Moving up from Shared Hosting

mmoore · 5th January 2009

I'm a reasonably experienced Unix tech-head (well, I've worked with Unix for 25 years but haven't done much dabbling around with Linux). I have a "hobby" business as a Web site designer and have around 50 domains under management at the moment. I currently use Heart Internet for shared hosting. I guess I can't complain but the pitfalls of shared hosting are really doing my head in (mail server outages because of spammers getting hosted on my server, total lack of understanding of what it is to be a reseller versus a consumer, miscellanous technical glitches that get sorted reasonably quickly but shouldn't have happened in the first place, etc, etc).

Fundamentally, I've kind of outgrown them and so am looking to migrate up to VPS (can't afford dedicated right now... maybe in a year or two).

I have several concerns in the back of my mind about this that I was hoping that other members of this forum could address based on their experience.

First... no one ever seems to let you know how many VPSs are running on the hardware. I mean, am I getting 1/10th of a machine or 1/100th? Don't get me wrong, I'm not running any complicated stuff here, just brochure type sites, but I do want them to work well (at least as well as on shared hosting). is this a question that I can expect a reputable supplier to answer?

Next... I'm aware that for all the niggles and gripes I have, shared hosting is a comfortable environment where a lot of issues are taken care of for me. This is, after all, just a hobby... not a full time job. Am I biting off way more than I can chew? It's not so much getting Apache or Perl to run that bothers me... I'm even pretty confident about configuring my own nameservers without needing a control panel... but I'm more worried about the stuff I'm NOT thinking about (e.g. one customer does use mail lists, and I've no idea - yet - how I would set that up - I would also have to set up mail server(s) and ASP for most of these sites which I've not done before). I'm prepared to learn in order to get something up and running - and I'm prepared to put time in to solve the occasional glitch, but what I don't want is to spend several hours a day just making sure something ticks along.

I think you get the basic idea. Any war stories from those that have "been there, done that"? Am I better off staying in the comfort of shared hosting despite the niggles?

Thanks

Mike

Dhosting · 5th January 2009

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.

mmoore · 6th January 2009

Quote:

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).

Quote:

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.

TDMWeb · 6th January 2009

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.

mmoore · 6th January 2009

Quote:

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".

Quote:

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!

Quote:

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! ;-)

TDMWeb · 6th January 2009

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!

Karl · 6th January 2009

Quote:

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.

James[UH] · 6th January 2009

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

Dhosting · 6th January 2009

Quote:

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.

Karl · 6th January 2009

Quote:

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).

TDMWeb · 6th January 2009

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

gavint · 6th January 2009

In our case it depends on the spec of the VPSs - our VPS nodes are all pretty much the same but we have some VPSs with 4GB of RAM and some with 256MB so some hosts end up with 15 on and some only 4. The idea is that for the clients the "share" they get will be roughly proportional to their RAM allocation.

We're going to upgrade the RAM when we add a SAN in the next few weeks as we're filling the disks but the CPU utilisation is below 20% so I want to get a few more on each host.

Gavin

ThomasC · 6th January 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by TDMWeb

Check out these:
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

As a quick side note.
RS only offer 1x 160GB disk with cPanel for £80.50/MONTH (This includes VAT @ 15%)

TDMWeb · 6th January 2009

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

ThomasC · 6th January 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by TDMWeb

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

You win. This time