Rick_M
01-20-2004, 01:13 AM
Long post ahead - sorry for my overinclusiveness on many details.
For some background on where I'm coming from, you can see my hostmatters.com review (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=117631) and my thoughts on upgrading to a vps / vds (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=203968)
I signed up with servint on Nov 6th for their "Essential VPS" with cpanel, and got a response from Reed Caldwell, the founder and owner (as far as I can tell) fairly quickly saying the order was received and would be processed as soon as possible. As I'm an anxious person when I first sign up, I was only able to wait about 7 hours to contact them to ask the status of the VPS being set-up. I then got a response within 30 minutes with my login information.
As I knew nothing (and still feel like I know very little) about dedicated servers, it was a challenge to get things started. I found out that the company I bought my domain names through (powerpipe.com) wants an $21 fee to set-up a domain as a nameserver, while most companies will allow you to do it for free. Even more frustrating was when I then tried to transfer my domain, I found out poweripe had placed a lock on my domain. In order to remove it, I'd have to send them a notarized letter with photo ID and $7.99 to release the lock. Of course, I wanted to get my server set-up right away, so I registered a new domain at go-daddy. Enough of a diversion...
ServInt has a VPS forum, but they didn't automatically send me a login and password for the forum. Instead, I had to send it to them - and then it took a few days for it to get approved. This is not wise, as the forum has a ton of information that could have helped me get started. It also isn't clear who should be contacted with questions. As I'm a novice (and I'm guessing most VPS users are), I had a lot of questions, but I didn't want to bother their NOC (which is the only email address I've found for questions) with all of my simple questions. I spent a lot of time searching the net and I still wasn't sure I was setting up cpanel correctly. Making it worse was that my IP addresses weren't showing up properly in WHM. I finally bit the bullet and emailed the NOC. They responded within minutes that everything looked like it was set-up okay and they weren't sure why the IP addresses weren't showing up in WHM - they opened a ticket with the cpanel people. Everything seemed to be working fine with the server though.
I finally transferred over a few domains and it all looked pretty good. The network seemed stable and the site speed, while not lightening fast, was consistently quick. Things were going nicely, and then I decided to transfer over my domain that I wanted a super stable host for...
As the new DNS settings were being picked up, there was some problem that I started losing all my traffic. I tried to access my site and it was down. I panicked and phoned the noc - someone very pleasant answered after 2 rings. I told him the story, and he said he'd look at something, then said everything seemed to be working fine. I checked and my site was up. I thanked him and hung-up. I then checked through my server logs and noticed I had had no traffic prior to the phone call, but then traffic was fine afterwards. I emailed the noc and asked what was wrong, and they sent a quick, but short, reply saying they ran a script and it shouldn't be a problem again. While I don't know much, the vagueness of the response was a little unsettling as I have no way to know if I should really expect this to happen again.
Anyway, things continued to go smoothly. Then one morning half of my site isn't working right. I had noticed the cron email I was getting every night (which I don't understand) had some error lines in it, so figuring that was important I forwarded it to the noc. They said that cpanel tried to re-install perl and they have fixed the problem, and it won't happen again. I have been confused about this as I had WHM set to not update automatically - but it seems like it still tries to update things.
Since then, for about 2 months, I haven't had a single problem. I've never noticed the network to be down. I did notice around 8 minute of downtime when servint rebooted the server for a kernal upgrade (which they provided notice for around 24 hours in advance - I don't know why they did this at 10am on a weekday instead of overnight though). As for server performance, I'm still not sure what to think. I moved from my shared host for two main reasons - 1) I wanted increased reliability where other people's sites couldn't slow me down; 2) I have one script that is very resource intensive and I didn't want my shared host to kick me off. So, I have one script that is resource intensive and when the search engines spider it very heavily, it would bring my VPS to a halt. It didn't crash, but pages were very slow to load until the spiders stopped hammering the script - usually a minute or so.
