Posts tagged hosting

Dreamhost Hosting Review

Reviews

If you don’t know who Dreamhost are, just write Dreamhost on Google 😀 they are one of the largest hosts nowadays and up until recently I was a big fan and a client for over 10 years, wow! 10 YEARS! So as you all know i tend to only review hosta i stopped using, so why have i left Dreamhost?

First lets start with some history, for a while Dreamhost was the home of a bit of weirdly offbeat hosting, their hosting setup was unique, their culture was unique, their services were unique, also it was one of those hosts that gave you freedom, even when you screwed something over or abused some of the services or just didn’t have your wordpress well setup they were lenient and most of the times helpful, it wasn’t about oh its your fault or i cant do anything, it was a matter of helping you out even if it was your fault, their hosting was weird but cool, you never cared about how much space you were using or resources cause it just worked!

And from a very affordable price you had a ton of extras to play with it was a playground feel and something very unique on the hosting industry, it reminds me of when Gmail started, you just had so much to work with now, even with kinks you always forgave cause… well lets just say it… Dreamhost was awesome!

And although i had move most of my sites and apps to vps/cloud/dedicated hosting, i still was very happy with my Dreamhost account!

Was? Oh yeah since about 2 years ago, they changed and a lot and besides the culture part… well it was fun but its not the essential, the change was in their network and features, the moved from a clustered type of hosting where i have to say it had the occasional downtime but overall it was fantastic speed and resources to a plain basic shared hosting setup one that is very stifled on resources, a hosting account that at its max had 20+ sites all running a lot of traffic, including a buddypress social network and a forum, now cant handle 2 wordpress sites at the same time without giving 503 errors.

Now compare that with a test vps i have that also has 2 pretty new wordpress sites but getting there, this vps is KVM with 256mb of Ram and 1vcpu, is it awesome, no? but after a well setup (nginx/apache/mariadb) its running those 2 sites like butter its almost native speed, while on Dreamhost you basically traded that slight instability for basic performance, those 2 sites load slowly and i guess any more php sites and my account would die, by the way i was paying 7$ a month on Dreamhost and i pay 1$ a month on Atlantic.net and altough Dreamhost “gives more” like control panel, backups, the most important part, the hosting is pretty weak!

The fact is that shared hosting on Dreamhost is dead, they want people to move up to VPS, to their Cloud Offerings, to their Specific WordPress Offerings or Dedicated, they went were all the other hosting companies have been going since… well forever! They give you a great offer on shared hosting, but the shared hosting is so restrictive that any usage above a very low margin will probably need to upgrade, thats fine, but that wasnt the Dreamhost I sign up for!

Dreamhost could easily put nginx in front of apache, or just tweak their shared hosting to be as fast and streamlined as possible but they of course have no incentive for that, when you sign up for their vps you can do that yourself so they can do it, it reminds a bit of my issues with webfaction and their weird limitations…

Also i tried 2 times their VPS platform, the first time was a bust well mostly because their shared hosting was still in the old platform so it was literally moving to something worst with more limitations in everything, the second time around it was better but for that price and performance i expected a big leap from the shared hosting, i was using the shared mysql but than again why would i need to pay for vps and then for vps mysql, its just plain not good.

I also asked to be moved in the last 6 months to another datacenter and they did it, but nothing changed, still plain boring performance and hosting, this wasnt a easy decision i really liked Dreamhost, my kind of hosting, but they arent anymore, and so i move to bigger and better things, so to finalize this… yeah i left and im not going back, and sorry to say that ill probably also pass on their cloud offerings, burn me once… ok stopping the rant >_< sorry sorry, here is a resume 😛

Dreamhost Strong Points

  1. Awesome Control Panel
  2. Basic Hosting Feature Set
  3. The Shared Hosting Price is Alright
  4. Good Network

Dreamhost Weak Points

  1. Shared and VPS Hosting has Weak Performance
  2. Shared Hosting Increased its Limits
  3. The VPS Hosting Price is Expensive
  4. Lost Some Extra Features
  5. Its Price point has lost Value (You dont get the same bang for buck you once got)
  6. Lost part of its Nerdy/Tech Culture and Charm
  7. Uncertainty Regarding New Features (Adding then removing features)

Webfaction Hosting Review

Reviews 6 Comments

So I was a user of Webfaction hosting for a year, and nooo don’t take my dramatic image that Webfaction sucks! Hehehe it just sucked a little but it failed quite a bit, lets start from top shall we.

