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  1. #1

    Is any VPS truly fully managed?

    I know you guys are big on details, so here's the situation:

    I have a WordPress site that's grossing about $500,000 a year. From a hardware standpoint, it's not very demanding. 100,000 page views a month, all pages fully cached. A well-optimized VPS can handle it just fine.

    But there are a few requirements:

    1. The site can never go down. Not ever. If it went down at the wrong time for just five minutes, it could cost $20,000+.

    2. The speed of the site has an effect on revenue, and so fast page loads is extremely important. In my experience, that has less to do with hardware than it does having a properly optimized webserver and caching.

    3. We get a lot of hack attempts. Nothing very sophisticated. I would guess a lot of it is bots, but about once a quarter, somebody will break in and sneak a bunch of scripts into the site. We keep patching the holes, and they keep finding new ones. We don't do anything with credit cards or payment details, so no payment information is being compromised, thank God, but fixing it still costs us a lot of time and money.

    Right now, we're on a wiredtree VPS, and all things being considered, I think they are a good host with excellent support, but they can't do everything I need.

    I need a host to set up multiple failsafe systems to make sure the site never goes down. I need a host to optimize nginx and varnish to keep everything running at top speed. I need a host to keep security really tight so we never get hacked. Or at least get hacked less often.

    The last few days, I've been looking for such a host, hoping one of the premium companies who gives true full management could handle it, but I'm not finding many options. It seems like EuroVPS might work. Maybe. MediaTemple also has an upgraded support tier that might work.

    But I'm wondering…

    Is any host going to be able to do the above? Or is it time to get an external server management company?

  2. #2
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    Most providers will wait for you to open a ticket if you want something done. Those who claim they monitor your VPS 24/7 are most certainly not - PING, I hope so but other services such as HTTP, MySQL are not monitored.

    Are you looking for a solution where everything from security to service uptime is monitored 24/7 without your input?
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  3. #3
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    It's sounds like a very good plan, multiple servers with load balancing and/or fail over. Make sure that you get servers on different nodes, and if possible in different data centers.
    No point having a failsafe system if all servers is in one DC, and the network goes down, or the power etc.

    If it was me, I had used several hosts in different places to be sure. Or move to a big cloud that was pretty safe (but even the biggest clouds goes down from time to time)
    I earn about $8.000 from hosting some customers sites, and I have multible servers, with several hosts, with DNS Made Easy DNS failover service, auto syncing of files and data bases, backups to offsite servers, to my home server, to the cloud. Etc etc. And you get $500k...you should have a much better system in place that me.
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  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dural View Post
    Right now, we're on a wiredtree VPS, and all things being considered, I think they are a good host with excellent support, but they can't do everything I need.
    Thank you for reaching out and for the kind words Dural. May I ask if you currently have a ticket ID available within our system over at WiredTree? If not, I would be happy to speak to you through a ticket or over the phone about your growing needs. We always provide an upgrade path for our clients who grow beyond standard VPS services. Load balancing, failover, custom application management and more would all be available.
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  5. #5
    If you are grossing that much, why dont you have your own private cloud for true redundancy, failover and load balancing for peak moments to your site. Then hire a good out source management company to proactively monitor and manage your site. For a business thats bringing in that much money I wouldn't risk it on a standalone VPS.
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  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Ethernet Servers View Post
    Most providers will wait for you to open a ticket if you want something done. Those who claim they monitor your VPS 24/7 are most certainly not - PING, I hope so but other services such as HTTP, MySQL are not monitored.
    I dont think this is accurate - I think MANY hosts proactively monitor services, disk space usage, partitions, https/iis, mysql, etc, etc.. usually theres a fee for this level of management &/or the base cost for that sort of managed solution is higher then the reactive management you are talking about.

    the problem is the very wide variances in everyones definition of managed

    the other problem is when you do offer that level of management, you are called expensive when compared to other managed providers who "dont", as you said, offer that level of management

    Are you looking for a solution where everything from security to service uptime is monitored 24/7 without your input?
    having said the above, I think this particular poster is looking for something much more involved then a proactive management solution

    Quote Originally Posted by Dural View Post
    I know you guys are big on details, so here's the situation:

    I have a WordPress site that's grossing about $500,000 a year. From a hardware standpoint, it's not very demanding. 100,000 page views a month, all pages fully cached. A well-optimized VPS can handle it just fine.

