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Anyone out there use a VPS service with SSD drives?

jonnysods

jonnysods

macrumors G3
Original poster
Sep 20, 2006
8,791
7,453
There & Back Again
Hey guys, I host about 70 sites through Hostgator on a shared reseller plan.

I've been considering moving away from them to find a managed VPS service that runs on SSDs to give a good site speed boost.

I need a static IP and an SSL certificate as one site is an ecommerce site.

Just curious if anyone out there has a place you recommend. I'm thinking of using A2 Hosting.
 
I personally use digitalocean for my project, but it is more oriented to developers so this may not suit you. I had good experiences with A2 and even with bytemark
 
Linode have demonstrated time and time again that they're quite unbelievably unprofessional. Their CEO's responses on Facebook are downright worrying at times and they seem to not care a whole lot about security.

With that said, DigitalOcean are fantastic if you want a cheap option but if you're making money with what you're doing you might want to look elsewhere.

Right now Amazon AWS is fantastic.
 
JoelTheSuperior said:
Linode have demonstrated time and time again that they're quite unbelievably unprofessional. Their CEO's responses on Facebook are downright worrying at times and they seem to not care a whole lot about security.

With that said, DigitalOcean are fantastic if you want a cheap option but if you're making money with what you're doing you might want to look elsewhere.

Right now Amazon AWS is fantastic.
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Performance wise, Linode trashes DO in most benchmark (try the storage for example). AWS doesn't perform great. I don't use Linode anymore as I switched to dedicated to squeeze every bit of performance from the hardware... but I used them for many years and I found their support to be among the best I have tried. Shame they suffered that big DDoS recently...
 
hatuko said:
Performance wise, Linode trashes DO in most benchmark (try the storage for example). AWS doesn't perform great. I don't use Linode anymore as I switched to dedicated to squeeze every bit of performance from the hardware... but I used them for many years and I found their support to be among the best I have tried. Shame they suffered that big DDoS recently...
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Oh I completely agree with that. DigitalOcean's performance is pretty poor, especially on disk IO (which is crazy considering they use SSDs - no SAN though, just local disks).

Also worth mentioning - I found with DigitalOcean that if you wget a large file to /dev/null you can genuinely cause them to automatically nullroute your server - they assume if you're pulling any real amount of data at all then clearly you're under attack or just generally abusive.

Thing is with Linode, it's not that they received the DDoS - it's how unprofessionally they handled it, especially when it came to light that they'd been leaking customer data for a long time prior to it (and that those events are what lead to some upset script kiddies packeting them). Security really seems like a low priority to them so I'm really reluctant to use them again, despite having generally positively experiences.

If you're curious about the fun events, see the posts on Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170

That and, perhaps it's just me, but I can't help but feel that their general stability / uptime and support have declined lately - the last few tickets I've submitted took over an hour to get a response, and it would generally be an unhelpful one, which is worrying when the tickets are concerning the fact that the host node is down. Fortunately, in these instances, I can usually just fire up a new virtual machine much quicker than any host issues will be resolved.
 
Nice I'm looking to get a VPS myself soon, not sure if I want managed or non managed though. Non managed would be a bit of a learning curve but could be worthwhile in the long run I guess. Would be interested to hear how you got on with A2 Hosting and how it is in terms of price, speed, performance, uptime, etc. Once you've had a chance to test them out.
 
TodJacob said:
Nice I'm looking to get a VPS myself soon, not sure if I want managed or non managed though. Non managed would be a bit of a learning curve but could be worthwhile in the long run I guess. Would be interested to hear how you got on with A2 Hosting and how it is in terms of price, speed, performance, uptime, etc. Once you've had a chance to test them out.
Click to expand...

I'll let you know. This past weekend I had scheduled a 45 site migration. They took 2 days, didn't communicate very well, they sent me an email that it was competed but 27 sites didn't get migrated. I had set aside 2 days to visit clients and change email settings etc.

So not off to a great start.

However, the speed of the sites I already have up are very fast. And the staff I have dealt with have been friendly and courteous.

I'll keep you updated. Oh, and I wouldn't be able to handle unmanaged VPS. I barely know what I'm doing as it is!!
 
It's pretty easy to transfer those accounts to the VPS. You could either use Transfer to do it in cPanel or make a full backup of the accounts, transfer them to /home on the VPS and restore the accounts there. You could do all of this from the command line, but this depends on how secure you are about using it.