Webfaction is a shared hosting provider, it kinda sits between traditional shared hosting and running a VPS/Cloud/Dedicated hosting, its basically shared hosting with the basics plus lots of the resources and freedom of having control of most of your account, sounds great? Yeah i thought so too!
After some issues with some of my hosting i decided about a year ago to keep a part of my sites on  dedicated and some on shared hosting, so Webfaction looked like my perfect choice for a shared hosting provider (my end goal was 3 Webfaction accounts), still before singing up with I sent a e-mail with some questions, one of those was regarding the PHP and if that would run from the memory on the server or if it was included since their site doesn’t state that clearly, i was told that i wouldn’t need to worry about PHP since that was part of their setup and thus outside of my personal memory, only if i installed my own apps would i use up that memory, great!
So moving some of my sites over i had to get used to their control panel and system, that has some particulars compared with other shared hosting, but nothing too complicated and in some sense pretty cool, like the ability to run folders with just Nginx for example (bypassing the heaving Apache), still it took a while to move things over (about 8 sites, with 10GB of data, 5 MySql databases), performance wise it wasn’t all that good, i had some downtime (3 times at least) and weird issues like blazing speed one moment and crawling and timing out the next, after some back and forth with support (that although reasonably fast they are very bland with replies and tend to not give details on issues) and about 3 months in and more talking with support the server was moved to Cloudlinux and that would fix the issues.
And yes it helped, kinda, now i wasn’t getting those server wide glitches but started getting out of memory issues, were support sometimes telling me its my fault and other times telling me it isn’t a issue and shrugging it off, and that was my normal operation with Webfaction for another couple of months, with my sites going down all in a row, i had 8 sites on Webfaction, because i never had outstanding hosting, I moved the only important site out, but still the performance wasn’t improving, 2 of the sites were placeholders and the rest were smallish static or wordpress site, the total traffic per month was like 5GB to 10GB and around 1000 visit per month for the combined sites, my contacts with support always started with me asking what was the issue and they say that PHP was running and had to be terminated and me replying that i was told PHP wasn’t a issue and i don’t understand why PHP is running out of memory if i barely have visitors, and finally shrugs or promises that it would magically get fixed.
This kept going on, at one point support wasn’t even able to determine what was the PHP file that brought the site down (apparently support doesn’t have access to logs or Webfaction doesn’t make any logs of these issues), but since it wasn’t always the same domain even i was unsure, suffice to say it was a pretty miserable experience, so after 7 months in, i quit Webfaction and moved everything over to another one of my VPS (and yes the performance has been fantastic and PHP runs like a dream), i paid yearly so my fault there, so here is a resume of what i think are the strong and weak points of Webfaction hosting.

Good Points

  1. Feature Filled Hosting Platform, from php, python, perl, git, django…. you name it.
  2. Good Control Panel, although tricky, after you get used to it, it has some great features.
  3. Good Hosting Specs, with plenty of space and bandwidth.
  4. Lots of Control, of your hosting with shell account and the ability to run your own software
  5. Good Fast Network, at least in their Amsterdan location that i used.
  6. Really Good Community, they showed a lot of ways to go around issues and some of the things you can do on the platform.

 

Bad Points

  1. Support isn’t Knowledgeable, at least of their platform or lacks any real access, they are polite but i needed answers, not shrugs and reboots, especially when they say its a issue on my side and then point me to a “optimize your site” article as a solution for a plain WordPress site that received 10 visits that day and was able to crash my entire account!!!!
  2. Monitoring the Server wasn’t Proactive or Fast, every-time i had a issue even if the entire server was down it seemed like a surprise to support (and i don’t go running for support, I normally wait 30min or more just encase its some reboot or small glitch), not too sure what they are monitoring :/
  3. Although told otherwise PHP is considered an App, so every time it runs it takes memory from your account (in my case between 30Mb and 60Mb, so i had 256Mb of RAM at the time = i can only run around 5 instances until their prevention tools shut me down), so if you have 1 site you are good and you can run multiple PHP processes, if you have 5 or 6 like me, or if you have a very popular forum or WordPress site, you will get shutdown FAST (check Webfaction’s “tools to prevent server high loads” and “cgroups” and “Cloudlinux”)
  4. It doesn’t use Standard Configurations, so you get some issues and incompatibles with some scripts, of these 4 its a issue you can fix easily by searching the forums.