    But there are a few requirements:

    1. The site can never go down. Not ever. If it went down at the wrong time for just five minutes, it could cost $20,000+.

    2. The speed of the site has an effect on revenue, and so fast page loads is extremely important. In my experience, that has less to do with hardware than it does having a properly optimized webserver and caching.

    3. We get a lot of hack attempts. Nothing very sophisticated. I would guess a lot of it is bots, but about once a quarter, somebody will break in and sneak a bunch of scripts into the site. We keep patching the holes, and they keep finding new ones. We don't do anything with credit cards or payment details, so no payment information is being compromised, thank God, but fixing it still costs us a lot of time and money.

    Right now, we're on a wiredtree VPS, and all things being considered, I think they are a good host with excellent support, but they can't do everything I need.

    I need a host to set up multiple failsafe systems to make sure the site never goes down. I need a host to optimize nginx and varnish to keep everything running at top speed. I need a host to keep security really tight so we never get hacked. Or at least get hacked less often.

    The last few days, I've been looking for such a host, hoping one of the premium companies who gives true full management could handle it, but I'm not finding many options. It seems like EuroVPS might work. Maybe. MediaTemple also has an upgraded support tier that might work.

    But I'm wondering…

    Is any host going to be able to do the above? Or is it time to get an external server management company?
    sounds like you need a few things actually - and its completely understandable and a common problem in this industry. using 3rd party support companies rarely gives you the level of support/management you require, and very few hosts offer it either.

    first off, you likely will need your own developer - a php/mysql specialist. Wordpress/Joomla is not natively written to accomplish what you are looking for. I dont think (and I may be wrong, as there may be someone specialized out there) a hosting provider would handle this aspect

    the next thing you need is a real sys admin and a legitimate DBA assigned to your account - in combination with a real proactive management solution.

    These services ARE available from the higher end managed service providers - but, its not at all inexpensive. Still less expensive then hiring your own DBAs, SyS Admins, etc - which is why the real managed hosting space does so well and carries so much value

    Having said all of the above - Wordpress/Joomla types of apps just may not be a good fit for you anymore. especially with 3rd party modules, etc, etc. these scripts are constantly under attack and constantly have new exploits discovered, etc (any application scoured this hard will have this issue - its just simple math for hackers - find an exploit in wordpress/joomla and they suddenly have access to 1000s and 1000s of sites.

    considering your zero tolerance (or near zero) for injections, downtime, etc - and considering the revenue your site generates and the potential income loss when you do have issues...

    at this point..

    I would look to build your own platform, with exactly the features you want - and migrate off of wordpress

    I would also look to build in on a mongodb (http://www.mongodb.org/) backend and distribute it across a couple of facilities. then you can supplement that with a real proactively managed hosting service - and preferably one that will also have DBAs and Sys Admins available to you

    I hope this helps
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  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by SolaDrive - John View Post
    If you are grossing that much, why dont you have your own private cloud for true redundancy, failover and load balancing for peak moments to your site. Then hire a good out source management company to proactively monitor and manage your site. For a business thats bringing in that much money I wouldn't risk it on a standalone VPS.
    ^ This is my question as well.
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  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by kpmedia View Post
    ^ This is my question as well.
    wordpress isnt built for this

    load balancing applications and/or failing them over between facilities like this usually cause more problems then you are trying to solve. and even if you do try this, you better have excellent sys admins and dba's at your disposal
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  9. #9
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    I have a WordPress site that's grossing about $500,000 a year. From a hardware standpoint, it's not very demanding. 100,000 page views a month, all pages fully cached.
    with such profit and budget, why VPS? why not cloud technology?
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  10. #10
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dural View Post
    I know you guys are big on details, so here's the situation:

    I have a WordPress site that's grossing about $500,000 a year. From a hardware standpoint, it's not very demanding. 100,000 page views a month, all pages fully cached. A well-optimized VPS can handle it just fine.

    But there are a few requirements:

    1. The site can never go down. Not ever. If it went down at the wrong time for just five minutes, it could cost $20,000+.

