corsayoung
Member
Registered: 10th Feb 09
Location: Cheltenham
User status: Offline
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Hey everyone,
I don't post much but read everyday on here, so thought i would ask the CS community for a bit of advice. I currently run a number of websites, one of which is getting bigger and bigger each day, i currently run it all off simple shared hosting  , it was cheap and offered everything i needed but most of all it was UK hosted as well. Anyway now the shared side of things is really starting to show and we are getting a lot of slow speeds on loading at certain times of the day, sometimes doesnt load at all as the server peaks i imagine.
Now i have looked into VPS before, and they are getting cheaper and cheaper and i know i wont need something too big package wise, what i need help on is the setup on the VPS, does it come prepackaged with something like cPanel? or do you have to purchase that as well? The VPS i am currently looking at has these specs;
1GB guaranteed/1GB vSwap memory
20GB RAID10 protected storage
250GB/month data transfer @ 100mbit
2 vCPU cores
OpenVZ/SolusVM
1 IPv4
10 x IPv6
The website im going i would be putting on is a simple forum and wordpress, both of which require mysql and php etc.. also email.
How easy would it be for me to use a VPS, are there any hidden costs i should look at? Could i also use it for some of my other sites?
Thanks
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Dom
Member
Registered: 13th Sep 03
User status: Offline
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All depends on how much you're wanting to spend and your technical knowledge of server management. If you know little then i'd look at a fully managed setup like Tsohost's VDS, where essentially you're given cPanel/WHM access (you do have SSH but it's limited ie: not root) and server management is handled by the Tsohost team, otherwise if you know you're way around a command prompt then you can grab a decent spec 'LowEndBox' for silly cheap prices but you're literally given an empty virtual container and you have to go about installing and maintaining your preferred OS and services as well as any backups (some hosts do provide backup storage via rsync or FTP but it's up to you to setup the backups).
Regarding control panels, it all depends on the host. On the top end of the scale you'll usually get DirectAdmin or cPanel/WHM included, at the bottom end you'll either have to buy a license for cPanel (roughly £10-15pm)/DirectAdmin (roughly £5pm) or opt for one of the free panels like Kloxo/ISPConfig (if you don't really need it then i wouldn't both with it).
Read through what the host is offering and their T&Cs before you hit the purchase button. As standard you'll have a setup fee (most LEB providers don't charge a setup fee) and obviously you'll be charged for additional storage/bandwidth on top of your package. Hidden costs i've come across is being charge for reboots (usually it's free) and being charge for support tickets (although this tends to be at the bottom end of VPS's).
The spec you've posted looks reasonable but it depends on cost, location and offered support (unmanaged/fully-managed).
Note the used virtualisation - OpenVZ tends to be marginally better with performance but hosts can easily oversell (ie: containers can have a total spec that outweighs the physical hardware), whereas using Xen (and the likes) limits this some what as the total containers spec must be less than the physical hardware but there is a slight performance dip. A lot more to it than that and i would recommend having a read up on ivirtualisation but that's the gist.
And the bandwidth and port seems a little pants but again it depends on the price. If it was for a heavy traffic site then i'd personally opt for a 1Gbit port to help with peaks rather than a shed load of bandwidth on a slower port. But obviously you should have analytics and usage to help you decide what you need here.
Another option is to go 'Cloud' based where essentially you have the usual control panel/FTP/web hosting but the site is spread (load balanced) across multiple frontend and database servers. Tsohost have a really good Clustered service that i would recommend, otherwise look at Vidahost, Rackspace and possibly AWS (Amazon).
LowEndTalk and the WebHostingTalk forums are well worth a read or to ask help.
[Edited on 03-08-2012 by Dom]
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corsayoung
Member
Registered: 10th Feb 09
Location: Cheltenham
User status: Offline
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Thanks for replying, been ill last day or two so not had chance to reply but i did read it straight away.
quote:
All depends on how much you're wanting to spend and your technical knowledge of server management. If you know little then i'd look at a fully managed setup like Tsohost's VDS, where essentially you're given cPanel/WHM access (you do have SSH but it's limited ie: not root) and server management is handled by the Tsohost team, otherwise if you know you're way around a command prompt then you can grab a decent spec 'LowEndBox' for silly cheap prices but you're literally given an empty virtual container and you have to go about installing and maintaining your preferred OS and services as well as any backups (some hosts do provide backup storage via rsync or FTP but it's up to you to setup the backups).
Well i was looking at LowEndBox to be fair thats where i got that spec from and it was silly cheap, and now your great explaination explains why. Im not looking to spend a large amount, its only a small community and forum at the moment but will grow with time, i think i will need some managment, i have ran a lot of web hosting sites and spend a lot of time on cpanel and am all self learnt apart from a few comupting classes back in school, im pretty sure however if i did get a fully naked VPS, once it was all setup, os installed etc and a handy little admin panel installed i could manage it, as it wont need a lot of managing other then updating a few files everynow and then.
quote:
Regarding control panels, it all depends on the host. On the top end of the scale you'll usually get DirectAdmin or cPanel/WHM included, at the bottom end you'll either have to buy a license for cPanel (roughly £10-15pm)/DirectAdmin (roughly £5pm) or opt for one of the free panels like Kloxo/ISPConfig (if you don't really need it then i wouldn't both with it).