 

So to summarize, Webfaction likes to compare itself as a superior VPS, but it really isn’t! a quality VPS is unfortunately superior (at least in availability of resources), even a smaller one, the now 512Mb of RAM on Webfaction isnt superior to a equivalent VPS, were you can run a LAMP (+Nginx) stack with 150Mb of RAM and plenty of space to run PHP and anything you want smootlhy, its just a bit more work to setup hehehe, i would say if you have just a couple of sites and you want a good shared hosting with more freedom than the average Shared Host than Webfaction is a nice choice and like Webfaction likes to say hosting for developers (so expect issues?!?), but if you want to run critical software or if you need your sites to run smoothly, then Webfaction is unfortunately not the best choice.

Moving Away from PointDNS

Reviews 3 Comments

[ Rant Warning ^_^’ ] Since i have most of my domains on ResellerClub and from my tests on DNS performance, ResellerClub DNS is like me hosting my own DNS (it will be slow and probably only on one location), its kinda the bare minimum, so I’ve used other DNS services, but ended up going with PointDNS, it had the basic features and pretty good performance, but since they got bought/sold/merged into Copper, they have been changing more and more of their basic features!

I don’t mind adding new features and asking money for them, that’s perfectly reasonable, but going back on previously free features is where i draw the line, i feel cheated, well not in the sense that i have to pay (altought now i do!), but in the “you got me here with these features” cheated (ie i would never have used PointDNS if they didn’t have these features).

Taking back features is like going back on your word and so i have lost confidence, they decided to make their e-mail redirects paid, but since i only need hosted DNS for less important domains or 3rd party hosted domains (like hosted in Blogger, Tumblr…), that feature is pretty helpful for me, so I’m moving away, I still think they have a pretty good, clean and reliable DNS service, but at this point even using ResellerClub or hosting my own is a better alternative, as of now I’m moving to NameCheap DNS!

Positives of PointDNS

  • Clean Layout
  • All the Basic Features
  • Reliable DNS Service

Negatives of PointDNS

  • Inconsistent Layout
  • Inconsistent Pricing
  • Turning Standard Features into Paid
  • Lack of Support/Manual
Update: A Couple of days later they send a e-mail cutting from the 10 free domains i used to have to just 1, gawd, no respect for customers, they give 30 days to decide… extortionist much?

Dropbox Clone Copy Launches

News

Yeah i know this could be seen as a infomercial so you guys will click on my Copy referral link (and we both will get 5GB for free), but i am very interested in cloud hosting and i do try a lot of them, i use it daily for my backups, for business and for sharing (i’ll make another post later on with more details), so testing new cloud storage is important to me, since i do have some issues with the ones i use currently.

My Cloud Providers

Dropbox (Free 20GB) for syncing of work material, its absolutely flawless, but it tends to bog down from time to time (burst of CPU) and also although secure its not encrypted and i know i could do it myself and in some ways i do, but with encryption on my side there is a risk of corruption and data loss, so i avoid putting there anything that is really private, mostly work files, stuff i need on the run or that im currently working on! (Update a day or so after posting this, Dropbox decided to cut a chunk of my referrals, wtf is with that after years! they go back on referrals! thats fucked up, ill probably make a post about it tomorrow, but for today they lose their link on this post and worse, my trust).

Box (Free 50GB), i always liked Box, their web interface is really good, but the best is that my account has like 5 years and all my files are still there, i should like delete some, but the combination of 50GB and never deleting a file ever, makes it perfect for small backups and old webfiles, their sync app is pretty bad, so i dont use it (tried it twice).

