Ladies and Gentlemen,

 

A while ago I posted on this board looking for some advice on reseller hosting, I got some good feedback and in the end I went with cyberhostpro.com so far I am very happy with the service, the outsourced 'live' help is a bit hit and miss, but any problems they can't help with, or any issues I have sent directly have always been answered by the "managing director", Chirs in super fast time, usually in about an hour, even on weekends!

 

I'm a web designer, and I have recently begun developing for Magento, and my current reseller account does struggle a bit. I have also bee trying to do a few more interesting things which I couldn't do on my reseller account so have set up my PC as a server which is working OK...for testing.

These things combined, I am considering stepping up onto a VPS, obviously my first post of call was cyberhostpro but to be honest I really don't find their VPS as competitively priced as some others I have seen.

 

So, my query, if you have had any particularly good/bad experiences with a VPS host then please share.

 

If you represent a web host, please check that you can compete with cyberhostpro before linking to your own site (cyberhost are charging £20p/m for 512mb RAM, 40Gb Storage, 450Gb Bandwidth)

 

Over to you...

Hey Thom

 

The essential question you need to ask yourself is, do you want something FAST and reliable, or do you just want cheap.

If cheap is the #1 priority, then your already in the right place.

 

Secondly, whoever told you a VPS is a step UP from any shared or reseller plan, was drunk, or doesnt know very much.

A VPS should be seen as a step sideways, not a step up, because although you get a gauranteed allocation of memory and space/bandwidth, your STILL competeting for disk data throughput of the physical server, only now, you have not just lots of websites competing, but also lots more operating systems, and control panel softwares too, so speed is never something you will experience on a VPS, its just not what they were built for.

 

I'm sure loads will tell you otherwise to get you to part with your $, but thats kind of why your already here asking for better...

 

The VPS you have mentioned also sounds highly oversold. Youw uldnt get anywhere close to 450GB with that little memory, and a "shared" of CPU time, nowhere close.

 

Not something we would ever even want to compete with, its asking for problems right from day 1.

Thanks for the reply wesh, I visited your site a few times, first thing I always notice is how fast it loads, very impressive.

 

Although you are offering a specific service, speed and quality focussed, I find your prices completely unfeasible considering I am very happy with the service I have now on standard sites, which makes up the bulk of what I host.

 

I would love to host my sites with you but at 4 times the price its not even an option at the moment.

 

(also your 'hosting/plancompare.php' prices don't seem to match your 'hosting/index.php' prices, I know you changed your prices recently)

I was just hoping a few people who already have a VPS and are happy with the service would share their experience and recommendations....

 

?

 

Secondly, whoever told you a VPS is a step UP from any shared or reseller plan, was drunk, or doesnt know very much.

 

I wouldn't say that at all - that is an incredibly blinkered view. In some cases a virtual server can be a sideways step - largely due to the fact that a virtual server with 512MB-2GB of RAM has much less headroom to cope with large influxes or traffic than a decent provider's shared hosting system (we use 24GB of RAM, for instance...)

 

That said, a virtual server does allow some very specific optimisations in a system which otherwise wouldn't be possible on shared hosting. Apache with PHP running as DSO with opcode caching is not possible (or rather, advisable) on shared hosting - but the performance benefit (*especially* for Magento) is massive compared to suPHP and no op-code caching on shared hosting. It also means you can tweak Apache, MySQL and other higher level options specific to your website rather than running a "jack of all trades" configuration that is normally required on a shared system.

Magento is quite a resource hogging application.. So its necessary that you have a good vps or a dedicated server that meets the rquirements of your magento and the published products.. Further if you are opting for cpanel, chances are that you will get a cheaper vps.. However, managing the website on a plain VPS or a normal free control panel such as webmin etc, will be your skillset and caliber.

Also remember that having a control panel may indeed take up quite a bit or resources.

From my experience Plesk can be quite resource hungry, If you have the technical expertise to manage the server without a control panel, I'd recommend that.