Hello,

I have some sites running. Overall bandwidth is about 70 Gb/month and about 20.000-25.000 unique visitors / day.


I tried a VPS at hostmysite but sites goes down once a day more or less. Suppor only tells me to restart apache when this happens but I can't be watching the screen 24 hours a day waiting for the moment to restart. They say that I can look into logs to see what is making apache crash, but this is not as easy for me. The sites are going off-line some hours each day until I find a solution becouse crashing can happen at any time.

I can't spend lots of money in a managed dedicated server and hostmysite only bill me about 50$ / month.

Is there any good and not expensive managed solution out there?


Thanks in advance.

There are several good offers in the offers section, my advice to most users is to find a offer they can use and then do a search on them here and contact them directly, test how long there support times are
for $50 a month you should be able to get great hosting

Perhaps outsource server maintenance/monitoring to a reputable company or hire an in-house admin?

Going with a vps with root access usually means you yourself have SSH skills/knowledge, have on-staff or outsourced server admins, or are willing to pay the hosting company you use to help you in times of need. You'll want to make sure to check the policies you agreed to when signing up of course to see what you and they are ultimately responsible for at the price point you are at.

This is one of the many reasons companies can allow for "unlimited" sites for such low prices on vps plans...with typical shared hosting the client is not responsible for server maintenance/monitoring at all.

Well, if apache keeps crashing everyday, sounds like you could be running out of resources.

A good host will monitor all the servers and automatically restart servers that stop
responding. Its easy to do.

A good semi-dedicated server would be a good thing for your site. Or think about a really stable shared account from a very successfully known provider. Best of luck

What kind of sites are you running?

As said before you can outsource your server management, platinumserver management is pretty good, well they were when HF used them awhile back. As far as money to pay for managed service, that happens to cost a pretty penny (for good management) and if you don't meet money requirements for this, perhaps you should raise your pricing (if indeed you sell space) to make up for the management costs.

If you're happy with your host except for the problems you're obviously having, and you think that appache crashing is an isolated incident and don't expect problems such as this to occur regularly, I would recommend just purchasing an hour or so of administrative work from a company such as rack911 or platinumservermanagement and see if they can find and fix the problem for you.

Best thing is to go for fully managed VPS solution (make sure its truly fully managed, since deferent providers have deferent definitions over server management). Your requirements vs. price seems realistic, even for a good managed VPS. Also you could consider semi-dedicated hosting, some host offer this under names like super hosting, premium hosting etc. These account are very expensive when compared with shared hosting however they host much more less clients than shared hosting plus much more server recourses per account.

Thanks to all for the answers.

I run some sites that show static content (html pages) and one site that uses mysql to show dinamic content (about 10.000 uniques/day).

Before hostmysite I was spending 199$ in a dedicated for 2 years but now I can't spend so much and it looks like the sites run faster in the VPS.

I've found some fully managed solutions and I think I will try one of them.

You can easily find dedicated servers now for way less than $100. Some are are
very competitive with VPS's. I personally never saw the advantage of a VPS when
you can have the real thing for just a little bit more.

Well, if the sites are very static you could in theory have them on shared accounts.... but it is not something I really recommend.

The price you're paying for the VPS seems OK.... if it is fully managed. But in that case you wouldn't have to restart Apache yourself, I guess.

I've seen fully managed VPS offered at $50/month, for instance at InMotion Hosting.

If I send a mail to support they restart apache for me ... but It's faster if I do it by myself trough plesk panel. The problem is that I need to be 24 hours/day in front of my pc watching the screen and waiting for the sites to fail. They don't monitor if the sites go down and don't care about it.

A couple of days ago the sites gone offline but restart apache didn't work.
I send an e-mail and they solved it restarting VPS. Restart VPS takes 2 minutes or so, but I had to wait a couple of hours since I send the e-mail.

I only recommend hostmysite if you're an expert administrator, even if you are a guru I suppose you won't sleep well thinking if your sites are on-line or not.


I have searched some other companies like: scaraweb, servint, liquidweb, budgetdedicated and powervps. In think they don't have bad reviews here in webhostingtalk. I didn't try Inmotionhosting becouse they ask for a set up fee.

I send mails to all of them telling my problem and needs. By now, after 12 hours, only scaraweb did answer kindly.


I will post next experiences here.

You can easily find dedicated servers now for way less than $100. Some are are
very competitive with VPS's. I personally never saw the advantage of a VPS when
you can have the real thing for just a little bit more.

You'd have to have to hire a management company though (unless you plan on monitoring/managing it yourself)


@junter:
You may consider websitepulse's feature that can have someone from websitepulse respond 24/7 and contact your isp based on instructions you give them whenever a service is down. It'd probably be better just to switch hosts though :/

We use IPCheck server monitoring software by Paessler.com.

It's only $100 bucks and you can configure it to send emails when there is a problem. We have it set up so it pages us on our cell phone when a service goes down. It not only pings the server but actually tests if a specific service is running like email or http.

There is also a free edition with limited features that may do the trick for you.

Of course you do need to install in on a computer/server that has internet access 24/7.

What about a semi-Dedicated solution? A webserver that only has a handful of accounts on it. It's more efficient than a VPS, only has a single apache/mySql instances on it, and support/uptime etc would be handled by the host? You should be able to find it for less than your VPS cost.

I'm not a fan of VPSs they are just too inefficient. Apache running on each VM, EXIM, PHP, and a control panel (if needed). Chews up the resources too quickly. By the time you outfit a VPS properly your better off going to a Dedicated machine.

A Dedicated machine from Layered tech (I'm a happy customer of theirs) and getting a server for $65/mo prepaying for a year for their 20% discount which brings it down to $53/mo and then hiring a management company for $25-30/mo.

If that's too pricey, you can sublease 1/2 the server to someone else who has the need, split the cost with them, and your down to $39/mo for a machine of your own that will run CIRCLES around a VPS for the same price.

-Jason

After mailing some hosting companies I got this answers:

servint -> No Service monitoring
Budgetdedicated -> No answer
PowerVps -> No answer

Scaraweb -> Fast answer. Service monitoring.
Solarvps-> Service monitoring
Liquidweb -> Fast answer. Service monitoring

Only 3 of them answered fast and told me that they take care of keep on-line all accounts.

I only could choose one of them and I tried liquidweb. They help with setup. I had a dns problem and it was solved in 30 minutes. Yesterday I was uploading files and I notice all my sites were off-line but I had no time to contact support becouse after a couple of minutes all was working again.

By now it looks like all works fine and they have good support.

I will post more experiences here ...

By now it looks like all works fine and they have good support.

I will post more experiences here ...
Good! Let us know how it goes after a month or so :)