Thread: Moving up from Shared Hosting

Are you looking at a Linux or Windows VPS? You mention both apache and ASP in your post!

You are not going to find many VPS providers who will tell you how many virtual boxes they have per physical and even if they tell you are you actually going to believe them?

If you pick a reputable provider who aren't offering a VPS for next-to-nothing per month you will do ok.

Heart aren't really geared up for quality service the "unlimited" tag should shout out to you why!

If you pay for a decent quality reseller service you probably will not need a VPS and you will save yourself loads of time and money.

Originally Posted by Dhosting

Are you looking at a Linux or Windows VPS? You mention both apache and ASP in your post!

Heart use Sun ONE for ASP support on Linux. That's what I was thinking of installing on any VPS. You can also get Apache for Windows... so take your choice! ;-) But Linux was what I was looking at, mainly I guess 'cause it's cheaper and it's what I know (well, Unix anyway - I really wouldn't have the foggiest about how to run a nameserver on Windows).

Originally Posted by Dhosting

If you pay for a decent quality reseller service you probably will not need a VPS and you will save yourself loads of time and money.

And I guess that's one of my questions... why would I save time? It seems I spend more time making sure the hosting company does their job.

As the price difference between a *capable* VPS and a low-end dedicated is so small I'd strongly recommend you go with a dedicated. With a VPS you never know just how much of the cake you are getting and our experience is that you'll have problems sooner or later (it's not a fashionable view, but IMHO it's a technology which is over-hyped).

If you really cannot afford dedicated, personally I think you'd be better off using a reseller account from a high quality host than a VPS.

Originally Posted by TDMWeb

As the price difference between a *capable* VPS and a low-end dedicated is so small I'd strongly recommend you go with a dedicated.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious (quite possible) but VPS is £35 a month and dedicated is £100 a month. In the context of what I'm doing I really can't say that a price difference of £780 a year is "small".

Originally Posted by TDMWeb

With a VPS you never know just how much of the cake you are getting

This is definitely one of my concerns, and if it proves too worrisome then it will mean I stay with reseller hosting. So, advice to all you VPS sellers out there, let your customer know what the contention ratio is!

Originally Posted by TDMWeb

If you really cannot afford dedicated, personally I think you'd be better off using a reseller account from a high quality host than a VPS.

I just need to find a high quality host! ;-)

Check out these:

a) Managed Linux Virtual Private Servers (VPS) - Layershift UK (who seem to me to be quality providers): a VPS:30 is £70.95 per month and provides credible guaranteed RAM (960Mb)

b) Managed Dedicated Servers, Network and Colocation Services at RapidSwitch are a good outfit who will do a Core2Duo, 1GB RAM, 2x160GB disk, CPanel, for £70/month

Yes, you *can* get a VPS for an awful lot less, but our experience is that lower cost VPSs will give you problems with shortage of resources. (You can get a dedi for less than £70 as well, try asking for offers, but my aim was to compare providers who I know are quality outfits.)

But it's your choice at the end of the day!

Originally Posted by TDMWeb

As the price difference between a *capable* VPS and a low-end dedicated is so small I'd strongly recommend you go with a dedicated. With a VPS you never know just how much of the cake you are getting and our experience is that you'll have problems sooner or later (it's not a fashionable view, but IMHO it's a technology which is over-hyped).

We recommend the oposite, with a cheap dedicated you're getting cheaper hardware, usually no RAID, single drive - With a decent VPS provider you're going to be getting fast disk, RAID-10 in a lot of cases and be running on much better hardware and when it comes to fixing things should hardware break, you're going to be a higher priority simply because it'll have affected a number of customers, not just one low margin server (If the provider doesn't have systems in place to automatically recover a VPS from hardware failure that is).

Of course you do need to be careful and ask just how many VPS are going on a node - as we've seen providers put 64 VPS on to Dual Core, Dual Disk servers, which is just silly IMHO.

We'll tell you our VPS per machine limit, all you need to do is post in advertising and companies such as us can flaunt our wares

Originally Posted by Karl

Of course you do need to be careful and ask just how many VPS are going on a node - as we've seen providers put 64 VPS on to Dual Core, Dual Disk servers, which is just silly IMHO.

Karl,

The thing is you don't know if the provider is talking a load of crap just to sell them.

Cheap Dedi isn't the best option but with someone like RS you are not going to have any major issues.

Originally Posted by Dhosting

Karl,

The thing is you don't know if the provider is talking a load of crap just to sell them.

So pick a reputable provider who is know for talking straight and not utter crap then I know what I'd pick each and every time, and it's not a server with a single drive in it (then again, we've not built a server without RAID for about 6 years now).

Karl, I wouldn't recommend a single-drive server either: asking for trouble.

ThomasC: the info I gave above was taken from RS's website quote page and excludes VAT. I just checked again