32 bit Debian instead. They apologized and had Debian 64 bit setup less than 24 hours later.
When I asked them to get rDNS records setup it took a few hours but they were setup correctly and they worked.
Universal Hosts is also a BurstNet reseller but compared to my other attempt at using a BurstNet reseller they are fantastic. While the initial config was incorrect they worked quickly to fix it and were very professional about it.
So after two weeks - so far so good. Keep up the good work UniHosts!
I am running Apache2.2, PHP5.I have been running with virtual hosts on a Windows 7 environment fine for a couple of years successfully, but have just had to move to a Windows 8 environment.It looks like Apache and PHP have installed and are working fine, but my Virtual hosts are now not being recognised. From what I can tell, it is the Windows 8 hosts file that is having a problem, as it looks as though it is now just setup to Block websites.
If I make the host file just have the one line127.0.0.1 localhost entry, then the very first Virtual Host from my apache config file will come up, but the rest are not found.If I put the usual 127.0.0.1 mywebsite.name aliasname is appears as though my website works momentarily and then is blocked..
I am using epicvps right now. But it has been baught by vaserv days before. Where it came a lot server downtime and server problems. My storage will automaticly decrease. I send tickets to them many times, they just respond me that the nod that where i host have too much vps on it. They tell me that they will move my account to new nod. But it still happen again today!
My budget is something around $50 per month, can anyone recommend some reliable company?
Twice in two years now, as a very responsible host with ZERO tolerance to spam (incoming or outgoing!), I have been hampered by the efforts of the anti-spam "reputation service" offered by [url]
We host something like 2000 websites across a cluster of servers, and while we do everything possible to prevent spam, it's inevitable there will be the occasional outbreak.
A couple of days back, sure enough, one of our hosted sites was compromised. As far as I could tell, the culprit was too simple a password. There were no signs of compromised scripts, permissions, anything. Just a spam script uploaded via FTP from a foreign IP address. We do have limits on password strength now, but may not have when this account was set up.
Anyhow, within 120 minutes or so, we had removed the spam script, blocked the offending IP, secured the site and delisted our IP from the ONE RBL it appeared on - Spamcop.
You would think that would be the end of the story, right? Wrong.
Here we are, over two days later, NO listings on any RBLs, NO further spam from ANY of our servers. What Senderbase reputation do you think that server has? Poor.
This is an IP that as far as I know has NEVER had a spam issue, other than the single outbreak two days ago.
The net result of this "Poor" listing is that we have now had outgoing email sitting in our mail queue for 50+ hours because the recipient mail systems are STILL blocking us based on our "Poor" reputation.
Furthermore, I quote directly from the Senderbase site: "Why is the reputation Poor? This host is sending spam!". That one really tipped me over the edge.
As I say, this is at least the second time two years running that this has happened to us. Single spam problem; Cleaned up quickly and efficiently; Wait on Senderbase for days.
It is hard enough dealing with spammers and problems like this, without having to fight the "good guys" too. All I can say is that I will personally NEVER use, nor recommend, the services of Senderbase or Ironport.
I am currently with Lunarpages. Up until a few months ago I was on a regular plan (not VPS). Their service and uptime was great. But they moved me to a VPS due to the traffic which I completely understand. However, since I have been moved to their VPS servers the downtime has been horrible. And by horrible I mean horrible! So I am on the hunt for a new web hosting company.
I really do not know what I need, I believe I do need VPS hosting though. The bad news is that I know nothing about VPS hosting. Lunarpages has me on Plesk now and I could not be more lost with it.
My main dilemma is that I have a php forum that generates a good amount of traffic. I am getting about 40,000 page views per day on the forum and about 6,000 page views per day on the main website portion.
I am scared to death to move the forum. I fear I will need a tech friendly host to help me set the forum back up. Once I am back up and running I never need any help. I just want to get to that point again.
But I have questions, like what the heck is "Guaranteed RAM"? Is that important to me? Could this be part of the reason that now that LP has moved me to their VPS servers that I can no longer just simply download my large database for the forum through phpMyAdmin? It just craps out and LP told me something like VPS servers didn't have enough memory (or was it RAM?) to preform the task?
So far I am hating my VPS experience. I just want to be up and running smooth again without fearing the downtime.
I think LP's hosting for the VPS is around $45.00 per month or so/ I would like to be lower if possible, but I do not want to get a new host with the same downtime issues.
I'm in the process of looking at a new firewall... What we need in a firewall:
- Deep packet inspection - BGP Routing (just for active/passive uplink failover) - support for up to 150 Mbps+ - Gbit uplinks - Active/Active setup for firewalls - Budget around 3k Each firewall
Possible choices: - Juniper Netscreen 140 SSG - SonicWALL® PRO 4060
So far I'm really leaning towards the Juniper NetScreen 140 SSG.
My network consultant started to recommend SonicWall but from previous reviews here and else where kinda turned me off them.
