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VPS Recommendations besides Beyond Hosting (42)

10-31-2013 02:21 PM #1 doppelganger (Member)
VPS Recommendations besides Beyond Hosting

Hey guys,

I'm looking for some recommendations on a good hosting provider for a managed Linux VPS. I'm currently looking at Liquid Web and someone also suggested Host Winds. Who else should I be looking at? I would like to make a decision and start migrating my stuff by the end of this week.

I am done with BH and need something reliable. Their scheduled maintenance today was supposed to result in a 5 minute outage and be done by 8:00AM EDT. It is now 10:20AM EDT and my server has been down for 2+ hours . It makes me sick to think about how much money I've lost due to this.

What do you guys recommend? I don't need a dedi yet but need a fast and reliable VPS.

Thanks,
Aaron

10-31-2013 02:48 PM #2 nyc (Member)

wiredtree is always great

10-31-2013 02:53 PM #3 caurmen (Administrator)

Unfortunately I'm not too good on managed services, since everything I use is unmanaged.

WiredTree and LiquidWeb both have a good rep, though.

10-31-2013 03:03 PM #4 groomez (Veteran Member)

X2 for Liquid web. Been great for 4 years to me

10-31-2013 03:20 PM #5 emonetized (Member)

I'm pissed at Beyond too. I used to have nothing but good things to say about them but reliability over the last few months has been awful.

11:16 AM and my server is still down too. Totally ridiculous.

10-31-2013 03:20 PM #6 doppelganger (Member)

Thanks guys! Definitely leaning towards Liquid but looking for more feedback. I really don't want to end up in another situation like this. My server on BH just came back up. Over 3 hours of downtime and lost rev.

Edit: @emonetized, yeah it's pretty ridiculous. I considered switching when I upgraded a few months back and am regretting not making the move then.

10-31-2013 03:30 PM #7 MrGoogle (Member)

At least yours are back up.
Mine is still down and they keep saying "in 20 minutes or soon".
I just paused all my campaigns

10-31-2013 03:35 PM #8 doppelganger (Member)

Mine is up but it is running like a turd . Super slow and getting database errors in P202.


Warning: mysql_query(): Unable to save result set in /xxxxx/xxxxxxxx/xxxxx/202-config/functions.php on line 16
Can't find record in '202_clicks_site'

SELECT * FROM 202_clicks_spy AS 2c LEFT JOIN 202_clicks_advance AS 2ca USING (click_id) LEFT JOIN 202_clicks_site AS 2cs USING (click_id) WHERE 2c.user_id='1' ORDER BY 2c.click_id DESC

10-31-2013 03:44 PM #9 hunmik (Member)

I have been also really happy with LiquidWeb.

10-31-2013 03:51 PM #10 dynamicsoul (Member)

I have a premium VPS with Burst.net... which is ok for the money.. less load than the budget VPS they do.. not managed tho..

10-31-2013 03:59 PM #11 dragoshsd (Member)

Haven't been a fan of BH for a while, but to be fair my VPS has only been down 20 minutes and I knew about it in advance. 2 hours sounds ridiculous though, esp if you were sleeping and traffic was flowing.

10-31-2013 06:45 PM #12 BeyondHosting-Tyler (Member)

Hi Guys, sorry about all the headache.

Its not like this event was planned, we are doing everything we can to get performance back to where it should be.

For those of you unaffected, the total outage for reboots was only 15-20 minutes if not less.

Also, a final note. If you want 100% uptime, you should rent a dedicated server. You can't pay $70/mo and expect 5 nines of uptime and the best performance on the planet. Cheap, Reliable, Fast... pick 2, can't have 3. Any of our customers on dedicated can attest to having excellent uptime, support and performance.

We will be following up with affected customers on vh3 and vh23 to go over SLA credits and issue refunds/advanced services.

10-31-2013 07:58 PM #13 egan (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by dragoshsd View Post
Haven't been a fan of BH for a while, but to be fair my VPS has only been down 20 minutes and I knew about it in advance. 2 hours sounds ridiculous though, esp if you were sleeping and traffic was flowing.
Agreed. I really want to stay with BH...their customer service is amazing and always prompt.

