Blog Home Page

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) aren’t adequate for most website owners.

A lot of shared web hosting customers, who exceed their stay on a shared platform are often being forced onto what is called a Virtual Private Server or VPS for short. What is a VPS? As defined by Wikipedia, VPS  is a method of partitioning a physical server computer into multiple servers such that each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted.

Virtualization is a great thing, but attached with it is a huge learning curve for the average website owner. They are sold on the fact that something called a “VPS” will solve their issues, which isn’t entirely true — it often leads to confusion, frustration and doesn’t always solve the issue.

On a traditional web hosting platform, you have a single server (web, email, mysql, etc all on one machine) that hosts hundreds of web sites. What often happens is that there is a sudden surge of traffic to one or a few web sites and the server starts to come to a crawl, affecting service to hundreds of other customers. So what you’ll find is the web hosting company will set out to find these “abusers” and will either upgrade them or ultimately terminate them — all for the best interest of their “non-abusive” users.

The abusers are often classified as “resource intensive web sites” — and those websites absolutely NEED virtual private servers!

I’ll touch on a few common issues that I’ve seen from direct exposure in the VPS market and from frustrated users of the virtual private server platforms.

Ease of Use & Comprehension of the Technology.

What VPS lacks is the ease-of-use and easy to understand workings that shared hosting provides. The notion that “I just upload my site and it just works” with shared hosting is not necessarily there with virtual private servers. There are companies who have tried to battle this with throwing in a “fully managed” feature (some extra charge for this, some don’t). This adds an extra layer that doesn’t have to be there and doesn’t always work well.

Doesn’t always solve performance & reliability issues.

Most that get virtual private servers are under the false sense that it will resolve their performance and reliability issues. This isn’t true. While the hardware node is virtualized and you are allocated dedicated resources, it still is a single physical machine.  You’re sharing all aspects of that machine. Issues such as overselling of the hardware node or a single user monopolizing on the disk I/O will cause considerable performance & reliability issues.

Added complications & worries.

Now that you’re on a “virtualized” environment you have your own sets of security vulnerabilities along with other complications, such as data backup, regular system maintenance, etc. As the provider grows, it will become increasingly difficult for them to manage and you run the risk of them not getting to your VPS. Overall, just a lot more things to worry about versus just running your web site. You’re also sold the fact that you can install your own server software, 9 out of 10 customers (based on my experience) never needed to.

After operating several hundred virtual private servers at previous hosting companies, and learning from the challenges that were faced, I am so glad that we do not have to put Uptimehost customers through this type of burden. Whether they’ve started with us or they’ve moved over from somewhere else. We’ve managed to maintain the easy to use and understand concept of shared web hosting and have applied a better than VPS/Dedicated hosting environment due to our clustered cloud platform.

Just another way our years of experience is working to benefit our customers. Until next time…

February 27, 2009 | Filed Under Rants

Leave a Comment 

Using Akismet to stop comment/trackback spam on Wordpress!

I’ve been using Wordpress for many years now and one of the things that annoyed me most was the amount of spam that would appear on the comments section of blog posts. It got very annoying, one wordpress blog had 30,000 comments, all spam, waiting to be “verified”.

I’ve come across this wordpress plug-in called Akismet and it’s done a swell job at keeping those annoying comment/trackback spam at bay!

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

I strongly suggest that bloggers using Wordpress install this plug-in!  Click here for more information.

February 7, 2009 | Filed Under Rants

Leave a Comment