Mega (Free 50GB), what? MEGA!!! yep, as it seems the fact that your files are encripted and they dont delete files and they have backups and they dont have file size limits, makes mega awesome for website backups, sometimes if its a database heavy site its pretty small, but if its a media heavy website, its gonna get huge, so mega is awesome for that and yes i do encript all files myself, so no security issues there! and super fast upload and download!

I do have a owncloud instance but i only use that to sync my music, maybe if i encript it and make automatic backups, ill use it more ^_^’

Cloud Providers i Tried and Quit!

Cubby, pretty good cloud hosting, with local sync and web sync, but with their change to a paid service  they basically cripled every free user to a less than useful service, before it had some interesting features now its way less usefull, that and a touchy sync (sometimes it syncs, sometimes it doesnt and says everything is synced…)

Rapidshare, this one is going down the drain, i dont know what they are thinking, i was still barely using them, but the last files i had there died a couple of weeks ago for no reason, no point using them for anything.

Mediafire, good for sharing, horrible for backups, your files dont stay if they are too popular or not popular enough, im not sure why they keep saying they are a dropbox clone, they are a basic filehost.

Skydrive, searching your files for images or whatever is beyond me, i dont care if its automatic, any host that searches your files is not a host that i will ever use.

Google Drive, im slowly moving away from Google services, but i did try it and it worked ok, i didn’t liked they changed their pricing at the time, but i dont care cause i dont want to use, that and their terms of service that give them a lifetime license to your stuff, again shit beyond me.

So how about Copy?

Well I’ve only tried for a few days, but its very similar to dropbox (thats a good thing), lightweight and i like their android app, worked great for now, quick syncing, i did wished they did something different, instead of a pure clone, still if i get more than what i have in dropbox you never know hehehe.

So yeah i put in this post my copy and my dropbox referral use it if you are interested in signing up youll get extra space, ohh and here is my Copy referral  (If you sign up you will get an extra 5GB!)

The End of User Generated Content

Tech

Expanding on my rant on the changes on Google App Engine and Google’s culture around exploiting developers (and don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of companies that do this, Google isn’t the only one), now i see this Howcast announcement that they decided to focus on their own productions and that the user generated videos were going to be deleted and that reminds me that its not just developers, also users are used and then left out, more and more i think if you want to do something awesome or want to share your pictures or videos or content you have to host it yourself, do it yourself, depending on third parties is a major flaw, one more and more people regret.

I do understand that business change and decisions have to be made, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it, for users if you are changing or closing down, please provide backups or alternatives to the users owned content, make it as easy as the service was!

If you are making tools for developers, think hard about what are you giving and their expectations, don’t make a product and promote it as something and then change the rules later on, don’t provide API’s and then change your mind when there are thousands of products that depend on those API’s (yes Google but Twitter too).

Nowadays even though i still use a lot of products, i create less and less content for other companies, if i create i own the platform as well..

Cloudflare Review – Should You Use It?

News 10 Comments

Since i run lots of sites, things like performance, security, caching, stats are part of the daily routine of running them and of course of extreme importance, whats the point of having a kick ass site if its slow or insecure, so a couple of months ago i heard of cloudflare, basically its a proxy/caching system, but by using this caching system they provide caching for your dns, for site files, as well as intrusion detection, stats and a series of other niceties, this happens mostly because every time anyone wants to visit a site that is using cloudflare it will pass through cloudflare servers before reaching the site.

At first it sounds like an awesome product, first of all the basic package is already extensive and free, but even the paid version seems to have even nicer features and at a very affordable price (it would be nicer if it was $5 each site, and not $20 the first and $5 the remaining), especially comparing to somewhat equivalent CDN and Security systems available online, also impressive is the control panel, very simple but with lots of features (comparing with something like google analytics, its way better at presenting a one page overview), so i decided to test cloudflare and see if it was a good fit for the S2R network.

The testing was done with 3 sites, that have different functions, frameworks, servers, performance and traffic, this way i could see how effective cloudflare is, i do this by doing a initial setup and testing and then having a couple of site monitoring services checking up on the site as well as me randomly visiting them and testing again.

So the simple site was a domain hosted, blogspot powered site, basic template and its mostly a placeholder site while it isnt developed, so low traffic (about 30 uniques a day), low content, quick site.

