VPS, VDS,

[davidh6781]

I require a new host and can't make my mind up. have a budget of £30 a month and need 99.99% uptime (unlike webfusion who i am currently with)

I tried layershift but resources in that price bracket are below what i require. although there service and help is fantastic just cant justify the high prices at the moment. (few clients moved on thus not the extra cash)

can any suggest some decent hosts of vps, vds, services that are pritty good before i tear my hair out and loose another good paying client.

when thinking about who do all the big brands use, eg, play.cpm, ebuyer, amazon etc.

cheers

 

[LayershiftDamien]

Hi David,

The resources issue (particularly as compared to UBC based providers like Webfusion) is rather complex... The amount of memory (RAM) on any given VPS package is difficult to compare against another from a different provider because of the different virtualisation platforms, and different ways these can be configured.

As an example, Webfusion use Virtuozzo as do we at Layershift. However, Webfusion run theirs in the older, less efficient, and less stable, UBC mode. This is how they generate the notion of guaranteed/burstable resources. The burstable point is a whole separate issue which creates its own problems and system instabilities, but even aside from that, your memory usage will inherently be significant higher on this system, and also performance is degraded.

We've been running our VPS services since 2003 (one of the first Virtuozzo VPS providers in the UK), and initially we also used UBC - it was the only resource management scheme within Virtuozzo at the time.

More recently, a new optimised resource management scheme was added to Virtuozzo called SLM. After testing, we determined this system offered much better performance and stability for our end users, and as a result we converted all of our customer VPS's to this as part of a complimentary upgrade 1-2 years ago. By the way... there was no downtime for this either

SLM reduces the amount of memory used by your VPS. Without going into the technical details, the reduction can be very significant. As an example, we've moved VPS customers to a dedicated server and seen memory usage immediately increase 2-3x.

I'd invite you to contact us to discuss this resource issue further. If you can explain more about your exact requirements, I can let you know if it's reasonable to expect this to run properly on our VPS:10 plan.

when thinking about who do all the big brands use, eg, play.cpm, ebuyer, amazon etc.

Well some of them (not the mentioned ones) use our services ... but I think those particular examples mentioned all operate their own servers.

 

[davidh6781]

Hi Damien. Im pritty sure you may of put two and two together. i have been considering the vps10 but worried about it only been 320mb of ram. is that burstable? this is in the budget.

whats happening is this, resources gets too much and stop the apache and then requires me to reboot and nurture all day every day.

what is UBC and SLM

 

[LayershiftDamien]

No, the 320MB isn't burstable, but this is one of my points - burstable resources, especially memory is a very very bad thing! It reads well "in the brochure", but in real world usage it causes serious trouble. This is why we took the decision to switch to the better technical solution, instead of the better marketing one...

To explain, if you're using burstable memory at the moment, one reason for Apache getting stopped (killed) could well be because the burstable memory you're using needs to be reclaimed from your VPS. If your VPS can't release this quickly enough, it will be forcefully removed from it - that causes the instability.

How many sites do you run on the VPS, and what software do you use in those sites (e.g. WordPress, vBulletin, just static HTML etc.)?