Posts Tagged Virtual Private Servers
Picking The Best VPS Configuration For Your Website (Part 1)
Choosing The Right Way. Source: thefrisky.com
When website owners decide to purchase a Virtual Private Server for their websites, they are often concerned about its configuration. If upgrading from a shared hosting account, a user may pick a too weak server and put it down right after the website launch, as virtual servers do not have such strict limits on resource usage set, as shared ones do.
If someone is purchasing a VPS at once, without having the site actually tested elsewhere before, its owner may pick a wrong software configuration and not even have the website started (we don’t think that error pages hosting is funny or profitable).
A fair question is “Which VPS configuration to choose to provide my website with the most optimal hosting solution?” Here go the answers.
VPS Configuration Types
Virtual private servers differ in their configuration by many parameters. Those usually depend on their vendors’ likes and commercial interests; presence of trained personal, able to work with this or that software; welfare and funding, etc. Studying the market of VPSes we can define the following main configuration options:
1. Virtualization Type
Virtualization Technology. Source: ibm.com
Nowadays there are two most popular virtualization technologies – Xen and OpenVZ. We have already talked about both and compared them, so to make the long story short, we are just going to tell, that Xen technology supports full virtualization and a wide range of operating systems. It does not have any inter-carrier shared resources, what makes the work of each server autonomous (there is even a separate /swap partition created under each virtual machine). OpenVZ is a specialized Linux-solution, which is faster but it lets the carrier share resources (RAM/CPU), what may cause overload issues to both virtual and physical machines. On the other hand, resource sharing allows OpenVZ users to get temporary RAM-boost – so-called burst-RAM.
2. Control Panels
Most Popular control panels
When one speaks about comfortable and user-friendly hosting, they first of all mean the control panel. A control panel is very important for site management, so it’s easy to imagine how essential it is for administration of the entire server. VPS vendors usually provide control panels on a partnership basis or as license resellers. This allows them to both get licenses at lower cost and provide control panels either for free along with the VPS’s or for a significantly smaller price. Leading VPS control panels are DirectAdmin and cPanel. cPanel has a VPS-optimized build which may be a perfect solution for those, who strive for automation. There is one more panel, frequently offered by VPS vendors – Webmin – free open source server/account management software.
NOTE: cPanel is a resource intensive panel compared to Webmin or DirectAdmin. The former requires 256 MB RAM for full functionality, while the latter ones – only 64 MB.
3. Installation of Basic Services
Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. Source: graphicsyork.com
The generally installed software-bind is known as LAMP – Linux + Apache + PHP + MySQL. This configuration works well with any kind of sites and is recommended for use. Some scripts and serious web-projects, however, require different pieces of software. The most frequently substituted element is Apache – the webserver. Users install LightHTTPD or Nginx instead, to improve the web-content processing speed. It is a known trick, so many VPS vendors offer either blank servers (without software and sometimes even the OS preinstalled) or custom software set installation.
NOTE: LAMP is the most recommended software set for cPanel-based servers, as cPanel allows to manage all services via web-interface.
4. Operating Systems
Linux and FreeBSD. Source: linuxwallpaper.net
One of the best Linux distros, which has proved its reliability is CentOS, so no wonders it is one of the most frequently setup default OS, provided on VPSes all over the market. The vendors, however understand that the users are interested in customization, so they offer other distors, too. The most popular are Ubuntu, Fedora and Gentoo. Additionally, many offer FreeBSD (Unix).
NOTE: Though FreeBSD is faster in some extent, it is not recommended for use with cPanel, as far as FreeBSD may start malfunctioning after automatic cPanel update.
5. Amount of RAM and Disk Space
Piece of Hardware. Source: fuhrmann-itservice.de
Those parameters are usually set according to the carrier server specifications. Before the VPS hosting plans are created and approved, the marketers study the demand for this or that plan type (usually studying competitors’ plans with more or less similar quotas) and their actual relevancy (e.g. instead of buying some top VPS plan it may sometimes be more desired to get a dedicated server for almost the same amount). So far the most popular RAM quotas are: 256, 512 and 1024 MB. The disk quota has more floating values, the minimal is usually 20 GB, while the maximal may vary from 80 GB to 120 GB
Matching The Details
Say, you have picked a host you would like to get a VPS from. You studied the plans they offer and their pricing seems to look good. Before you make your final decision and signup, you need to match all the details of their plans and pick the most optimal solution for you website.