    2. The speed of the site has an effect on revenue, and so fast page loads is extremely important. In my experience, that has less to do with hardware than it does having a properly optimized webserver and caching.

    3. We get a lot of hack attempts. Nothing very sophisticated. I would guess a lot of it is bots, but about once a quarter, somebody will break in and sneak a bunch of scripts into the site. We keep patching the holes, and they keep finding new ones. We don't do anything with credit cards or payment details, so no payment information is being compromised, thank God, but fixing it still costs us a lot of time and money.

    Right now, we're on a wiredtree VPS, and all things being considered, I think they are a good host with excellent support, but they can't do everything I need.

    I need a host to set up multiple failsafe systems to make sure the site never goes down. I need a host to optimize nginx and varnish to keep everything running at top speed. I need a host to keep security really tight so we never get hacked. Or at least get hacked less often.

    The last few days, I've been looking for such a host, hoping one of the premium companies who gives true full management could handle it, but I'm not finding many options. It seems like EuroVPS might work. Maybe. MediaTemple also has an upgraded support tier that might work.

    But I'm wondering…

    Is any host going to be able to do the above? Or is it time to get an external server management company?
    If your income depends on your website to be online then why are you investing in such a cheap hosting solution? Nothing wrong with your current provider but it seems you are making quite a nice sum with your website and your hosting should be your top priority.

    Donīt get me wrong but you cannot invest 000.01% of your income in your business hosting if your whole income depends on it.

    If you are earning 500,000$ a year with your website, then you should at least invest 50,000$ a year in your hosting setup. That will surely give you an amazon dual fail over, never fail, with all the fancy bells and whistles money can buy.

  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by cartika-andrew View Post
    wordpress isnt built for this

    load balancing applications and/or failing them over between facilities like this usually cause more problems then you are trying to solve. and even if you do try this, you better have excellent sys admins and dba's at your disposal
    The application has nothing to do with the hosting setup. You can surely have WP in a clustered setup that never fails, its just PHP and MySQL on the end. Its not an easy straight setup but it can be done for sure. For what he makes online he can surely afford load balancers and clusters.

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by nibb View Post
    That will surely give you an amazon dual fail over, never fail, with all the fancy bells and whistles money can buy.
    its not about the infrastructure - you can buy whatever infrastructure you want. Keeping the application running 100% of the time is the challenge. FYI, Amazon charges $15,000/month on your account for access to support, sys admins and DBAs. Rackspace charges anywhere from a few $100 to $6000+ per VM for this level of support

    Quote Originally Posted by nibb View Post
    The application has nothing to do with the hosting setup. You can surely have WP in a clustered setup that never fails, its just PHP and MySQL on the end. Its not an easy straight setup but it can be done for sure. For what he makes online he can surely afford load balancers and clusters.
    I respectfully disagree

    you can purchase all the infrastructure you want. and if your application creates mysql conflicts when load balancing and isnt written properly for replication, you are throwing your money away - as a single, stand alone server, with proper management and support may perform better and more reliably over the long haul
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  13. #13
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    I was not talking about the infrastructure and Im absolutely sure a smaller host and company will be 100 times better than Amazon.

    First of all Amazon does not provide fail over like most people thing. At all, zero, nada, their virtual containers will crash like any VPS.

    Its a misconception of people to think their app will fail over if they are on Amazon. Not even their server will fail over!

    Just like people thing you are on a huge cloud on Amazon, again, its just a VM in their cloud, most people donīt even know what is the network speed you get in a Amazon server? Why? because Amazon does not say so, they just say low, medium, high, believe it or not you will not be able to stream over XX mbits on the smaller instances in Amazon, and you get little close to one gigabit tops in their biggest setup. Want more? You can cluster of course, but you can in every provider as well. People think they buy a server in Amazon and they get unlimited everything which is not true. Its just a Xen VM...I donīt say this results are bad, they are actually excellent. It just a point to notice when other smaller companies like about their output and network speed offering to customers when not even Amazon can do it in some cases.

    For HA

    You need to configure this yourself and server failure is one thing, making Wordpress fail over, lets say in a WAN setup globally is amazingly expensive because you are providing fault tolerance at the application level, hardware is easy, server OS a little harder, but application can be tricky, some canīt even fail over and some will require changes in the code.

