March 30, 2016 at 10:55Dollar hosting
This material is not an official position of the company and contains only a review and opinion of an employee who posts his own web projects with his fellow webmasters.
The time comes when the most common shared hosting is not enough to solve a certain kind of tasks. For example, there is no way to customize yourself and install a specific operating system, or the hosting company’s administrators themselves, for security reasons, will not always allow you to install the necessary script. Yes, and somehow it’s not very pleasant to sit on the “needles” due to the fact that the next unfriendly neighbor of the shared hosting will begin to send spam and this, in consequence, will cause all projects located on this IP address to suffer. Technical support naturally immediately blocks such "wise men", but if a similar problem is repeated with this IP more than once, then as a rule it manages to get into the database, and difficulties can begin with website promotion.
For a long time, the guys and I rented a few “pieces” of disk space on the hosting server and, until all issues were resolved, we did not even think about moving. To be honest, in principle, most issues can now be resolved. We often go to meet our customers and provide one-time access to install the script or offer to transfer the user to another IP address in case of another spammer, which in the end may be a regular novice webmaster. All issues can be resolved, but for this it is necessary to additionally open a ticket and make extra "body movements" that take time.
And now comes the moment when it becomes just too lazy to do this, because there are more important things. And each time, it’s annoying to pull administrators somehow, who knows, maybe conscience wakes up, or maybe you just want “freedom”. Freedom to work with your own, albeit small, but it’s your own project, and you are set limits and the opportunity to step left or right needs to be additionally asked in the ticket, and there’s far from the fact that technical support will give it a go. The guys and I were tired of all this and we decided to move to a small virtual server.
At the time of our migration, the hosting company has been providing cloud VPS service for a year now. Honestly, these virtual “cars” had both pleasant moments in history and those that I don’t really want to remember. True, during operation, most of the shortcomings were eliminated and after a rather long period of time no problems were observed anymore.
So, I made a newsletter among several of my acquaintances webmasters who had placed their projects with us for a long time, and offered to take the first step to that “freedom” that we had been talking about for quite some time. The validity period of our current shared hosting packages allowed us not to rush too much and think about everything well. By the way, just at that moment, material was being prepared for publication on the review of free hosting control panels, and in particular, work on one of them, namely the Vesta panel, made it possible to tip the scales in favor of moving to a small virtual server.
With nostalgia I recall the work on the articleabout the "goddess" Vesta, and indeed about cooperation with her development team. I think this is not the last collaboration and the guys will please us more than once with interesting additions and updates to their wonderful panel. But this publication is not about that, therefore we will not be distracted.
They agreed to carry out the move after the people move away a bit from the New Year holidays, there will just be enough time to check everything and figure out some aspects of the administration. The guys entrusted me with all the organizational issues, because I brewed all this “mess” with migration. Well, I think, let's go ...
To begin with, I will give a few weighty arguments precisely in numbers. Count for yourself - we rented 2 shared hosting packages for 4 webmastersSSD BASIC, and paid $ 38 a year for it, before the price was even higher. When renting the simplest cloud VPS - S in the USA for a year, the price will be about $ 48. What is the point of paying more ?! - you ask. And let's compare the resources and, I think, a similar question will no longer appear.
The first point is disk quota. Both hosting packages SSD BASIC in total gave us no more than 20 GB of disk space on the server, against about 40 GB in a virtual machine. However, I want to immediately inform you that after installing the operating system (OS) on our VPS we “rolled” CentOS 6, 31 GB of free disk space remained:
And since there is nowhere without a convenient graphical control interface, we also installed the Vesta panel, which “ate” about 1 GB of disk space. As a result of all these simple settings, the guys and I got a guaranteed 30 GB on a solid-state drive of a virtual server:
The second point is traffic. If on 2 shared hosting packages we could consume no more than 200 GB per month, then on VPS - S a package is already available in 4 TB (~ 4000 GB). The difference is felt, right? And if you add that each virtual “machine” must have a connection channel of 1 Gbit / s, then I think many of you will want to check this at least. Well, let's check. We connect to the server via SSH and run the following command in the console:
And look at the result:
But we want to check virtual servers on locations in the USA:
To be honest, I did not think that it would be more than 100 Mbit / s, since when loading even such a channel into the shelf, the server can “eat” 30 TB of traffic in a month. Do you need it? Your 4 TB margin with a 1 Gbit / s channel (which is provided on these virtual servers) can "fly off" well in a maximum of 12 hours. And then what, sit almost the whole month without a server or spend extra money on upgrading traffic ?! Well that's the truth, do you need it?
