Archive for January, 2010
128MB wasn’t enough
128MB wasn’t enough for me. My VPS struggled to serve my sites, and too many simultaneous connections caused the server to swap wildly, bringing up CPU and disk usage. My VPS got suspended once for over usage of resources. Despite more tweaking, the server was still too slow for my liking.
I wanted to upgrade to a plan with more RAM, but the plans on RapidXen were beyond my budget. I looked around and found VirtuallyDedicated. Their 640MB (with 1.25GB swap) was still reasonably affordable for me, and I decided to take that plan. I did not regret my decision. The extra RAM really does help, and my sites load faster, and handle more connections. Even compiling PHP for LiteSpeed took a fraction of the time. Network connectivity is much better, especially in terms of bandwidth. A tip if you’re buying hosting in another country: make sure you do latency and bandwidth tests. Not all datacentres are made equal. 10-20KB/s is really bad.
So far, so good with this VPS. My only issue right now is the lack of a control panel (for Xen VPSes), which means things like reboots have to be requested and done by staff. They keep telling me a control panel is launching soon, but I have not received any word.