Following cloudflare instructions and setup, change the dns and waited for it to change, it took about 5minutes for dns to refresh and the site showed first a nginx error (nginx is a webserver software), then after 5minutes a cloudflare logo saying that the cache was being made and after a total of about 15minutes the site was running on cloudflare, first of all this initial caching sucked, first errors, then cloudflare logos, the caching should be done in the background, start in offline mode and then turn itself on when it can cache so users should always see the site, although not too long, this was far from a transparent change, the site remained on cloudflare for around 3 weeks,

after about 2 weeks i got a site down warning, when i visited the site i got a topbar from cloudflare saying that the site was in offline mode (one of cloudflare features), after about 2 minutes of refreshing the site went back to normal, i don’t think it was down at all, still what made me not so happy was putting cloudflare logo and links on that topbar.

Site 2 – The Heavy Duty but Simple Site

So the HDBSS is a domain hosted on a shared server that runs a simple image board software, it caches all the pages in html, so basically its html and pictures, still the site is popular and has higher traffic (about 3000 uniques a day), large but simple content, and because of all the images it is slower to load (altough we do use caching for a lot of things, but i turned them off during this trial).

Again the cloudflare setup, this time around i didnt see any cloudflare logos or problems and the site runned fine from what i could tell, however somethings didn’t work, connecting to the backend (running php) was no problem, but the forms wouldnt work, my only doubt was that probably the captchas or ips were not matching (because of the proxy nature of cloudflare) and therefore the form wouldnt work, the strange thing is that other people could post, so on one part i was having some complains and could see that it wasnt working but posts still kept coming, i did try some workarounds like disabling the form captchas, disabling other settings, but that didnt work so the trial on site 2 was cut short to one day and a half, so after the dns change was complete, the site returned to normal, so the likely culprit was indeed cloudflare, so FAIL!

Well not that complex, but its a domain hosted on a server that runs 2 copies of wordpress (long story), its somewhat popular (about 1000 uniques a day), its a ecommerce site, with large dynamic content, in this case i left wordpress caching (w3 caching) and installed the wordpress plugin from cloudflare.

Setup run smooth, but this time around when dns kicked in i only saw the ngix error, i went to cloudflare help and there said it might be my firewall, so i checked, no, but i put the exceptions anyways and contacted the server host for them to check (later i received that they didnt blocked anything as well as my firewall and that the ips from cloudflare connected correctly), i waited for 30 minutes and then reverted the changes, so again a FAIL!

Conclusion
Humm this didnt went at all like i expected, i didn’t do all of these at the same time, this was done randomly during about a 2 month period, so if there were problems on cloudflare side, then they were recurring, however there are 2 things that concern me regarding cloudflare,

First all the links and logos from them, anytime something is wrong they show their logo, i dont think that is userfriendly it should show the logo of the site in question or just a plain text warning from the site in question, showing cloudflare is confusing to any visitor, ohhh whats happening i thought i was going to vacationparadise.com, where is the site? what is this cloudflare??? is cloudflare there to catter to webmasters or to the general public? cause if i buy CDN from Akmai or Amazon they wont show their logo’s in my site, now would they.

Second it seems too forceful, its make it or break it, if it runs at first it probably will run fine, if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t at all, also their system is purely proxying, so you have to install plugins to make it work fine and for example report links, its too easy to break your site, that risk just for some caching and some security is not a good tradeoff, better to optimize and use caching.

So my opinion of cloudflare is that its actually a pretty impressive product, especially their site, the features and customization even on a free product, but their caching seems limited, i didn’t see any real performance boosts from my tests (even though their panel says its like twice as fast, real life tests from multiple sources didn’t show me that, its more like a few ms and i think mostly cause i don’t use gzip and cloudflare uses it) as well as all the links and logos to cloudflare are ridiculous in my view, from the offline mode and from the initial cache, and probably for the “question pages” as well, even tough i didn’t get any, but i did have one my visitors complaint that the site was blocking him from visiting because he had javascript turned off (probably noscript or something), so that’s a bit worrisome as well, i would say the service has good promise but for now it shouldn’t be used by anyone that runs more than a hobbist site.

Update: I’ve done another updated review of cloudflare! check it out!

