VPS recommendations

[chrisburton]

Could anyone recommend a VPS host (other than Media Temple)? My budget is around $3,000 to 4,000 per year for hosting. Also, this is only for one site.

I prefer that the VPS is managed as I’m not familiar with running my own server.

[Dhaupin]

Liquidweb is what I use. Totally great and they will help you out with any recompiles or whatever within minutes of opening a ticket.

[chrisburton]

Thanks @Dhaupin. I’ll look into what they offer.

[Dhaupin]

I’m also using rackspace… Not by choice. I’m not impressed by their network performance.

[chrisburton]

Really? I’ve heard good things about them. Although, Rackspace might be a little too much for a small personal site.

[chrisburton]

Thanks @jurotek. I came across their plan last night and they seem to have pretty good reviews.

Someone also recommended http://www.swbroadband.co.uk but I live in the US.

[chrisburton]

Has anyone tried these guys?: http://www.ramnode.com

[hotpink]

If you want to work with an unmanaged solution…

Amazon offers new customers a year of free service for one micro instance.

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

I am currently hosting a couple of low traffic wordpress sites. No problems so far, up 147 days without a restart.

I mostly followed this guide to configure my server.
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu-12.04-lts-nginx-bind-dovecot-ispconfig-3

Because of the low specs of the micro-instance, I had to edit some config files to limit the maximum number of processes nginx and php5-fpm can open.

If you go this route, you should probably use Apache for the webserver rather than nginx. I find Apache to be more user friendly and there are more online resources/tutorials for Apache, as well as gaining use of .htaccess

[chrisburton]

@hotpink Oh, geeze. That is over my head. I would most likely need a managed VPS only because I have no clue what I’m doing. I’ll be editing the initial post above for my preferred features. Thanks for the recommendation and taking the time to write that up.

[Dhaupin]

@chrisburton just don’t go rackspace even for a small site. Pretty sure they only have 1 data center in Dallas and their virtualization sucks… I ping out alot at peak hours. Ps I’m forced there because a client uses americommerce.

I sound like I work for liquidweb… I have 8 small business Ecommerce sites on our vps there. 3 of them are frameworks. In total a couple thousand unique sessions a day, fast db calls, half a second renders, 0 network performance issues. They will basically run it for you if you have no idea. They are always trying to just do it themselves when I ask them about something. I got a storm server and recently compiled pdo_sql, soap, adjusted all kinds of php settings, mem limits, etc. Its WHM with easyApache, but Liquidweb still heavily wanted to do it for me. Anymore I just let them… Less liability on me.

Keep in mind: 95% of hosts are simply resellers of a handful of big guns. Most of these big guns dont even own their data centers, its rented from Dupont or others. So in reality there are only a few viable top level hosts.

[Dhaupin]

Choopa is another top level host. Im trying to remember the rest hah. Its been awhile since I’ve dug.

(ps the Choopa bot is actually ahref’s bullshit bot using choopas router as it’s name… Sly. Add nogo to your robots.txt)

[chrisburton]

Appreciate that info @Dhaupin. I’ll add it to my list.

[chrisburton]

Decided to go with Webfaction. I came to the conclusion that I don’t necessarily need a VPS but a host that will allow the installation of Dropbox. Thanks for all of the recommendations.

[Zoom]

> I prefer that the VPS is managed as I’m not familiar with running my own server.

For $3000 you can easily get a managed dedicated server. I have a managed dedicated server with Liquid Web and I pay about $2000 per year.

For anything hosting related you should check http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ They also have a “Web Hosting Offers” section where you can get discounts for several hosts.

> a host that will allow the installation of Dropbox

Are you using Dropbox for deployment somehow?

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