Archive for April, 2011
After we have delivered you numerous articles on different aspects of VPS hosting, we’ve noticed that we need to get back to this topic again. Once again we are going to talk about the problem of choice of a VPS server. This time we are going to take a look at this question under a different angle – let us share some interesting tips on how to tell if what you see when checking out the feature/pricing page of your potential VPS host is what you are going to get. While introducing you choice-making tips in our previous articles we usually referred to the technical aspect of VPS hosting, today we are going to analyze the VPS hosting from the point of view of a customer.
How much RAM do you get in fact?
When you see a 1 GB VPS plan at a very low cost, don’t be too fast in making optimistic conclusions. Check if this entire amount is guaranteed RAM. The best option is to contact sales support – then you are going to have a proof – a copy of your chat or email. But if you don’t have time for those checks, there is a quick way to find it out on your own – check the virtualization type used by this host. If it is XEN – be sure the entire 1 GB of RAM is guaranteed. If they use OpenVZ (the hosts that use it often say their VPSes are powered by Virtuozzo), there’s a risk, that their pricing provides the combined amount of RAM – guaranteed + burstable (RAM, that may be allocated only for a short period of time and thus – not constantly available). Since RAM is the main feature of any VPS server, this should one of the first points you verify before moving any further.
CPU units
Checking out pricing of some VPS hosts, one can find such feature as CPU units. This parameter shows the CPU frequency, available for the given VPS. Although it looks rather informative and lets the potential client compare the offered plans in more details, it’s not quite a correct way to represent VPS CPU specifications. To find out how powerful the CPU of the given VPS is, you need to know, what number of cores the entire VPS-carrier has, what their frequency is and how much of this power is delegated to the specific virtual machine – the latter factor depends on performance priority.
If you don’t know, how to interpret this information, you can simply ignore it. If you do need the details, you can have a brief consultation with the sales department of your potential host. This will let you find out the specifications of the carrier. The more powerful it is and the bigger the plan you are looking into, the more powerful your VPS is going to be.
Disk Space
Since VPS servers are usually offered as a fast solution that is cheaper than a dedicated server, those are not designed for large data processing. The minimal plan at some VPS hosts may offer as little as 10 GB of disk space. If you are going to host a few web pages, it’s alright, but if you work with email and databases, you need to consider disk space allocation rather carefully. Now let us count what you have in the end – after your server is setup, the system may take up to 2 GB of disk space. Any backup you make is going to create a file of the size approximately equal to the size of your /home directory. Not that much space left, isn’t it? That is why another Gigabyte of your virtual HDD may become vital. Well, it can also be taken by swap. According to the architecture of OS Linux, swap is a fixed disk partition, not a file, unlike on Windows – therefore, before you order a XEN-based VPS, you need to consult sales department first, to find out whether /swap is counted with the disk space offered or not.
Summary
If you want to be completely sure about your future VPS host, you need to find out as many details as you can before you actually sign-up for their services. Your potential host may not list everything on their web-page, it’s alright, but their sales and technical team should always be able to explain these or those aspects of hosting with their company. If it happens that some of your questions remains unanswered, you have serious reasons to not consider this host. If you are looking for an affordable and reliable VPS host right now, please spend another minute checking out our plans here at SiteValley.com.
Yesterday we at SiteValley.com started a promo – from now on you can get a virtual private server from us with a doubled amount of RAM paying the same price. This is a limited time offer, although the final date of the promo is not yet defined we started receiving many sign-up requests. Since the promo is also valid for our current customers, incoming upgrade requests arrive as well.
Why?
One may wonder why we increased exactly RAM. We might lower the prices, increase disk space or bandwidth quotas or include some special service to the plan cost. However we did not, since the main idea of that promo is to fulfill the need of our current and prospect clients – the need of performance.
We released a plenty of articles regarding VPS hosting peculiarities lately and despite that almost all factors become the key ones when you search for a virtual private server, there’s one parameter you look at firstly – amount of RAM. RAM really is important for the VPS user, since if the client needs more disk space or less traffic limits, he or she gets a physical server, but if they are here for a VPS, they check the RAM quota in the first place. Right now, when software requirements increase and the amount of day-to-day tasks grows – it’s rather hard to manage all that having a server with amount or RAM that used to be popular among home PC users over ten years ago. Right now the minimal RAM quota at SiteValley.com is 512MB and we believe many of our customers are going to like it.
What Does it Mean for Me?
If you are still in doubts, let us show you some examples of how useful those changes are and how exactly they are going to do you good.
First thing first – the control panel – that’s something many people have problems with. Experiencing lack of RAM they either have to get an inconvenient panel of DirectAdmin type to have more free RAM left or get a full-functioning entirely automated solution, like cPanel that makes them forget about some manual works on the server… and that makes the server forget about being fast and responsive. Well, right now even our minor plans – oVPS1/xVPS1 – will let you have your VPS with cPanel setup on it.
Tasks processing and scheduling. If you wait for non-business time to backup your content or to execute some mass mail delivery so as not to experience slowdowns or glitches – your VPS lacks RAM. There’s not much to do about it since you can kill or suspend primary processes. Thus you have to figure out schedules and do some work within inconvenient narrow time frames wishing your VPS had more RAM. Now it has, so you may not be that strict about memory allocation and load distribution.
Overall performance. Whenever your VPS uses up all RAM, it never goes down at once. Our OpenVZ customers are happy with burstable RAM they can use to cover minor load spikes, while XEN users rely on swap that uses hard disk to temporarily store background processes, saving RAM and reallocating it for new processes. It’s fine and such overuse is bearable, but it causes slowdowns and if you work with databases or dynamic content – you may start receiving timeouts, so your site turns unreachable with your server being online. Well, for now your server will have some more RAM to use up till it starts using swap or eating some spare memory of the carrier.
We hope that our article helped you understand why we took care of RAM being increased specifically and what changes it is going to bring in. If you want to get a VPS from SiteValley.com but feel somehow unsure about the plan and virtualization type – feel free to contact our live chat support or submit a ticket to our sales department. And of course, you can browse our blog for more >VPS-specific articles.