Pushing S2R Improvements

Update

Ahhh nothing like autumn to get you inspired, well not really, muhahaha, still lots of new shinny things to come from the nice folk at S2R:

Expansion of the S2R Network, yep new sites, a bunch of them are coming, while most are well in Portuguese, and some are revamps (like panchira), there will be some niceties all round, both in new sites and oldies ^^


Much Improved Hosting, performance is always something we aim for, S2R’s hosting is now spread through the world, well mostly around the US of A, in places like Los Angeles, Dallas, Orlando and Kansas City, but in the UK and Netherlands as well, so i hope most, if not all sites will have better performance, we will also be rolling out support for CDN, for extra performance.


On the home-front, some upgrades on some of the computers (so expect faster website building muhahaha), but mostly my custom multiple TB backup system, so all my sites will have 3 layers of backups, from my hosting provider, from an off-site backup and finally to my new backup system, AWESOMEEEE ^_^

Apthost Hosting Review

Reviews

Well im doing reviews of host i’ve used, in this case it was Apthost Shared Hosting in mid 2009, sometimes when i finish a new site i decide to make a new account on a new host (cause they look good, or have a awesome promotion, and yes i know hosting promotions are more hype than substance, but you never know unless you try, thats why i continue to be a Dreamhost customer), so in this case i choose apthost, mostly because of their tag of being the best host for “FFmpeg”.

So lets get into the review, the setup and payment was quick and easy as expected, my account was activated, and like normal quick upload and everything is looking good, i also requested a transfer of another one of my sites but that was a fail apparently apthost staff hasn’t mastered transfer from cpanel to cpanel so i never did anyways, speed isnt awesome, but its all good, about a week later i noticed there were several error_log type files (some growing to multiple mb sizes) in a lot of the folders on the site, but the site seemed fine, when opening those, it was just standard log files with lots of weird errors (like page loads fine, but log reports errors from my ip anyways… weird), talked with support that dismissed it.

So like 3 weeks into it, the real problems started with multiple downtime’s and overall pretty lousy performance (strange how this tends to happen to this kind of hosts, probably when they finish filling up the server to the brim…), since the site was new i decided to put a “maintenance page” while i try and workout the issues, so then it starts a week of trouble tickets with support and it kinda gets silly, most of the replies are “Your site is coming up fine.Please check it from your end.” while the site is still down, also “It is being taken care of. I noticed that one of the techs did not show up, and left the monitoring of the server unattended, which caused to go into overload mode. It is coming back online in few minutes.” or the “the account has been suspended for 30 minutes in our node due your account is responsible for overloading the server, which is impacting overall performance in the node.”, so my site that wasnt even online is overloading the server… awesomeeee i kinda couldn’t believe it, i know it was probably and automated system of some-kind and because the server was in the shitter that probably went to everyone on the server, still funny though

So after a week of practical downtime, they announce that they are moving me to a new server, ok… ohhh but there was a problem and the new server is built from backups that are from Friday and not Monday, what? well at this time since i was still on my 40th day (45 day money back guarantee) i asked for a refund and that was awarded after about a week,

So a recap of my review of Apthost:

  • They aren’t a very good host overall, at least they don’t seem to have their shit together
  • Support is not very supportive, there is a lot of one liner copy+paste replies from support
  • I also don’t appreciate the 30min suspension for “overloading” (i would suspect a lot of people would hit that, in a more professional webhost they contact you ALWAYS before turning off your site)
  • Apparently their backup system sucks
  • They did follow trought with their moneyback guarantee
  • Setup was quick and easy

Review of Virpus VPS Hosting

Reviews 6 Comments

So this is my review of Virpus VPS Hosting, as a principle i only review hosting companies AFTER i’ve been with them, as well as i try and be to the point with my review and it shouldn’t be taken as a literal performance of the hosting company as a whole, just of my particular experience.

I was with Virpus for 5 months, and i signed with their unmanaged Advance package (so a mid to high end hosting package) with Directadmin, since the initial payment it took around 9 days to setup my account but after a contact with support they did apologised, they said that they had a huge surge of new customers and were a bit late on the setup as well as i was discounted for those days, so thats cool.