Given the rather serious server connection bandwidth and very small traffic packets, I advise beginning traffic generators to monitor consumption or not to rent this type of server at all. They are just not for this kind of tasks guys. Yes, you can take a dozen of these machines and get more resources in total than on one dedicated server for the same amount, but certainly not in order to distribute the load among all virtual servers.
Such VPS may be of interest to those involved in email marketing.. There are a sufficient number of companies that provide such services, and it is just for such tasks that it is very important to have a large number of IP addresses. It’s just that the data center doesn’t always make it possible to order more than 10 ... 15 IP to one dedicated server, which also costs money. And if for the price of one IP you get not only an address, but a whole virtual server. True, that sounds tempting?
My guys and I do not do email newsletters, because VPS was rented just for the sake of gaining freedom of action on our “piece” of the server. We also hoped that the problems with curvature and love for freebies, which sometimes turned into troubles with spam, were already in the distant past. But, to make my dreams more calm, I still decided to install a few additional goodies on the server. I will not say that it was a good idea, but first things first.
We had little experience in dealing with spam, after we started using a not-so-“clean” module for the CMS of one of the projects. Naturally, the best advice would be to not use dubious software. But sometimes you really want to get a nice feature. But just then a nice feature turned into a killer feature was really not a joke. Therefore, I went to read the dock and at the same time set up the SpamAssassin virtual server together with ClamAV.
Of course, just installing this software is not enough, you need to do additional configuration. But honestly, it’s good that I didn’t start doing it right away, but first I decided to go into the Vesta control panel in order to activate all commercial extensions, create users, etc. I remembered that the panel has pretty beautiful and informative load graphs, for some reason I really wanted to look at them with at least one eye. And just here, I got a little bit crazy. The graph of RAM consumption was as follows: I
thought it might be a glitch, so I opened the terminal and entered the free command with the -m switch , and here is the result:
Mmm ... yes, I think this is what I decided to pump the “typewriter”, but I completely forgot that on board it only has 1 GB of RAM. He quickly returned to the console and stopped ClamAV using the service clamd stop command :
SpamAssassin decided not to touch it yet, since it should not “eat” a lot of resources. I waited a bit and went to look at the RAM indicators:
Over 300 MB of free RAM, and now it has become easier for the virtual machine to “breathe", and it somehow let me go. I think stopping SpamAssassin will free up at least 100 MB more, but I would still like to figure it out and set up a small, but anti-spam protection. Also, the idea slipped through to run the same ClamAV on cron assignment, followed by updating the databases, scanning and automatically sending the results to each user's mailbox. After which the next cron job would stop the process and most of the day the server would work in normal mode. Theoretically, all these actions can be accommodated in one hour. But, after a meeting with administrators, I decided not to do this. Yes, and let the loading of the RAM into the shelf, and for an hour of time can be very detrimental to the availability of sites,
To begin with, it was necessary to transfer the projects to a new place, monitor their work, and only after that install additional buns, and, if necessary, optimize the VPS. But I also wanted to do everything here and now.
Since it did not immediately grow together with additional protection, I went to the forum in search of a solution for backing up data. During the study of information, I remembered that the Vesta control panel allows you to make backups both locally and upload them via FTP to a remote server. To do this, just create an FTP account on some service, and then enter all the necessary data in the corresponding menu of the control panel. Yes, our company provides backup serviceand for pretty reasonable money. But to be honest, the guys and I were not ready to increase the hosting budget by almost 2 times due to backup. Therefore, using the search, we found several services on the Internet where you could get FTP access for free. As an example of one of them is Turtobit . There, the free package has a limitation due to the fact that the total size of files downloaded at a time should not exceed 10 GB, but for a start we decided that it would be enough. And already in the process of using VPS, we will look, and who knows, maybe even set up a backup to YandexDisk. Everything will already depend on the flight of the virtual “machine”.