However, this is the third time these past few months that my server has gone down for at least a few hours. I lost $60 last night while I was sleeping and couldn't pause anything.

I know I'm not going to have the reliability of a dedicated server with the VPS2048...but I can't justify paying almost double every month due to losses from down time.

10-31-2013 08:04 PM #14 doppelganger (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by BeyondHosting-Tyler View Post
If you want 100% uptime, you should rent a dedicated server. You can't pay $70/mo and expect 5 nines of uptime and the best performance on the planet. Cheap, Reliable, Fast... pick 2, can't have 3.
I had 3 solid hours of downtime followed by intermittent outages for the last 4-5 hours. When it is up it's slow as shit! God knows how much money I've lost today and how many retro'd FB ads I now have due to broken links. I just hope that none of my accounts have been banned due to this shit show!

My Prosper DB is completely jacked. I now have corrupt tables that prevent P202 from even functioning properly (when I can connect to it). I can't even keep a connection to the server long enough to make database backups or copy directories off the server.

And you have the nerve to come in here and tell people that they should have paid for a dedicated server??? We know that you love the 'cheap, reliable, fast... pick 2' line but the ironic part is that BH is none of these things.

10-31-2013 09:39 PM #15 nefig (Member)

Hell my DB is still down, and Im charged more than $200/month for my "semi-dedicated" setup.. And its been for few hours like that already. Yeah I can switch to dedi no problem if that fixes the problem somehow, but at a discounted rate to compensate for that and last time's downtime..

10-31-2013 10:13 PM #16 dynamicsoul (Member)

There's no excusing downtime, beyond your control.. but setting up servers/vps to handle lots of volume.. (clicks = simultaneous requests/sql connections) needs a bit of custom tweaking too, which probably falls outside of most managed plans..

its good to up the max sql connections.. need to switch keep_alive off in apache .. amongst other bits.. or get a super powerful dedi

11-01-2013 03:07 AM #17 maynzie (Moderator)

Liquidweb I been bombarded with lately, might be worth having a shot

11-01-2013 05:38 PM #18 BeyondHosting-Tyler (Member)

Hi guys, were extremely sorry for the headaches.

If you are having database stability issues please contact support so we can run mysql repairs for you. It is not our intent to leave your databases non functional. If you're still having ANY issues what so ever do not hesitate to contact support. Were here 24x7 for you.

After yesterdays issues with our existing storage system (which will remain nameless for the sake of legal) we've placed an order with SolidFire (http://solidfire.com/) to vmotion all of our vmware vm's for VPS and Semi-Dedicated to.

Essentially all of yesterdays issues were started by rebooting so many servers in such a short period. It's never ever been a problem before, and testing has never shown it to be a problem, but we cant possibly risk having that happen again.

11-01-2013 10:30 PM #19 cyberdelicstudio (Member)

If you have time (and some patience) then I recommend Digital Ocean. It's not managed but then I don't see an argument as to why you need to pay a recurring cost that for a tool that doesn't change once you install it. I manually installed P202 onto Ubuntu Desktop and I've never used Linux. It took me a few days but I haven't touched it since. It's still tracking all my campaigns and I've never had a problem with it.

11-02-2013 06:11 AM #20 gritz (Member)

For unmanaged VPS's, I am super impressed with Ramnode. Check out what you can get for $39/month with coupon LEB35 (which is 35% off for life, taken from another forum):
4096MB RAM
4096MB VSwap
4 CPU Cores @ 3.3GHz+
120GB SSD space
1Gbps Port

If you run Ubuntu 12.04 and Nginx + PHP + Memcache + MariaDB ... god only knows how much traffic that could handle. I have a Ramnode 1GB SSD and I've had periods of 5-20 clicks/second without it going down.

For managed though, I'd probably go with Liquid Web SSD (3GB Ram @$100/month) or get one from a respected company like Rackspace or Softlayer.

