posted by admin @ 19:25 PM
June 3, 2011

RAMThis question is the one many people ask themselves before purchasing their first VPS. Indeed, when you only check out the plans, you cannot tell for sure what intensity of RAM usage you expect. What you know, is the approximate amount of physical memory used by the software you are going to run on your VPS. Software system requirements, however, are usually not enough to estimate the real use of RAM needed for the particular application or script to operate, and thus it is hard to know how much physical memory the entire server with all its background processes in general is going to need.

There are some facts that you know that might help you there. For instance, we know that the server in its basic installation – usually LAMP – requires at least 128 MB of RAM. Choice of the control panel will make you add another 64 MB to your requirements (if your choose WebMin or DirectAdmin) or even 128 MB – if you want to run cPanel. This makes a minimum of 256 MB with a lack of operating options. What you can run there is email and FTP exchange (not intensive though) and hosting of simple websites. Dynamic and script-driven websites, such as CMS will also fit this configuration but you may need to implement many adjustments, some of which can limit the functionality of your online project.

If you look into running something more serious on the Web, you will need to search for a more solid solution. Let us review bigger VPS configurations and estimate what can be hosted there.

512 MB

This is one of the most popular configurations available on the market of VPS hosting. A VPS with 512 MB of RAM usually becomes a step-up for users who have never dealt with VPS servers before and who gave this type service a try on a smaller plan and then requested an upgrade.

If you want to host E-commerce software or run a script that is going to use your server resources constantly – a VPS with 512 MB of RAM is going to suit you perfectly. This plan will also fit those, who look into using a VPS as a platform for hosting reselling – simple shared hosting, of course. WordPress and Magento users will also find such a VPS a better luck, since 256 MB virtual machines never let them run those CMS full-throttle.

1024 MB

A one-Gig VPS is a choice of a Pro. Many gurus and experienced webmasters, as well as resellers and other online business holders, either purchase those servers at once or upgrade to them shortly.

If you deal with hosting reselling, you will find a VPS with 1024 MB RAM to be a perfect solution for serious reseller business. Unlike smaller VPS plans, those and higher let you offer the so-called Master reseller hosting which implies that your resellers will be able to sell hosting, too. And of course, a more powerful VPS will let you manage the clients easier. Indeed, if you have a thousand clients or more, whatever the business you do is, why should you partition them into groups to send emails hourly so as not to overload the server. You deal with e-commerce, so you must have some special offers and discounts and you want to be sure, everyone knows it – a powerful VPS will let you notify everyone at once without overloads or any other issues.

2048 MB

If you need a power of a dedicated server, but do not want to pay extra for the features you do not need, a 2 GB VPS is something you will like.

Those servers are usually the top ones among many VPS hosting providers and thus have the highest privileges on the carrier. This feature will make you feel absolutely comfortably on your VPS and it is worth it. Such a powerful VPS is heaven for big online projects and geeky things – those servers are capable of letting you refuse from standard server configuration, so one can easily install there such popular software as Java, Tomcat webserver, FFMPEG and many other tools, to make their online project a hi-tech multimedia pad.

We hope that this review of the most popular VPS plans helped you find out what you need or may need for your online business. If it did, you may like the news that since recently we run a special offer that has doubled RAM on all our VPS servers, so now our 256 MB, 512 MB and 1024 MB plans come with 512, 1024 and 2048 Megabytes of RAM accordingly.

But if you think VPS is not enough for you, take a look at our cheap Linux dedicated server hosting offers.

posted by Archie @ 20:03 PM
April 28, 2011

VPS hostingAfter 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.

posted by Smirnovi4 @ 20:04 PM
March 19, 2010

DirectAdmin control panel logocPanel control panel logoWeb hosting control panel is a set of tools and interfaces designated to maintain and monitor a hosting account. On shared and reseller hosting plans such panels are installed and configured by a provider company. Depending on the type of VPS and Dedicated server, control panel software can be either pre-installed or be absent at all. The main advantage of using a control panel is the ability to control your account via a comfortable web based graphical user interface, which, in turn, means that you do not need to possess any knowledge of OS specific console commands to maintain your hosting. Control panels features normally include (but are not limited to):

  • Viewing server logs
  • Monitoring quotas usage (e.g. disc space, bandwidth, mail accounts, ftp accounts etc.)
  • Working with e-mails (creation, modification, termination and checking of e-mail accounts, modification of MX records, autoresponders, forwarders and many more)
  • Managing FTP accounts
  • Managing domains, addon domains, subdomains and parked domains.
  • Managing databases
  • Collecting and viewing web statistics (e.g. visitors, pageviews etc.)
  • Working with files of the hosting account (using a web based file manager)

A fast and feature rich webhosting control panel can significantly increase both productivity and quality of any online business or project. Webmasters obtain impressive management tools for performing most crucial administrative procedures for every day account operations with the help of it. In absence of an efficient hosting control panel every webmaster and user would need an extensive internet and OS administration training in order to effectively use their hosting accounts. There are many control panels these days (you can find a list of 4 famous ones at http://webhostingrating.com/articles/2009/12/4-most-influential-control-panels/ ), but not all of them are as popular and widely used as cPanel and Direct Admin. This is mostly due to the unique set of features and capabilities included in the latter two. Although cPanel has a Windows platform version as of today, both cPanel and DirectAdmin are normally regarded as Unix OS designated. Read the rest of this entry »

posted by Smirnovi4 @ 16:16 PM
December 8, 2009

Virtualization is a widely used technology nowadays. A whole set of hosting plans is based on it – the so-called Virtual Private Servers (VPS). They allow steady transition from regular shared to the most powerful dedicated solutions. While big projects may require the power of an independent dedicated server, some personal and small-to-medium businesses may not need such resources at high costs at first. At the same time the needs of  such customers may not be satisfied with what regular shared hosting has to offer due its nature . Unlike shared hosting, V PS allows full isolation from other users on the host server. It provides full control over the account (i.e. root access), remote reboots and system restore.

Nowadays various approaches and implementations of virtualization exist. In this article we will compare two most widely used virtualization engines: OpenVZ and Xen. The main goal of the article is to provide basic concept, and outline the differences and similarities of the two engines.

Read the rest of this entry »