Posted by mherchel on February 8, 2011 at 1:54pm
I’m looking for managed VPS hosting for SurfingNosara.com. We currently use Media Temple, but they’re slow- even after doing as much site optimization as I can.
The primary goals are
- Database and processor speed. We currently use the Boost module to handle most anonymous traffic, but when logged in, the site crawls.
- Disk space – We currently use around 30GB of disk space (mostly high res image uploads), but we may start having more automated uploads and videos.
- Multiple Sites - There are several other sites that will be hosted within the same VPS
I started doing a bit of research into different competitors. I’ve looked into Linode, and Webenabled but they seem only to offer unmanged VPS services (managing it via SSH unless you install CPanel/Plesk).
I see that many other companies have managed VPS, but when I search for reviews, I get mostly spammy/affiliate links from Google.
Does anyone have any positive experiences to share that could help out?
Comments
I once used MT too
but quit shortly thereafter and moved all of my sites, as well as those of my clients to the Rackspace Cloud. It's not a VPS - although there are some new managed options that may be worth taking a look at there. I can't recommend Rackspace highly enough - they're on the ball with performance of the equipment, and their support is awesome and only gets better if you use one of their dedicated, managed boxes.
WebEnabled VPSes come with the control panel
All WebEnabled VPSes come with the control panel that allows you to manage your sites... Using the control panel, you can create as many sites as you can fit in your VPS; if you run into disk or memory limits, you can upgrade your VPS instantly. The control panel also gives you the ability to clone sites and to manage multiple sites via domain access. WE offers a web interface to Drush so you can add/update core and Drupal modules right from the control panel. VPSes also come with nagios monitoring so you can be alerted if your VPS is running in CPU, disk, and memory limits.
With WebEnabled, you can create development teams for each site and use the integrated GIT and SVN for code management. You can also setup automated nightly, weekly, and monthly backups for certain sites.
Disk space, CPU, and memory allocation of your VPS depends on the plan you purchase... we recommend starting small and growing your VPS as needed.
Feel free to contact me if you have questions.
Salim.
Salim Lakhani
President, WebEnabled
skype: sklakhani
SL at WebEnabled.com
http://www.WebEnabled.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sklakhani
With Media Temple the problem
With Media Temple the problem is they are using Virtuozzo for servers virtualization and Virtuozzo (especially since version 4) is well known as the worst choice for Drupal hosting due to I/O performance. You can find Virtuozzo mentioned as a source of performance issues by many people here on g.d.o.
I suspect you are affected by the same issue, and while Media Temple can be still an excellent choice for other hosting needs, it is not the best place to host Drupal.
I would recommend Voxel.net managed services, as they offer not only dedicated VoxSERVER options but also VoxCLOUD, which is IMO even better than Rackspace and Amazon, see comparison tables: http://www.voxel.net/voxcloud-competition-comparison.
We use VoxSERVER and VoxCLOUD in three of our four global locations: in the New York, Amsterdam and Singapore to provide our high performance Aegir based SaaS Drupal solutions for almost a year already and we are very satisfied with their service.
By the way, they have even Pantheon as a ready to deploy OS distro for your VoxCLOUD server and their site is also build on Drupal 7.
I've used HostGator
I have used HostGator's fully managed VPS: http://www.hostgator.com/vps-hosting/ (~$40/mo)
While I cannot provide any speed tests for you, I can say that I have been very impressed with HostGator. I host everything there now -- also with shared hosting. They have 24/7/365 tech support (by phone/email/live-chat) and they are actually knowledgeable and US-based. Even with the VPS, they will freely answer question regarding that setup.
I know with the shared hosting that they will migrate your site (files and db) for free. It might be worth doing a one-month test (using different domain name or their temp URL, of course) with your "slow" site and compare. Drupal runs great on their servers. They do offer a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.
And, they use 130% wind energy for their other servers, if "green" services are important to you. (They are to me.)
Rackspace Cloud Holds My Trust
I have all clients and personal clients on Rackspace cloud servers. Like roborracle, I've experienced nothing but awesomeness from their service, support, and systems.
I'm currently running 4 Ubuntu 9.10 servers hosting 10+ production sites and a plethora of development sites. I love the ability of taking a backup snap-shot of a virtual server, install a new instance as a tarball, develop on it, debug/destroy it and delete it within minutes.
Scaling up and down server configurations (up to 16GB ram) based on traffic and load on the fly (5-10 min. max rebuild time) has saved my butt a few times when launching large marketing campaigns for clients.
I have not used their managed services but I would assume they are great as well.
Rackspace Cloud +1
I had a few servers set up with the Rackspace Cloud. I originally started with their managed services, which was awesome, but then needed the extra power and flexibility of their cloud services. Their support is always spectacular. We had a great drupal setup with web server, development server, database server, and a backup server. And, we used their CloudFiles CDN for media/assets.