    I was not talking about the infrastructure, this can be done in almost any host, assuming the host does provide the customer with hardware that is fault tolerant and their network and datacenter is also fault tolerance. I mean any serious hosting provider. If they provide 2 datacenters separated, and you have both setups similar, you can do it, and probably with a little help from them as well.

    Its expensive like hell and usually a wordpress owner will not do it. Unless of course you earn half a million dollar with your website.

    These setups are very expensive and only huge companies have them. Not even hosting companies themselves have them for their own websites, I know that The Planet, Softlayer, etc, even their own websites are not setup like that because they donīt need it.

    This is for people that truly cannot be 5 minutes down. Most downtimes are very short and people are not willing to pay 10,000 times more just to avoid such small downtimes. I would not. If to be offline for a few minutes can save you a huge amount of money most will take that route. Now if your income is very sensitive in terms of the website or you have a huge website with massive traffic where even 15 minutes will result in news on the media about how your service was down, then you are going with something like this.

    There are many levels of HA, and I think there are little offerings for several reasons. It usually requires custom work per the load and app requirement. One model does not fit everyone and second, you usually canīt find such services because it does not sell well to the public. Like I said, users are not willing to pay, lets say 1000$ a month to avoid 10 minutes of downtime a year. So its not profitable to offer services like this, because users assume its cheap. Most providers have such an impressive uptime today that you will just avoid a few minutes or hours a year with HA.

    Most hosting services are budget hosting services, and the ones that really need this, they get a special consultation quote and have it custom made for the company. There allot of companies that build something like this for their customers, but its usually on request.

    Iīm sure both Rackspace, Softlayer, etc, will help the poster if he gives them a call. Its not cheap but donīt expect it to be.

    You are right about Amazon support. I knew it was expensive, but that expensive?

    One more reason to go with a company that is a true hosting company, since support it usually part of the deal and believe me, you will need support eventually.

    This is why I actually agree with you. A good server or VM with proper management will be so much cheaper and better. Why?

    Because this HA setups if its not done correctly and I mean be prepared to open your wallet will cause you more downtimes than just using one single server. Everything that is distributed and clustered is very sensitive to failures and more if you are doing it at the app level. Most people that used some grid or clustered services had more downtimes than their previous single server setups. Hell, just read here on WHT all those posts of people that jumped into some cloud and had nothing but downtimes.

    A proper server in a proper hosting company will give you almost (I mean almost) the same result. Maybe a just a few minutes here and there, updates, patches, normal, and it can be scheduled in off peak hours. My point is that this setups do not even make sense unless you need more than what a single server can provide in terms of power. Today a single machine can be so powerful that I hardly thing someone has the traffic needs to out power a huge server. The biggest single server you can buy is huge. So huge that you will never even need a distributed setup. Now if you are Facebook or Google then you are looking into what I was talking and this is exactly a similar setup to what they use.
    Last edited by nibb; 01-14-2014 at 08:36 PM.

  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dural View Post

    1. The site can never go down. Not ever. If it went down at the wrong time for just five minutes, it could cost $20,000+.

    Then VPS is not for you.

    If you are grossing $41,000 per month, then you can easily invest at least 1000 for the hardware. Look for hardware raid10 setup and a network that has 100% up time and some redundant power/network.

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  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by net View Post
    Then VPS is not for you.

    If you are grossing $41,000 per month, then you can easily invest at least 1000 for the hardware. Look for hardware raid10 setup and a network that has 100% up time and some redundant power/network.
    Raid10 and a redundant power/network is very common on any decent provider, this will not provide him with a complete outage free systems either. It will help, but I assume he already has this on his current provider.

    I would look into more than that. Like to be able to have fail over at the WAN level, this means from datacenter to the datacenter and at the application level, this means when actually his Wordpress fails, this means his website with multiple monitoring stations controlling his website performance.

    Not sure why you say VPS is not for him since you actually need to virtualize systems in order to achieve this as well. Its one part of the equation.

  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by nibb View Post

    Not sure why you say VPS is not for him since you actually need to virtualize systems in order to achieve this as well. Its one part of the equation.
    I was talking about Load Balancing not just 1 server. I guess I didn't explain everything.

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