I tried to figure out with the NOC what my options were and they said either make the script more efficient or upgrade to a dedicated server. They didn't feel that moving up to a higher VPS package would make much difference on my server loads. I still am confused about the VPS server loads that I see - while the site does slow down with higher loads, I'm surprised that it seems slow when it gets about 1.0. I have been told that the load number I see is just for my VPS, but it shows 4 processors so I would have thought a load of around 4 would be okay.
Anyway, as I didn't want to go dedicated, and I did a lot of reading and found a module for perl called mod_throttle that I installed myself (wasn't in WHM's list) with a lot of nervous moments - I learned how to use vi editor when I was in college over 10 years ago and I remember enough to be dangerous. I didn't like the feeling of messing around with httpd.conf but all worked okay and my site never went down.
I had emailed Reed Caldwell with a few of my questions with the server load and moving up to dedicated, but he didn't answer my questions (at that time). I just figured he wasn't the right person to contact. I had a thread on their VPS forum about these issues, and he posted wanting to know what emails I had sent. I reforwarded them to him and he immediately reponded with very thorough responses.
While I was trying to decide whether or not to upgrade to the next package (which is a fairly steep jump in price from $49 / month to $89 / month - although with more than double the resources) he tells me that ServInt is upgrading all of their VPS packages.
So, now the essential package has what seems to me to be more than double the power and resources than initially, including an increase in disk space from 2gb to 5gb. That went into effect today. Reed emailed me saying he wants me to let him know if the increased resources work out for me.
To summarize - I'm very satisfied with my experience so far, even with a few bumps along the way. I always felt the NOC was immediately available for any emergencies I might notice - I'm not used to having phone support where a person actually answers - this is clearly a step up from what I'm used to. However, I feel I have to be a little more responsible for making sure my site is working as I don't share my VPS space with anyone else to notify my host when things are down. I'm not worried about other people's sites slowing down the server - only my own, but that seems under good control now.
For the price I'm paying, I feel like I have an excellent combination of space, power, and reliability - even more so now with the increased server resources.
For some background on where I'm coming from, you can see my hostmatters.com review (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=117631) and my thoughts on upgrading to a vps / vds (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=203968)
I signed up with servint on Nov 6th for their "Essential VPS" with cpanel, and got a response from Reed Caldwell, the founder and owner (as far as I can tell) fairly quickly saying the order was received and would be processed as soon as possible. As I'm an anxious person when I first sign up, I was only able to wait about 7 hours to contact them to ask the status of the VPS being set-up. I then got a response within 30 minutes with my login information.
As I knew nothing (and still feel like I know very little) about dedicated servers, it was a challenge to get things started. I found out that the company I bought my domain names through (powerpipe.com) wants an $21 fee to set-up a domain as a nameserver, while most companies will allow you to do it for free. Even more frustrating was when I then tried to transfer my domain, I found out poweripe had placed a lock on my domain. In order to remove it, I'd have to send them a notarized letter with photo ID and $7.99 to release the lock. Of course, I wanted to get my server set-up right away, so I registered a new domain at go-daddy. Enough of a diversion...
ServInt has a VPS forum, but they didn't automatically send me a login and password for the forum. Instead, I had to send it to them - and then it took a few days for it to get approved. This is not wise, as the forum has a ton of information that could have helped me get started. It also isn't clear who should be contacted with questions. As I'm a novice (and I'm guessing most VPS users are), I had a lot of questions, but I didn't want to bother their NOC (which is the only email address I've found for questions) with all of my simple questions. I spent a lot of time searching the net and I still wasn't sure I was setting up cpanel correctly. Making it worse was that my IP addresses weren't showing up properly in WHM. I finally bit the bullet and emailed the NOC. They responded within minutes that everything looked like it was set-up okay and they weren't sure why the IP addresses weren't showing up in WHM - they opened a ticket with the cpanel people. Everything seemed to be working fine with the server though.