BTW, the combination of Terminal on your Mac and the command line in Linux on your server is great. I prefer myself working in Terminal.
 
MacSociology said:
It's pretty easy to transfer those accounts to the VPS. You could either use Transfer to do it in cPanel or make a full backup of the accounts, transfer them to /home on the VPS and restore the accounts there. You could do all of this from the command line, but this depends on how secure you are about using it.

BTW, the combination of Terminal on your Mac and the command line in Linux on your server is great. I prefer myself working in Terminal.
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I would love to know how to do this as it would have made my weekend a lot easier. But I am such an end user it's distributing. I make websites, I'm not a networking kind of guy (even though I host 80+ sites!!)
[doublepost=1463397191][/doublepost]And I don't have root access to either. Moving from a shared reseller to managed VPS.
 
was very happy to see this thread. I use digital ocean but I have very little traffic on my ubuntu 14.04/ wordpress VPS site that I use as a portfolio for my work. I can't really comment on how it compares, but after setting it up (and figuring out the annoying server management folder permissions stuff - i'm new to this), it is only costing me $5 per month. I have my domain with namescheap.com
 
Another +1 for Digital Ocean - running my secure Dropbox alternative (OwnCloud + Encryption/Let's Encrypt). I've found their staff to be incredibly courteous, helpful and knowledgeable; at least the ones I dealt with, they were more than willing to talk to me on my own level re geekiness. Started with a $5/month box but had to jump to $10/month for additional space ... kind of frustrating that the only way to get more space is to double the price, but c'est la vie.

DO wouldn't work for you as they're unmanaged; I did the Linux admin stuff back in the day with a dual PIII 733Mhz Ubuntu box in my basement but got hacked because I had no idea how to secure a box, and dropped the hobby. Back into it now and learning every day about new ways to secure the box and manage effectively (e.g., supervisord, tripwire, etc.).

Looking forward to an update from you re A2 Web Hosting. I have a client with them and have neither been impressed nor unimpressed by their performance or support. Good luck!
 
Mhaddy said:
Another +1 for Digital Ocean
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I'm considering them, for my needs. I have a couple of small sites on ICDSoft, but each site costs me money and a VPS options frees me up to do what I want.

The downside is that it does not appear to be a fully managed site, so its on me to get everything up and running. I've done that once and it was a lot of work - at least for me, since I have little experience doing that.
 
TodJacob said:
Nice I'm looking to get a VPS myself soon, not sure if I want managed or non managed though. Non managed would be a bit of a learning curve but could be worthwhile in the long run I guess. Would be interested to hear how you got on with A2 Hosting and how it is in terms of price, speed, performance, uptime, etc. Once you've had a chance to test them out.
Click to expand...

you could try a cheap unmanaged vps (like chicagovps.net).. I have :

first vps:
- paid 60$ for 3 full years
- 50gb hdd space
- 2gb ram
- 2tb bandwidth

second vps:
- kvm vps (22$ every 6 months)
- ssd 45gb
- 1.5tb bandwidth
- 1.5gb ram

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output bs=8k count=10k; rm -f /tmp/output
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
83886080 bytes (84 MB, 80 MiB) copied, 0.159635 s, 525 MB/s

I bought them for experimentation but now use them for production as well.

if you don't like unmanaged you can go back to a managed solution and it's a cheap way to try.
 
I signed up to Digital Ocean and my initial impression is that I'm fairly happy with them. I've not needed any support, but I selected the 5 dollars a month droplet, and if I see that I need more ram, then I can easily upgrade, but I have very modest needs so I'm thinking the 5 dollars a month option is a good fit.

I installed Ubuntu, though I wanted CentOS. I opted for Ubuntu, because the KB article on installing Sentora, was based on Ubuntu. I have [limited] expsoure to both operating systems and I prefer CentOS but my last foray into unmanaged VPS had me struggling with installing a control panel. The KB article provided allowed an easy installation and configuration so that's why I opted for Ubuntu.
 
MacSociology said:
You're renting a VPS and you don't have root access? With a VPS you should have access to WHM, and if you don't have you should demand access. How else would you be able to add new accounts besides using a reseller account?
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I have WHM but I don't have root as it's a managed VPS
 
MacSociology said:
Still strange as most suppliers will give root access even though it's a managed VPS.
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Digital Ocean is unmanaged, at least my package is, so I can see why I need root. Tbh, I've never looked into managed VPS, so I cannot comment if root access is the norm or the exception
 
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