So, having received the FTP access data, we go to the Server menu section of the Vesta control panel. Then we click the Configure button, and going down to the very bottom, select the BACKUP - Remote backup item, where we enter all the necessary data:
Immediately after that, I advise you to go to the BACKUP menu and create a backup with your hands to make sure that the settings were made correctly. Honestly, after I saw the first tar archive on an FTP server, my soul became so calm. These guys, and mine, too, are now backed up.
Most likely, a lot more will be added, changed or completely reinstalled during the operation of the VPS. This process can be endless if the projects develop and require additional changes in the settings of the server itself. Yes, with the creation of a virtual server that would be ready for almost everything, there were minor difficulties. But this VPS is a “machine” of the wrong class, and there was no problem at all to pump the Slavik (ZAZ-1103) right up to the Skoda Octavia Tour.
The guys and I tried to do it cheaply and cheerfully, and I think we succeeded. As a result, each of us got his own “piece of freedom” on our personal virtual server. Great things start small, and great web projects start their life on hosting for $ 1 per month. And if at the same time you completely control the flight of your own, albeit slightly “pumped machine”, then believe it will be long and successful.
PS Since there are still questions regarding additional protection, I would like to see in the comments all possible opinions on this issue and on setting up such small virtual servers.
PPSDo not think, we do not stimulate anyone to rent a service, for example, for almost $ 4 and share it between 4 users, it just happened so, and most webmasters have enough shared hosting without these dances with a tambourine)
This material is not an official position of the company and contains only the feedback and opinion of the employee who posts his own web projects with our fellow webmasters.
The time comes when the most common shared hosting is not enough to solve a certain kind of tasks. For example, there is no way to customize yourself and install a specific operating system, or the hosting company’s administrators themselves, for security reasons, will not always allow you to install the necessary script. Yes, and somehow it’s not very pleasant to sit on the “needles” due to the fact that the next unfriendly neighbor of the shared hosting will begin to send spam and this, in consequence, will cause all projects located on this IP address to suffer. Technical support naturally immediately blocks such "wise men", but if a similar problem is repeated with this IP more than once, then as a rule it manages to get into the database, and difficulties can begin with website promotion.
For a long time, the guys and I rented a few “pieces” of disk space on the hosting server and, until all issues were resolved, we did not even think about moving. To be honest, in principle, most issues can now be resolved. We often go to meet our customers and provide one-time access to install the script or offer to transfer the user to another IP address in case of another spammer, which in the end may be a regular novice webmaster. All issues can be resolved, but for this it is necessary to additionally open a ticket and make extra "body movements" that take time.
And now comes the moment when it becomes just too lazy to do this, because there are more important things. And each time, it’s annoying to pull administrators somehow, who knows, maybe conscience wakes up, or maybe you just want “freedom”. Freedom to work with your own, albeit small, but it’s your own project, and you are set limits and the opportunity to step left or right needs to be additionally asked in the ticket, and there’s far from the fact that technical support will give it a go. The guys and I were tired of all this and we decided to move to a small virtual server.
At the time of our migration, the hosting company has been providing cloud VPS service for a year now. Honestly, these virtual “cars” had both pleasant moments in history and those that I don’t really want to remember. True, during operation, most of the shortcomings were eliminated and after a rather long period of time no problems were observed anymore.
So, I made a newsletter among several of my acquaintances webmasters who had placed their projects with us for a long time, and offered to take the first step to that “freedom” that we had been talking about for quite some time. The validity period of our current shared hosting packages allowed us not to rush too much and think about everything well. By the way, just at that moment, material was being prepared for publication on the review of free hosting control panels, and in particular, work on one of them, namely the Vesta panel, made it possible to tip the scales in favor of moving to a small virtual server.
With nostalgia I recall the work on the articleabout the "goddess" Vesta, and indeed about cooperation with her development team. I think this is not the last collaboration and the guys will please us more than once with interesting additions and updates to their wonderful panel. But this publication is not about that, therefore we will not be distracted.
They agreed to carry out the move after the people move away a bit from the New Year holidays, there will just be enough time to check everything and figure out some aspects of the administration. The guys entrusted me with all the organizational issues, because I brewed all this “mess” with migration. Well, I think, let's go ...
