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  1. #1

    Moving to VPS - stick with same host?

    I'm a web developer for a small company and we currently use shared hosting on a Windows server. I'm growing very dissatisfied with our current hosting company because of the "time-to-first-byte" on the web server that our site is located on. Sometimes pages take up to 1 minute to load and I've ran tests to verify that this is not the fault of my ASP classic scripting.

    I'm not going to say who our current hosting company is but I will say that it's not one of the big ones like GoDaddy, 1and1, or Network Solutions. It's more of a medium-sized company with really good US-based support. If you provide hosting services, just assume that I'm talking about your company.

    I have not yet complained to the hosting company about the performance issues. My experience so far with hosting companies indicates that they are going to A) blame my code B) dodge my complaint through some other method C) never take the issue seriously.

    So I'm thinking that we'll just move to a Virtual Private Server plan because we do plan to run multiple websites and expand our current website with more features. We may also opt to use a CMS so we'd like to make sure our website always performs fairly quickly as we grow. I'm finding that $60 per month is a fairly standard rate for about 1 or 1.5 GB or RAM and about 80GB of hard disk space. This should be more than enough unless our SQL database needs outgrow the memory.

    But here's another thought I've been having. Why would I pay for VPS at a company that has let me down in only a few months on their shared hosting? I do admit that in almost all other issues their technical support has been above average but I don't have much confidence that they are going to take my complaints about performance seriously. Should I call in and complain and see if they take the complaint seriously? Should I cross my fingers and move our site to a VPS? Or should I look for yet another hosting company?

  2. #2
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    Why assume or try and predict what they will say? Submit a ticket and find out before spending more money on something that might or might not fix your issues.

    You have nothing to lose.

  3. #3
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    I agree with above.
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  4. #4
    OK, I did open a support ticket. The support representative warned me that moving to VPS might not fix performance issues anyway because it's still a shared environment.

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by aychekay View Post
    It's more of a medium-sized company with really good US-based support. If you provide hosting services, just assume that I'm talking about your company.

    [...]

    I have not yet complained to the hosting company about the performance issues. My experience so far with hosting companies indicates that they are going to A) blame my code B) dodge my complaint through some other method C) never take the issue seriously.
    Doesn't make sense to me... if they have really good support like you say, then speak to them about your issue and they will be able to help. If they can't help you then their support isn't quite "really good"

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by aychekay View Post
    OK, I did open a support ticket. The support representative warned me that moving to VPS might not fix performance issues anyway because it's still a shared environment.
    What else did they say? Are they looking into it?

  7. #7
    The tech just said they needed to open a ticket in order to check into it. He indicated they would check the log files and other vectors on the server to determine where the problem might be.

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by aychekay View Post
    The tech just said they needed to open a ticket in order to check into it. He indicated they would check the log files and other vectors on the server to determine where the problem might be.
    Quote Originally Posted by aychekay View Post
    OK, I did open a support ticket. The support representative warned me that moving to VPS might not fix performance issues anyway because it's still a shared environment.
    Both responses seem perfectly reasonable to me. If it does come down to blaming your code, an easy option is to create a simple test program and see if that also performs poorly. My experience is with linux but there, just loading any dynamic page (PHP or perl) can be visibly and measurably slow on an overloaded server.
    Chris

    "Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them." - Laurence J. Peter

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by aychekay View Post
    The tech just said they needed to open a ticket in order to check into it. He indicated they would check the log files and other vectors on the server to determine where the problem might be.
    I think you need to wait for their response with reasons, once they find the problem, probably they'll fix it or tell you what causing the problems.
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  10. #10
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    Quote Originally Posted by aychekay View Post
    OK, I did open a support ticket. The support representative warned me that moving to VPS might not fix performance issues anyway because it's still a shared environment.
    I'm not sure how virtualization works on Windows servers, but that is true on linux (although there is some debate depending on the type of virtualization). The thing that does happen on a VPS is that you usually don't have the ability to burst to much higher levels like you might be able to on a shared server (assuming no one else at that time is using the resource). In other words, you can burst memory usage to 1.5GB on a VPS, but might be able to go much higher on a shared server with 8GB of RAM that everyone is sharing. So performance could, in theory, be worse (my experience is that moving my sites to a VPS improved the performance quite a bit).

    This is a good, real-world test of the host's support. You might want to move up to a VPS for the other reasons you cited, and this incident will give you an insight into how they might respond on an issue with it. If they come back, and it is something in your code, or a function or something that you didn't catch, and they are right ... stay with them. That kind of host is invaluable. If they come back and say "its not us, its you" without more explanation, then they give "average" support. Most hosts don't provide any support for scripts, etc. that they did not install, and will only check their end of the issue.

  11. #11
    Just wanted to write a quick update.

    1) In doing my own research on the performance issue I found something in my code that I thought I had disabled. On one page, specifically one of them that has been giving us the worst performance problems, I found out I was still making some calls to the database where I thought I had disabled them. This would not really be so bad if it were not for the problem listed in #2. My call to the database occurred at the very end of the pageload but I failed to use the response.flush command (it's ASP classic) to output data before the entire page had loaded so my database calls had to finish first before the page would actually get pushed to the client.
    2) I guess we've just plain outgrown the database. It's a SQL Server 2008 Express database on this web server. One table alone has 326,300 records. Another has 145,600 and a third table has 81,000. Due to a lack of optimization in the code and in the table structures this has gotten very slow. I do find that the performance does vary quite a bit so I still think this web server is probably overloaded, specifically the SQL Server portion of it. However, I admit that I'm probably asking it to do more than I really should so responsibility is going to have to start with me instead of blaming it on the server or on other users of the server.

    I'm currently looking into dedicated server options and server colocation options. I do have some questions regarding this but I'm going to leave those for another post.

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