I finally transferred over a few domains and it all looked pretty good. The network seemed stable and the site speed, while not lightening fast, was consistently quick. Things were going nicely, and then I decided to transfer over my domain that I wanted a super stable host for...
As the new DNS settings were being picked up, there was some problem that I started losing all my traffic. I tried to access my site and it was down. I panicked and phoned the noc - someone very pleasant answered after 2 rings. I told him the story, and he said he'd look at something, then said everything seemed to be working fine. I checked and my site was up. I thanked him and hung-up. I then checked through my server logs and noticed I had had no traffic prior to the phone call, but then traffic was fine afterwards. I emailed the noc and asked what was wrong, and they sent a quick, but short, reply saying they ran a script and it shouldn't be a problem again. While I don't know much, the vagueness of the response was a little unsettling as I have no way to know if I should really expect this to happen again.
Anyway, things continued to go smoothly. Then one morning half of my site isn't working right. I had noticed the cron email I was getting every night (which I don't understand) had some error lines in it, so figuring that was important I forwarded it to the noc. They said that cpanel tried to re-install perl and they have fixed the problem, and it won't happen again. I have been confused about this as I had WHM set to not update automatically - but it seems like it still tries to update things.
Since then, for about 2 months, I haven't had a single problem. I've never noticed the network to be down. I did notice around 8 minute of downtime when servint rebooted the server for a kernal upgrade (which they provided notice for around 24 hours in advance - I don't know why they did this at 10am on a weekday instead of overnight though). As for server performance, I'm still not sure what to think. I moved from my shared host for two main reasons - 1) I wanted increased reliability where other people's sites couldn't slow me down; 2) I have one script that is very resource intensive and I didn't want my shared host to kick me off. So, I have one script that is resource intensive and when the search engines spider it very heavily, it would bring my VPS to a halt. It didn't crash, but pages were very slow to load until the spiders stopped hammering the script - usually a minute or so.
I tried to figure out with the NOC what my options were and they said either make the script more efficient or upgrade to a dedicated server. They didn't feel that moving up to a higher VPS package would make much difference on my server loads. I still am confused about the VPS server loads that I see - while the site does slow down with higher loads, I'm surprised that it seems slow when it gets about 1.0. I have been told that the load number I see is just for my VPS, but it shows 4 processors so I would have thought a load of around 4 would be okay.
Anyway, as I didn't want to go dedicated, and I did a lot of reading and found a module for perl called mod_throttle that I installed myself (wasn't in WHM's list) with a lot of nervous moments - I learned how to use vi editor when I was in college over 10 years ago and I remember enough to be dangerous. I didn't like the feeling of messing around with httpd.conf but all worked okay and my site never went down.
I had emailed Reed Caldwell with a few of my questions with the server load and moving up to dedicated, but he didn't answer my questions (at that time). I just figured he wasn't the right person to contact. I had a thread on their VPS forum about these issues, and he posted wanting to know what emails I had sent. I reforwarded them to him and he immediately reponded with very thorough responses.
While I was trying to decide whether or not to upgrade to the next package (which is a fairly steep jump in price from $49 / month to $89 / month - although with more than double the resources) he tells me that ServInt is upgrading all of their VPS packages.
So, now the essential package has what seems to me to be more than double the power and resources than initially, including an increase in disk space from 2gb to 5gb. That went into effect today. Reed emailed me saying he wants me to let him know if the increased resources work out for me.
To summarize - I'm very satisfied with my experience so far, even with a few bumps along the way. I always felt the NOC was immediately available for any emergencies I might notice - I'm not used to having phone support where a person actually answers - this is clearly a step up from what I'm used to. However, I feel I have to be a little more responsible for making sure my site is working as I don't share my VPS space with anyone else to notify my host when things are down. I'm not worried about other people's sites slowing down the server - only my own, but that seems under good control now.
For the price I'm paying, I feel like I have an excellent combination of space, power, and reliability - even more so now with the increased server resources.