I spent about 1 month learning all about Linux and how to manage my own servers, and I have to say that it's been well worth it. The amount of money I've saved on hosting is retarded. I have one VPS from BuyVM.net that costs $3.50/month and is currently hosting 4 Wordpress blogs... and it's fast and responsive as fuck!

I also have a $12/year VPS that is so goddam reliable it's not even funny. Here's a screenshot from htop which shows my uptime


Would be longer, but I manually restarted it 128 days ago.

But yea, if I were you and I didn't want to learn how to manage my own stuff, I'd choose that LiquidWeb SSD

11-02-2013 08:29 AM #21 prof (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by cyberdelicstudio View Post
If you have time (and some patience) then I recommend Digital Ocean. It's not managed but then I don't see an argument as to why you need to pay a recurring cost that for a tool that doesn't change once you install it. I manually installed P202 onto Ubuntu Desktop and I've never used Linux. It took me a few days but I haven't touched it since. It's still tracking all my campaigns and I've never had a problem with it.
Here here.

Once you've got the workflow down on setting everything up then all is cool. You can also save snapshots as you go so can create a duplicate server in minutes. The other great thing is that if I get a message that in a weeks time there will be some maintenance of sorts which might affect my server then I power power and clone over to another data centre. One quick change of the DNS records and I'm usually up and running again within an hour. It's great.

Oh and it's costing me just $10 / month with $2 extra spent on regular backups.

11-02-2013 09:02 AM #22 _mcr_ (Moderator)

My first question was going to be, "what's your budget?" then I read through the thread saw these were VPS accounts. If you're doing as much volume as it sounds, why not invest a few more bucks and get a dedicated server, or get a load-balanced cloud set up with dedicated database servers? You can't really spend $70 and get mad when things go down. For the sake of comparison, I spend around $40,000/year between Rackspace (cloud servers) and Lunarpages (dedicated and VPS servers) and I have Managed Hosting Intense with both, which means I can call and talk to an engineer 24x7 and they will do what I need them to do immediately. You get what you pay for. Spend an extra $200 and give yourself peace of mind.

11-02-2013 09:38 AM #23 fjk87 (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by prof View Post
One quick change of the DNS records and I'm usually up and running again within an hour.
One quick comment, be careful about DNS propagation in some cases can take quite a while so you might lose on traffic

11-02-2013 09:40 AM #24 andy_d (Veteran Member)

Lol.. all I gotta say, my current VPS has had no downtime since I moved from BH and is shit loads faster, and only $20 more than what I was paying over there for a VPS2048 with LiteSpeed.

Great support, sub-par hosting and an easy target since everyone and their grandma know they mostly host affiliates.. hence the constant issues. DDosing people out of business is not uncommon.

11-04-2013 12:37 AM #25 BeyondHosting-Tyler (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by gritz View Post

If you run Ubuntu 12.04 and Nginx + PHP + Memcache + MariaDB ... god only knows how much traffic that could handle. I have a Ramnode 1GB SSD and I've had periods of 5-20 clicks/second without it going down.
We've got a dozen installs of cPanel+Litespeed at 150-200 clicks per second. Nginx is actually pretty poor at handling high connection load to a fastcgi daemon like fpm. MariaDB won't help SQL insertion rate, however it does handle query caching and large select *stats*, better. We've looked at standardizing all installs with it but cannot adopt that until cPanel natively supports it. Suppose to be on the list coming up.

11-04-2013 12:41 AM #26 BeyondHosting-Tyler (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by _mcr_ View Post
My first question was going to be, "what's your budget?" then I read through the thread saw these were VPS accounts. If you're doing as much volume as it sounds, why not invest a few more bucks and get a dedicated server, or get a load-balanced cloud set up with dedicated database servers? You can't really spend $70 and get mad when things go down. For the sake of comparison, I spend around $40,000/year between Rackspace (cloud servers) and Lunarpages (dedicated and VPS servers) and I have Managed Hosting Intense with both, which means I can call and talk to an engineer 24x7 and they will do what I need them to do immediately. You get what you pay for. Spend an extra $200 and give yourself peace of mind.
Gotta spend money to make money. Good to see your using dedicated!