To begin with, I will give a few weighty arguments precisely in numbers. Count for yourself - we rented 2 shared hosting packages for 4 webmastersSSD BASIC, and paid $ 38 a year for it, before the price was even higher. When renting the simplest cloud VPS - S in the USA for a year, the price will be about $ 48. What is the point of paying more ?! - you ask. And let's compare the resources and, I think, a similar question will no longer appear.
The first point is disk quota. Both hosting packages SSD BASIC in total gave us no more than 20 GB of disk space on the server, against about 40 GB in a virtual machine. However, I want to immediately inform you that after installing the operating system (OS) on our VPS we “rolled” CentOS 6, 31 GB of free disk space remained:
[root@SKRS1666 ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg0-root 33G 870M 31G 3% /
tmpfs 499M 0 499M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/vda1 485M 47M 413M 11% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg0-temp 2.0G 3.1M 1.9G 1% /tmp
And since there is nowhere without a convenient graphical control interface, we also installed the Vesta panel, which “ate” about 1 GB of disk space. As a result of all these simple settings, the guys and I got a guaranteed 30 GB on a solid-state drive of a virtual server:
[root@SKRS1666 ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg0-root 33G 1.7G 30G 6% /
tmpfs 499M 0 499M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/vda1 485M 74M 387M 16% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg0-temp 2.0G 3.1M 1.9G 1% /tmp
The second point is traffic. If on 2 shared hosting packages we could consume no more than 200 GB per month, then on VPS - S a package is already available in 4 TB (~ 4000 GB). The difference is felt, right? And if you add that each virtual “machine” must have a connection channel of 1 Gbit / s, then I think many of you will want to check this at least. Well, let's check. We connect to the server via SSH and run the following command in the console:
wget -O - https://raw.github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest_cli.py | python
And look at the result:
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from XxxxxXxx Netherlands B.V. (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)...
Selecting best server based on latency...
Hosted by NFOrce Entertainment B.V. (Amsterdam) [0.00 km]: 3.338 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 942.47 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 363.98 Mbit/s
But we want to check virtual servers on locations in the USA:
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from XxxxxXxx USA (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)...
Selecting best server based on latency...
Hosted by Fast Serv Networks, LLC (Ashburn, VA) [28.16 km]: 2.708 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 194.86 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 315.74 Mbit/s
To be honest, I did not think that it would be more than 100 Mbit / s, since when loading even such a channel into the shelf, the server can “eat” 30 TB of traffic in a month. Do you need it? Your 4 TB margin with a 1 Gbit / s channel (which is provided on these virtual servers) can "fly off" well in a maximum of 12 hours. And then what, sit almost the whole month without a server or spend extra money on upgrading traffic ?! Well that's the truth, do you need it?
Given the rather serious server connection bandwidth and very small traffic packets, I advise beginning traffic generators to monitor consumption or not to rent this type of server at all. They are just not for this kind of tasks guys. Yes, you can take a dozen of these machines and get more resources in total than on one dedicated server for the same amount, but certainly not in order to distribute the load among all virtual servers.
Such VPS may be of interest to those involved in email marketing.. There are a sufficient number of companies that provide such services, and it is just for such tasks that it is very important to have a large number of IP addresses. It’s just that the data center doesn’t always make it possible to order more than 10 ... 15 IP to one dedicated server, which also costs money. And if for the price of one IP you get not only an address, but a whole virtual server. True, that sounds tempting?
My guys and I do not do email newsletters, because VPS was rented just for the sake of gaining freedom of action on our “piece” of the server. We also hoped that the problems with curvature and love for freebies, which sometimes turned into troubles with spam, were already in the distant past. But, to make my dreams more calm, I still decided to install a few additional goodies on the server. I will not say that it was a good idea, but first things first.
We had little experience in dealing with spam, after we started using a not-so-“clean” module for the CMS of one of the projects. Naturally, the best advice would be to not use dubious software. But sometimes you really want to get a nice feature. But just then a nice feature turned into a killer feature was really not a joke. Therefore, I went to read the dock and at the same time set up the SpamAssassin virtual server together with ClamAV.