After the initial setup there were a couple of things that weren’t setup right, especially since there were extra notes fields when you first signed up to put that kind of added or just needed information for a correct setup, but those seemed to be ignored (not a huge deal, since a lot of vps companies do this, probably cause the people that make the setup don’t do any tinkering), so a few back and forth with support and everything is on track.

So the hosting comes with Directadmin hosting control panel, well its kinda a subpar hosting panel, but at least it has a low overhead (doesn’t consume a lot of resources), that and probably a new server (although with not so new hardware) meant performance wise, the vps was quick and the first site i transferred over was indeed almost 2 seconds faster than on the other vps it was on.

After about a month later i transferred another site over, still the performance of both sites was pretty good, this lasted for 2 and a half months, since then i started having some downtime, for some apparently unknown reasons, others were to DDOS or Server Problems, so i had about 5 fairly large periods of downtime in the first 4 months, however in the last month i started having daily mini periods of downtime, i know i know, it can be a problem on my vps, but the vps was stable and apache has like 20 days of uptime i was using barely half the resources on the vps as well as the downtime was at random times, but still the sites started to drop off the internet for 5 or 10 minutes at a time (i use 3 different site monitoring services), i contacted support and nothing but excuses but nothing is done, so i moved one of my sites back to another vps, but the downtime continued for 2 more weeks, then again i contacted support and i was said they were going to scale this to management, i waited one more week and since i wasn’t contacted by support or management and the trouble ticket in question was closed, i moved the last site to another new vps.

So like i always do, i go and read the terms of service (to see their cancellation policy and if i had to pay anything extra, but no, i was within my time to cancel and not have to pay anything) and so i asked for a cancellation, after that i didn’t heard anything from support, not a “we have canceled your account” or anything (if my e-mail account or virpus account was hacked it seems it would be quick and easy to burn my vps), but what comes next wasn’t that nice, although my due date for payment was more than a week from that time, after i canceled they immediately tried to make a payment to my credit card, as well as tried several more times the following week (i was lucky that the reason i didn’t wait 1 or 2 more months with virpus, to see if the service would get better, was that i had to renew my credit card and i didn’t feel like adding my new one to virpus…), so to sum it up my review of virpus:

Good Points:

  • Pretty Cheap VPS Hosting
  • Good Enough Support for Technical Questions
  • Average Performance (was good at first but then it kinda when to normal+downtime)

Bad Points:

  • Cheap Hardware
  • Downtime (my threshold for downtime is about 2 per month, that is to be expected from upgrades to random problems, more than that, its totally unacceptable)
  • Bad Support Followup (they told me at least 3 times that they would check and get back to me, of course they never did)
  • Unethical Cancellation Procedure (tried to charge my credit card without reason after cancellation)

So i would say that i would recommend virpus to anyone that wanted a cheap vps for hosting anything that wasn’t priority (hosting files, cache, image galleries, backups), it was quick and overall the downtime wasn’t that bad (a month with about 20 downtime windows of about 5 to 15minutes each is bad for a active site, but not that terrible for file hosting or something like that, its still about 90% uptime), but i can’t recommend them cause they did try and charge my credit card when they didn’t have any reason to do it (for some companies you do have to pay something before you leave), so if you read this, there are way better and cheaper hosting companies on the web, so stay away from virpus.

Update: So a week as gone by and im still getting the “Invoice is Due” and that i should log in to my account and pay, nice ^_^ but since they closed my server and then closed my account, so even if i wanted to pay i was out, a little more of this and ill just consider it spam/phishing and start flagging them all as such.

Shared Hosting VS Cloud Share VS Virtual Private Server

Tech

Shared hosting, including cloud shared hosting, and virtual private server (VPS) are some of the most popular options for hosting websites and applications. While they both serve the purpose of making your content accessible on the internet, there are significant differences in terms of performance, control, and scalability. We here on Hostcult use all 3, so i think its a nice write up to compare each with pros and cons, so lets check this out.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a hosting environment where multiple websites are hosted on a single server. It is a cost-effective solution, making it suitable for small businesses, personal websites, and entry-level projects. In this setup, server resources such as CPU, RAM, and storage are shared among the websites hosted on the server. This sharing of resources allows hosting providers to offer affordable plans to a large number of customers. It also shares the hosting software so it makes it super easy to run anything.