11-04-2013 01:08 AM #27 kevins (Member)

I have a premium VPS on BH and it's always up and running.

11-04-2013 12:29 PM #28 caurmen (Administrator)

Nginx is actually pretty poor at handling high connection load to a fastcgi daemon like fpm
This is a point well worth making.

Nginx is an awesome server for static content. Images, HTML, etc, it'll serve all day, and it's pretty much bulletproof.

However, if you're doing heavy PHP or other code-based work on the server, Nginx is not (EDIT - always) the best choice. Apache, if configured by someone with half a clue, actually runs PHP at least as fast, because it's more tightly integrated with PHP through mod_php.

And most of Nginx's memory savings - which are huge, it's godlike for memory management - are obliterated by php-fpm, which isn't exactly light on the memory.

I don't know what Litespeed or the other, newer web servers are like for CGI performance, though.

EDIT - Nginx isn't terrible for PHP - it's just not as godlike as it's often painted. For other coding languages, it may be more efficient, too - I know some heavyweight Java people who use it. But PHP specifically is an odd use case because of mod_php.

11-04-2013 07:50 PM #29 BeyondHosting-Tyler (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by caurmen View Post
This is a point well worth making.

Nginx is an awesome server for static content. Images, HTML, etc, it'll serve all day, and it's pretty much bulletproof.

However, if you're doing heavy PHP or other code-based work on the server, Nginx is not the best choice. Apache, if configured by someone with half a clue, actually runs PHP at least as fast, because it's more tightly integrated with PHP through mod_php.

And most of Nginx's memory savings - which are huge, it's godlike for memory management - are obliterated by php-fpm, which isn't exactly light on the memory.

I don't know what Litespeed or the other, newer web servers are like for CGI performance, though.
Litespeed is really really good. It actually has some really advanced memory management caching and deduplication code. We met with the developers for it at the cPanel conference and had a long discussion. Turns out we're one of their biggest customers and they were happy to involve us more with the project.

We have nothing bad to say about it, not to mention the cPanel integration makes it a no brainer for an apache alternative.

11-04-2013 08:18 PM #30 gritz (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by caurmen View Post
This is a point well worth making.

Nginx is an awesome server for static content. Images, HTML, etc, it'll serve all day, and it's pretty much bulletproof.

However, if you're doing heavy PHP or other code-based work on the server, Nginx is not the best choice. Apache, if configured by someone with half a clue, actually runs PHP at least as fast, because it's more tightly integrated with PHP through mod_php.

And most of Nginx's memory savings - which are huge, it's godlike for memory management - are obliterated by php-fpm, which isn't exactly light on the memory.

I don't know what Litespeed or the other, newer web servers are like for CGI performance, though.
That's good to know. I monitor htop constantly and it seems like all my RAM stays cached. Is P202 too dynamic so PHP APC, Varnish and Memcache don't get the chance to cache things? Granted, I am not running 50/clicks per second in volume. I probably average like 0.5 clicks per second, with periods of 10/clicks per second with PPV and Facebook campaigns.

11-05-2013 10:13 AM #31 caurmen (Administrator)

@gritz - interesting! Memcache should be at least somewhat active at that volume, although I don't think that the amount of memory it'll use up is huge. What are you seeing as the footprint of php-fpm on that server at busy times? That's usually where the memory ends up getting eaten on an nginx/php setup in my experience, even with solid caching.

11-05-2013 11:17 AM #32 goshev (Administrator)

If you do not know how manage your server and you can pay a little bit more for it RackSpace or Amazon is the best option though. If you need managed VPS PM me I have like 120 VSPSes with a bunch of providers and will help with what I can. Also I am managing my own VPS environment if anyone wants to test. Another option but the price for that one may go really high is google cloud this guarantees 100% uptime and they have php support now. I have tested a few apps on that it is blazing fast but it can be expensive.