Of course, just installing this software is not enough, you need to do additional configuration. But honestly, it’s good that I didn’t start doing it right away, but first I decided to go into the Vesta control panel in order to activate all commercial extensions, create users, etc. I remembered that the panel has pretty beautiful and informative load graphs, for some reason I really wanted to look at them with at least one eye. And just here, I got a little bit crazy. The graph of RAM consumption was as follows: I
thought it might be a glitch, so I opened the terminal and entered the free command with the -m switch , and here is the result:
[root@lw1666 ~]# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 996 933 63 0 26 126
-/+ buffers/cache: 780 216
Swap: 4095 259 3836
Mmm ... yes, I think this is what I decided to pump the “typewriter”, but I completely forgot that on board it only has 1 GB of RAM. He quickly returned to the console and stopped ClamAV using the service clamd stop command :
[root@lw1669 ~]# service clamd stop
Stopping Clam AntiVirus Daemon: [ OK ]
SpamAssassin decided not to touch it yet, since it should not “eat” a lot of resources. I waited a bit and went to look at the RAM indicators:
Over 300 MB of free RAM, and now it has become easier for the virtual machine to “breathe", and it somehow let me go. I think stopping SpamAssassin will free up at least 100 MB more, but I would still like to figure it out and set up a small, but anti-spam protection. Also, the idea slipped through to run the same ClamAV on cron assignment, followed by updating the databases, scanning and automatically sending the results to each user's mailbox. After which the next cron job would stop the process and most of the day the server would work in normal mode. Theoretically, all these actions can be accommodated in one hour. But, after a meeting with administrators, I decided not to do this. Yes, and let the loading of the RAM into the shelf, and for an hour of time can be very detrimental to the availability of sites,
To begin with, it was necessary to transfer the projects to a new place, monitor their work, and only after that install additional buns, and, if necessary, optimize the VPS. But I also wanted to do everything here and now.
Since it did not immediately grow together with additional protection, I went to the forum in search of a solution for backing up data. During the study of information, I remembered that the Vesta control panel allows you to make backups both locally and upload them via FTP to a remote server. To do this, just create an FTP account on some service, and then enter all the necessary data in the corresponding menu of the control panel. Yes, our company provides backup serviceand for pretty reasonable money. But to be honest, the guys and I were not ready to increase the hosting budget by almost 2 times due to backup. Therefore, using the search, we found several services on the Internet where you could get FTP access for free. As an example of one of them is Turtobit . There, the free package has a limitation due to the fact that the total size of files downloaded at a time should not exceed 10 GB, but for a start we decided that it would be enough. And already in the process of using VPS, we will look, and who knows, maybe even set up a backup to YandexDisk. Everything will already depend on the flight of the virtual “machine”.
So, having received the FTP access data, we go to the Server menu section of the Vesta control panel. Then we click the Configure button, and going down to the very bottom, select the BACKUP - Remote backup item, where we enter all the necessary data:
Immediately after that, I advise you to go to the BACKUP menu and create a backup with your hands to make sure that the settings were made correctly. Honestly, after I saw the first tar archive on an FTP server, my soul became so calm. These guys, and mine, too, are now backed up.
Most likely, a lot more will be added, changed or completely reinstalled during the operation of the VPS. This process can be endless if the projects develop and require additional changes in the settings of the server itself. Yes, with the creation of a virtual server that would be ready for almost everything, there were minor difficulties. But this VPS is a “machine” of the wrong class, and there was no problem at all to pump the Slavik (ZAZ-1103) right up to the Skoda Octavia Tour.
The guys and I tried to do it cheaply and cheerfully, and I think we succeeded. As a result, each of us got his own “piece of freedom” on our personal virtual server. Great things start small, and great web projects start their life on hosting for $ 1 per month. And if at the same time you completely control the flight of your own, albeit slightly “pumped machine”, then believe it will be long and successful.
PS Since there are still questions regarding additional protection, I would like to see in the comments all possible opinions on this issue and on setting up such small virtual servers.
PPSDo not think, we do not stimulate anyone to rent a service, for example, for almost $ 4 and share it between 4 users, it just happened so, and most webmasters have enough shared hosting without these dances with a tambourine)
This material is not an official position of the company and contains only the feedback and opinion of the employee who posts his own web projects with our fellow webmasters.