Let’s make a test draft of the desired VPS:
Pick the desired disk space quota, we consider it 50 Gb coming with 512 MB RAM -> this means you can have cPanel installed without any problems -> this in turn means, you need CentOS, or any other Linux distro. The choice of cPanel also means, that you may have LAMP configuration set freely. Finally, virtualization type -> you have enough RAM for your server functionality, so no need in burst-RAM seems to emerge. On the other hand, 50 Gb of disk space is enough to share 1 GB for swapping.
Or another option:
Imagine you are a starter. You need the simplest VPS and you get it: 20 GB of disk and 256 MB of RAM. Not much to host a site, which would beet up Youtube or Facebook, but it’s your own virtual server! Let’s go: as there is not much RAM you may forget about cPanel -> this enables you to choose FreeBSD as an OS and Nginx or LiteHTTPD as a webserver. We seem to be getting a pretty light server. To finalize it, we choose OpenVZ to save the disk space and be able to temporarily boost our RAM up.
Summary
We need to admit, that the drafts provided were made up without sites differentiation in mind. We took it for average, to show how this analytic procedure should flow and what the choice of this or that configuration should be based on. There are, however, many sites and many site-building technologies. Each of them has its own peculiarities. This is the very point, were are going to tell about next time. So, await Part 2 released soon.
There is a correspondent discussion raised on our Facebook page. Feel free to take part.
Virtual Private Server Use for WordPress Blog Performance Optimization
Posted by admin in Guides, Technology on May 11, 2010
Scripts Resource Intensity
Nowadays having a personal website is as common as having a cell phone. Some people use cell phones for just giving and receiving calls and messages and some cannot simply imagine their mobile telephony device without a camera, an MP3-player and so on. It really is likewise about the websites: some website owners use their hosting accounts to bring up pages on the web and use email at their own domain. The others want their websites to be an ultimate public project, which would support many options starting from integration with social networks and ending with, but not limited to provision of downloadable content.
The way the sites are built is a question of demand, of course. But this question raises another one in turn – a question of approach. Many website owners start with shared hosting but then face with the problem of resource overuse, as their projects keep developing. And that’s where the question of approach becomes essential – those who take such issues seriously usually decide to upgrade in order to avoid temporary suspension due to excessive resource usage.
Of course, the website owner may not always realize the influence of his/her particular account on the entire server. On the other hand, server administrators are always glad to assist with the resolution of the problem. Those suspensions are mostly a preventive measure, which doesn’t let the entire server go down. For example, our team is always open for a dialogue and we co-operate with our Customers to find out the way to get the issue resolved. However, if it is definitely not about some particular script or module which is enough to be disabled to let the account keep working on the shared server – an upgrade is the next step.
VPS as a Hosting Ground for Resource Intensive Websites
Several years earlier the word “upgrade” would definitely mean a setup of a dedicated server, which would be tens times more expensive, than a shared hosting plan you used to have. Modern technology, however, has introduced a more liberal solution – Virtual Private Server (VPS). Those virtual servers are containers, created by means of virtualization software on physical servers. Current platforms allow a VPS web hosting user to obtain almost the same level of performance as the server-carrier provides, which means that a user can get a dedicated server, though a virtualized one, for a significantly cheaper price.
Bringing Forth Pros and Cons of VPS and Reseller Web Hosting Plans
Posted by Smirnovi4 in Uncategorized on January 8, 2010
Many of web hosting newbies bring up a question about differences between a reseller hosting and a VPS and wondering which one is best for their project needs. Unfortunately, it is not that simple to answer this question. There is a number of touches that require a closer investigation on the subject to give a decent answer. First of all, a lot depends on the initial aim, i.e. whether the account will be used to resell hosting, utilized directly to host own content, used as a test ground for products in development or all at once. Moreover, Skills possessed by an owner of an account matter a lot as well as the price differences. Let’s take a closer look at both hosting types to draw reasonable conclusions… Read the rest of this entry »
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