As for a cheap unmanaged VPS RamNode SSD KVM 2GB RAM is indeed pretty good.

11-07-2013 08:46 PM #33 kyleirwin (Member)

Digital Ocean, Amazon EC2, and Rackspace are all great VPS/Cloud hosts. All 3 have peppy machines w/ great networks. AWS maybe a bit weak on the "peppy machines" part, but they make up for it in other ways.

If you're just launching a single machine, I'd go with Digital Ocean. Dirt cheap, all SSD drives, and new hardware.

11-07-2013 10:36 PM #34 dynamicsoul (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by kyleirwin View Post

If you're just launching a single machine, I'd go with Digital Ocean. Dirt cheap, all SSD drives, and new hardware.
Yeah,its a good cheap option.. also if you are stuck there is a geezer on fiverr who will set it all up for you for a couple of gigs.. just search digital ocean on there..

I had him set up full ubuntu droplet, with memcache, nginx, sql and virtual hosts.. for the price of a burger and coffee.. good time saver..

11-08-2013 08:06 AM #35 dynamicsoul (Member)

I had a couple of PMs about who set up DO on fiverr.. here's the gig. Just change your passwords first, and change back after he has set it up for you.. you should have an idea of what you need obviously and message him first, as it's more than a single gig..

http://fiverr.com/smartyajeesh/troub...ocean-problems

11-11-2013 03:44 PM #36 theoptimist (Member)

I have Liquidweb and they are simply brilliant. Their 24/7 support has been immaculate so far, can't ask for much more.

11-18-2013 02:22 PM #37 thepeopleschamp (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by doppelganger View Post
Mine is up but it is running like a turd . Super slow and getting database errors in P202.


Warning: mysql_query(): Unable to save result set in /xxxxx/xxxxxxxx/xxxxx/202-config/functions.php on line 16
Can't find record in '202_clicks_site'

SELECT * FROM 202_clicks_spy AS 2c LEFT JOIN 202_clicks_advance AS 2ca USING (click_id) LEFT JOIN 202_clicks_site AS 2cs USING (click_id) WHERE 2c.user_id='1' ORDER BY 2c.click_id DESC
I keep getting this same error. BH VPS set up with litespeed, stm mobile tracker latest verions. Any ideas how to solve this error?

Cheers

11-18-2013 02:34 PM #38 doppelganger (Member)

When I was getting this they had to rebuild some of the DB tables. I would open a ticket and have them check it out.

11-20-2013 08:42 AM #39 thedudeabides (Moderator)

Quote Originally Posted by kyleirwin View Post
Digital Ocean, Amazon EC2, and Rackspace are all great VPS/Cloud hosts. All 3 have peppy machines w/ great networks. AWS maybe a bit weak on the "peppy machines" part, but they make up for it in other ways.

If you're just launching a single machine, I'd go with Digital Ocean. Dirt cheap, all SSD drives, and new hardware.
Linode is another for self managed VPS. The cheapest option is only $20/month and they seem to come out on top as far as price per performance whenever I check out comparison reviews.

Honestly though I wouldn't recommend a self managed VPS unless you really enjoy learning, because you'll be spending a lot of time figuring things out that could be better spent on campaigns. If you do go down that route I'd recommend tutorials like guvnr's or just google for ubuntu 12.04 server setup and go through the walkthroughs.

11-20-2013 11:27 AM #40 iwarrior (Member)

Wiredtree, cheaper than Liquidweb which is also good, and support is fast!

11-20-2013 11:47 AM #41 caurmen (Administrator)

Linode are awesome, and have just started adding SSDs. Much recommended.

I'd agree with thedudeabides, though. Unless you already know a fair bit of server setup stuff, it's easy to lose a lot of time learning to be a sysadmin rather than an affiliate marketer

11-27-2013 03:48 PM #42 BeyondHosting-Tyler (Member)

We use Linode JP/EU for our monitoring services. They have a pretty reliable infrastructure, however cpu feature sets are lacking because of Xen virtualization. They need to implement KVM/VMWare and stat.

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