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Topic: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

Hi,

I've spent the last few days researching hosting plans and I'm asking for personal experiences.

A little background: I run my own Debian server, it has an AMD 3000+, 1.5GB of ram and 2 200GB SATA drives. The machine screams and all the applications I have hosted on it just fly.

My quandry: My DSL connection is getting saturated and I can't get any more speed where I live. So I've been looking around with hopes of uploading my sites and using my machine for development purposes.

Uploading my sites to a hosting provider will give me more bandwidth but I'm wondering if the dynamic nature of the sites could be hurt by the limitations of a shared or a virtual server.

Most of the VPS plans allocate a certain amount of memory per server, never gave it much thought before but could this be a limiting factor in say a CMS or forum app?

At this point, I'm just very confused and just wondering what others have come across.

I know Rickard used to host PunBB at his home before moving to Textdrive, so I'm hoping others have also followed similar paths and can share their experiences.

Thanks.

2 (edited by Tobi 2005-07-27 10:06)

Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

I am running two servers that are my own plus some shared space.
With that I never had any trouble.

I think you should consider the following:
SHARED HOSTING
YES if you have static content mostly
YES if your provider gives you all the features you want (PHP, MysQl, Python, Imagemagick, whatever)
YES if he's flexible enough to install them for you if they are not here (mostly smaller companies do that)
NO if you have REALLY hungry apps or you need lots of space/bandwidth

VPS:
It is really a lot ike shared hosting in that you totally depend on how many people share a machine.
with the exceptiin that you have control over the software running


ROOT SERVER:
If you are a control freak this is for you.
But You should really think about security.
Are you capable and willing to spend a lot of time to keep your system up to date and protect it against hacker kiddies?
Do you want to mess with complicated backup strategies to have everything there when yu need it?
I'm talking out of experience here.
I am a control freak and I pay for it.. sad

Moneywise:
Think about it.
You can get a good shared hosting pack for abround 8 EUR/month
For 19 you can get a VPS
For less than 40 you get a root server.

It only matters what you do there and if it's worth it.
With some google ads you can pay even the root server, that should be no limitation.

And don't think too much about CPU power.
We have lots of apps running, some of them are very busy, we have also a number of quite frequented sites up, and all this now runs on a machine that is now 6 years old.
Better invest in a RAID system and a considerable amount of memory than into a super duper turbo CPU.
Your apps won't need it as much.

Sure they will run a bit faster, bt you won't really need it.
From my experience a good debugging session in your apps gives you more speed than a brand new dual processor smile

The German PunBB Site:
PunBB-forum.de

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Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

Tobi,

Thanks for your insight.

The reason I prefer a VPS solution is that your space is protected. I've seen too many site defacements happening lately because somebody on another Shared hosting account forgot to update their software.

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Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

I guess you make the best choice for you then.
I just moved all my accounts from my dirt-cheap-but-no-real-service Rootserver because I was tired of having to be paranoid 24/7. Then yesterday, I had *just* finished, the HD crashed for the 3rd time in 2 years. Luky me smile
I just want to say:
Unless you are a unix god or unless you don't really mind reinstalling your complete once in a while for various reasons - stay away from root servers.
Yes, they are cheap, yes, they give you incredible amounts of free traffic - but you pay in working hours and nerves...

But even a good VPS means that you have to e extremely careful with your setup, keep *everything* current and so on.

On more thing to consider:
Most hosters offer backup which is normally an incremental backup, one version only.
So if anybody manages to install a rootkit on your machine, be it virtual or not, and you find out after 2 weeks you have no clean backup to install.
At least yuo should keep versions for 2-4 weeks on your HD. A HD crash AND a rootkit install is possible but not s likely.. smile

The German PunBB Site:
PunBB-forum.de

5 (edited by afarber 2005-07-29 11:46)

Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

Since you're using Debian: check out OpenBSD.
I did this switch few years ago and love it:

smile good quality of packages and base (i.e.  you don't  have the rpm-hell
   situations when 1 package suddenly conflicts with another)
smile secure: you don't spend much time patching it:
  just look here, how many (not many!) patches were there:
   http://openbsd.org/errata.html (for base)
   http://openbsd.org/portsplus/ (for packages)
smile they maintain their own version of Apache 1.3.x
  with many security changes and chroot

See here how to try out punBB on OpenBSD.