Would these free panels be easy to install and easy to use? I don't use a lot of features on the current cpanel i have, literally just mysql, the emails and thats about it, all uploads i do via ftp, im guessing with the ftp i would need to connect a different way also? if i could conjure up the courgage to take the step and just see what its like i may do but i know i'd be lost and just spitting money out for nothing.
I'm defiently thinking at the minute that i need to go away from shared hosting and move to VPS, it just offers something completely different i can see. And once it is up it is pretty much self running i hope where not a lot can go wrong if i don't fiddle with it? Literally is just a case of how easy would it be to install an OS that i could install what i need, mysql? email thing? and then of course the wordpress and forum i currently have..
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Dom
Member
Registered: 13th Sep 03
User status: Offline
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Majority of the free controls panels will require installing and setting up the services/packages (Web server, DNS, Mail, FTP, DB etc) prior to installing the actual control panel. So you will need to get stuck in with terminal (ie - command prompt) some what, although there are a fair few tutorials floating around for the bigs 'ones' (Kloxo, ISPConfig) but it tends to be the case of picking and choosing bits from tutorials.
Even with a control panel, you'll still have to dip in once in a while to do maintenance and obviously without server management, you're own your own if anything (outside of physical server hardware) goes belly up.
As mentioned if you can live without a control panel (arguably if it's one site then there isn't really any need) then i would as not only does it free up resources (control panels use a fair amount considering), it also means you can migrate some of the services (ie: email you can move to Google Apps; DNS use a free third party provider like http://dns.he.net or zoneedit.com who CS and a few others here use) freeing up more resources and in turn saving some of the headaches and security issues that come with these services.
If you did this then essentially you'd just need to install a basic LAMP (Linux, OS; Apache, web server; MySQL, DB; PHP), or a variation of (such as using Nginx over Apache), stack which could be installed with reasonable ease (as long as you know how to use command prompt) with the help of the number of 'LEB' scripts (essentially automated scripts to install/setup services and parts of the OS, like firewall/IPTable) that are floating around (search on lowendtalk.com).
FTP is pretty insecure (logins are sent in plain text), certainly i don't run it on any of my VPS boxes and don't know anyone that does (unless their hosting for clients etc; which case it's locked down as much as possible). Rather you'd use SFTP (SSH FTP) which is encrypted and far more secure yet you're still able to use clients like Filezilla etc.
Regarding fiddling, generally once you have a decent setup then rarely apart from the usual maintenance/backups. But to get to that stage you'll probably have to spend a fair few weeks tweaking bits.
I did forget to mentioned this in the last reply but note that installing the OS and services/packages will eat into your storage eg - an empty Debian + LNMP stack is ~300MB, which would give you ~19.7GB free space with the above spec. Similarly your bandwidth (this is both upstream and downstream) allowance is for the whole VPS container and not just the hosted websites like with shared hosting; so all OS/packages updates, downloading backups as well as website traffic will eat into this allowance.
And if you are tempted to go down the LEB route then i would look at venturing outside of the UK to Netherlands (from my tests, a lot of the data centres have brilliant peering to the rest of Europe especially the UK), France, Italy (to some extent) or Germany for the VPS as you tend to be able to get similar specs for few pounds cheaper/better specs for same yet still get a decent connection back to the UK.
Obviously the US is vastly cheaper but you'll get a noticeable difference in connection performance, which won't be good if your audience is this side of the pond.
Bit of a ramble but hopefully you'll find it useful 
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ed
Member
Registered: 10th Sep 03
User status: Offline
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I run a VPS 350 from Evorack: http://www.evorack.com/unmanaged-xen-vps.php
I used to have a £40/month managed VPS from Webfusion which over the past few months got more and more shit. You couldn't upgrade the OS which meant I couldn't upgrade the PHP version and the Plesk control panel didn't let you do anything smart with Apache.
My current VPS has Debian, Nginx, MySQL and PHP 5 installed (and I have Apache running on another IP). I'm running around 10 WordPress sites on it at the moment and it's pretty darn quick  I'm using Ajenti as the control panel as its nice and light and doesn't create messy config files.
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ed
Member
Registered: 10th Sep 03
User status: Offline
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Just to agree with Dom - I don't use FTP either. I use SFTP using WinSCP or Cyberduck when I need to move files about.
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corsayoung
Member
Registered: 10th Feb 09
Location: Cheltenham
User status: Offline
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Thanks for both your replies, you've both gave me a little insight into the in and outs of the VPS.
I went ahead and purchased a VPS as i figured i would probably learn more from doing then hearing and reading. I got a UK server for pretty cheap each month, its currently running centos5 i believe and thats all i know. The server specs are as follows;
1024MB Dedicated Ram
2048MB Burstable Ram
60GB Diskspace
1000GB Bandwidth
100Mbps Port
1x IPv4 Address
8x IPv6 Addresses
SolusVM/OpenVZ
Think its running apache. Although don't have a clue what this means myself.
I have been able to access fia SFTP using filezilla, and my friend has said he would do a little setting up like installing mysql.
Where would i start about the domain etc, we have a domain currently do i need to run it through a third party DNS like mentioned above?
Do i set about installing a free control panel would that help significantly? And how about email, i really am lost.
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