Pros of Shared Hosting

  • Cost-effective: Shared hosting plans are generally one of the most affordable options, making them ideal for individuals and small businesses with limited budgets.
  • Easy to manage: The hosting provider handles server maintenance, security updates, and technical support, relieving users of the burden of server management.
  • User-friendly: Shared hosting often comes with a user-friendly control panel that simplifies website management, domain setup, and email configuration.

Cons of Shared Hosting

  • Limited resources: Since resources are shared among multiple websites, the performance of your website can be affected by the activities of other users on the server. If one website experiences a sudden surge in traffic, it can impact the overall server performance, potentially slowing down your site.
  • Limited customisation: Shared hosting environments typically have limitations on software installations and configurations since they aim to provide a standardised setup for all users.
  • Security concerns: As multiple websites share the same server, if one site is compromised, there is a potential risk of other sites on the server being affected as well.

Cloud Shared Hosting

Cloud shared hosting builds upon the shared hosting model by utilising cloud infrastructure. Instead of relying on a single physical server, cloud hosting distributes resources across multiple servers in a network. This offers improved scalability and reliability compared to traditional shared hosting.

Pros of Cloud Shared Hosting

  • Scalability: Cloud hosting allows for easy scaling of resources, ensuring that your website can handle sudden traffic spikes without performance degradation.
  • Reliability: With multiple servers in a network, if one server fails, your website can be instantly migrated to another server, minimising downtime.
  • Flexibility: Cloud hosting often provides more advanced features, such as load balancing and automatic backups, to enhance website performance and data protection.

Cons of Cloud Shared Hosting

  • Cost variation: While cloud shared hosting can be cost-effective for moderate traffic, the usage-based pricing model can result in higher costs if your website experiences significant traffic or resource usage.
  • Technical complexity: Cloud hosting may require more technical knowledge and expertise to set up and manage compared to traditional shared hosting.
  • Unique infrastructures – By default a cloud infrastructure can be setup from pretty simple with a couple of servers or incredibly complex with thousands, that makes it hard to compare the benefits or each cloud provider, since one can have better performance and another reality and another connections and another replication.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

A VPS is a hosting environment where a physical server is divided into multiple virtual servers, each acting as an independent server environment. Each VPS has dedicated resources allocated to it, providing more control and performance compared to shared hosting.

Pros of VPS Hosting

  • Dedicated resources: With a VPS, you have guaranteed resources that are not shared with other users, ensuring consistent performance for your website and application.
  • Customisation and control: VPS hosting grants you root access, allowing you to install and configure software as per your requirements. You have more control over server settings and can tailor the environment to suit your specific needs.
  • Scalability: VPS hosting offers scalability options, allowing you to easily adjust your resource allocation as your website’s traffic and demands grow.

Cons of VPS Hosting

  • Cost: VPS hosting tends to be more expensive than shared hosting due to the dedicated resources and increased control it provides. It may not be the most cost-effective option for websites with low traffic or limited budgets.
  • Server management: While VPS hosting grants more control, it also requires a higher level of technical expertise to manage the server effectively. Users are responsible for tasks like server maintenance, security updates, and software installations.
  • Performance limitations: Although VPS hosting provides dedicated resources, the overall performance can still be affected by the physical server’s hardware limitations. If the physical server is overloaded, it can impact the performance of all VPS instances hosted on it.

So shared hosting, including cloud shared hosting, is suitable for entry-level websites and projects with budget constraints. It offers cost-effective pricing and user-friendly management, but resource limitations and potential complexity concerns should be considered. Cloud shared hosting provides enhanced scalability and reliability compared to traditional shared hosting but can be costlier and requires more technical expertise to run.

On the other hand, VPS hosting offers dedicated resources, increased customisation, and scalability, making it a preferable option for websites with higher traffic and specific requirements. It provides more control and performance, but at a higher cost and with additional server management responsibilities.

To sum it up here on Hostcult we use shared hosting for small sites, placeholders and testbeds, we use cloud shared hosting for bigger sites and production and we use VPS for specific services or files/image/video hosting that need specific software/performance to run.