When you get a new VPS everything feels nice.  You’ve got your own server, without the dedicated server price tag. However, everything may not be as it seems.

A key thing to remember; A low end VPS does NOT have the same amount of resources available.

The first thing you will want to do with your server is setup everything. Assuming you’re using it for web hosting, this may include;

• Control Panel
• Web server & PHP / Python etc
• E-mail with Anti-virus/Spam detection
• DNS
• Database Server
• Log file processing

Be careful when doing this.  You are likely getting a VPS because your website is now getting enough traffic, or you are hosting enough sites that shared hosting just doesn’t cut it.  By adding all of those services. you could be eating into valuable resources.

If your VPS is for your website, it’s for your website, and ideally not the extras. Consider the following;

Control Panel

After your initial setup there probably isn’t much need for a control panel. Where possible, disable it. Virtualmin/Webmin/Usermin for example runs as its own perl process and while not very much it still uses memory that most of the time you don’t need. You can always login to the machine and enable it again via SSH.

E-mail

Consider using Google Apps (or similar any number of good quality email hosting providers). You can offload all of your E-mail, virus checking and spam checking to someone else. Gmail is a huge platform and most of you know the features offered by this. Google Apps allows all of that on your own domain name. There is 7gb of storage per account, for free. If you need more, or feel like offering google some money, its £33 per account, per year (at the moment)

DNS

Many server providers, like linode, have DNS servers that are free for you to use. Utilize them. BIND, on this very server, was utilising over 100mb of memory.

Log file processing

Webalizer and AWStats are both common log file processing tools. Do you really need them though? In some instances, yes, in most…no. Use Google Analytics (or something similar).  If you get a lot of traffic, processing millions of lines takes minutes to hours, during which time your website could be sluggish. A slow website really kills the user experience. If you really want/need something like AWStats, install it on your own computer and process the log files manually or create another VPS to process files periodically.

Web Server & Database Server

As this is your web server, you can’t do much about the overhead of a web server and perhaps a database server (unless you’re running multiple virtual machines). What you can do, however, is limit what is running. The default installation of Apache on Debian includes a lot of modules you will likely not need or ever use. Disable extensions that you don’t need.

Or….you can get a bigger VPS or multiple VPS for all of your services. Instant (or at least quick) scaling is one of the many benefits of a virtual server.

Remember: the faster your server runs, the faster your website runs, the happier your users are, the happier Google is, the happier you are…….well hopefully.

After seeing yet another failure from the vps.net camp, this being FAR worse than anything I’ve seen before, I decided to jump ship.

What was this failure?  well…

It has to do with the licensing, the licenses stopped pinging, which made replication stop, which caused some services to stop, they then logged in and rebooted it, and thought it was back up, but upon mounting VMs, it came to the point where it was clear that there was corruption. We then were able to restore all the logical volumes, but even then, the VMs wouldn’t boot..that brings us to where we’re at now

From my point of view, my server died, wouldn’t come up and after 24 hours it still wasn’t available.  There seems to be a high chance there is a missing data….that’s to be checked later.

All very far from re-assuring.

So, over to Linode. Similar pricing for the basic stuff.

• The initial setup was very much the same on both providers, under 5 minutes and a new machine was ready to go.
• Installing the software I need, pretty quick – then again I’ve done it several times now.
• Restore backups from my Amazon AWS. It costs less than £3 per month to run what I require.
• Less than 4 hours after setting up the nodes I am back live with only emails delayed.

I must admit, I’m pretty impressed with the flexibility of the control panel for Linode. In addition to what vps.net offers, Linode has;

• A job queue
• Root password reset
• Rescue mode
• Kernel switch
• Custom disk sizing
• Custom drive mounting
• Alerts  on CPU usage, Disk IO, Traffic and Transfer Quota
• Auto-reboots – this has not yet been a problem anyway
• Additional RAM/Storage/Data Transfer all separately configurable

There may well be more as well. This is under 24 hours of signup which included sleep, work & setting up servers so much tinkering is still to be done.

My sites also seem more responsive as well, faster disks maybe?