And if you like it, you can go for a root server.
Here is an example how to set it up (uses serial console)
http://www.bsdguides.org/guides/openbsd … strato.php

And when you get the root server, setup the pf too
(OpenBSD's nice firewall) to protect your forum even more.

http://preferans.de/ - russian card game

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Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

I took the plunge and moved my domains to a hosting provider.

Started the move yesterday morning and I'm already done. A total of 6 domains and over a Gigabyte of files moved up. Everything is working great and I'm very happy with the speed and service.

What I liked about this hosting plan is that I get unlimited domains, unlimited MySQL databases, 12Gb of disk space and 150Gb of bandwidth a month. So I have plenty of room to grow as I add new domains in the future.

The plan is called the 'True MultiSite Plan' at Site5.com

Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

Ok, everyone should choose what's more comfortable for them.

One more argument against sharing a site is that your neighbours
might be peeking at your files if something is not tight.

http://preferans.de/ - russian card game

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Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

afarber wrote:

One more argument against sharing a site is that your neighbours
might be peeking at your files if something is not tight.

This has a lot to do with file permissions.

Most good hosting providers require your files to be set at certain permissions, where only the owner of the web space, which is you, has write permissions. Of course some directories need more permissions to be set in order to store cache files, images and such but at least your scripts can't be harmed.

The best advice it to backup on a regular basis, I keep copies of all my sites on my local machine just in case.

9 (edited by afarber 2005-07-29 18:35)

Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

Yeah ok. We're not talking about backups here.

The Apache process needs to read your files, right?
And this means your neighbours will read them too wink

http://preferans.de/ - russian card game

Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

Just a FYI... site5.com runs PHP as CGI (phpsuexec) on their servers. Which means that you can chmod 600 all your PHP files (especially config files) and you're neighbours can't access them.

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Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

sleddog wrote:

Just a FYI... site5.com runs PHP as CGI (phpsuexec) on their servers. Which means that you can chmod 600 all your PHP files (especially config files) and you're neighbours can't access them.

Which also means quite a payload in performance.
Oh well, I guess you can't have one without the other.

Second, I think there is some confusion between write and read permissions.
What afarber means that other people sharing the server can see your code.
Doesn't sound like a problem unless they find your precious config.php with the DB access data...
Only way around that is to have all accounts jailed.
It's understood that nobody except for you should be able to write toyour files ...;)

The German PunBB Site:
PunBB-forum.de

12 (edited by Tobi 2005-07-29 20:30)

Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

afarber wrote:

Since you're using Debian: check out OpenBSD.

I have my server running on FreeBSD and it's really a good thing to do I guess.
BSD is hell when you want to have an X/Desktop-system but for a server it's just a bit more work than linux.
The main adavantage is the same that Linux has over Windows:
Since there are not so many BSD servers out there there are not as many discovered and exploited security holes. It's just not as interesting.

plus it is really stable, never had a kernel panic or such, and I do bad things to the poor little machine sometimes.... smile

The German PunBB Site:
PunBB-forum.de

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Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

afarber, I forgot to mention that my firewall is running OpenBSD. I got into OpenBSD a few years back while building an IDS appliance for a venture. Liked it so much that I use it as a firewall now.

Tobi, my sites on Site5.com are just popping, so if there is a performance hit, I haven't seen it yet.

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Re: Hosting: Shared vs Virtual

hcgtv wrote:

Tobi, my sites on Site5.com are just popping, so if there is a performance hit, I haven't seen it yet.

There is a performance hit, that much is sure.
If you feel it or not is another story and depends on the server and the number of users you're having.
So if you get along fine don't worry.
Only if performance is dropping then PHP running as cgi is one suspect (after bad programming and too many users connecting .. smile )

The German PunBB Site:
PunBB-forum.de