Just my two cents on the VPS white paper that just came out.
I used to think that Virtual Private Servers were fantastic. It was like getting a dedicated server for a fraction of the price.
The problem is that it was LIKE it, but performance was not one of the similarities. I was overly anxious and willing to believe in the hype that I migrated one of my shared hosting accounts to a VPS environment and breathed a sigh of contentment for about 2-3 months.
Then I started having weird issues – I would be SSH-ed into the Linux shell, typing away and there would suddenly be a long pause as if the network had simply dropped out. It came back and I just figured it was my own connection.
A couple months after that, I realized that the problem was definitely with the host – I was experiencing the same problem from several different connections. I complained to my VPS provider, who said that it was another VPS customer on the physical server who was running scripts that were hogging the physical resources and that they would take care of it.
The problem and the support conversation continued for a little over a year before I got fed up with it. Strictly speaking, VPS should give me a dedicated amount of CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and space, and apparently that couldn’t be 100% resolved.
I tried another VPS host, and the same problems kept happening (I’ve set up dozens upon dozens of servers before, so I’m well-aware that it was not my configuration, which was a simple LAMP setup with little traffic).
During my stint with the second host, I was researching colocation pricing for a client, and realized there were some pretty similarly-priced colocation packages out there (usually anywhere from $30 to $100).
After my research, I signed up with a 2U package with a company called ColoPronto ($40 a month – not the cheapest, but the least expensive that also had good reviews), then bought a used PowerEdge 2950 server off of an eBay seller with good ratings for about $600. After configuring the server at my house, I shipped it to ColoPronto and I’ve been a happy camper for about 5 months now, no hiccups.
FAR better performance and reliability than VPS, and I’m running some additional services on it now, too. No hiccups yet. I should note that I have no affiliation with any hosting company beyond being a customer.
I’m not sure what the craze is about VPS – maybe not enough people have complained about it yet, but you definitely get what you pay for with VPS. Companies like Verio lure you in with plans “as low as $30 a month”, and then when you have performance issues, they push you to upgrade to more expensive plans to get more resources. It seems very bait-and-switch to me. If you don’t want to buy your own server, then I’ve found the best place to get dedicated servers is from ThePlanet.com – I’ve been with them since they were RackShack, and have had good experiences with their dedicated setups.
Anyone else had similar experiences with VPS, dedicated, or traditional hosts?