Virtual private servers (VPS) are neat inventions: they give you a guaranteed slice of resources on a real server, which means you generally have plenty of CPU, disk space and memory to run your bulletin board. Usually things run spiffy on a VPS. Limitations like outgoing email quotas generally aren’t a problem. A VPS is generally completely configurable, letting you control and install pretty much anything. It’s all this and they don’t have the cost of renting a dedicated server. The technical overhead is usually less too.
Working with a client yesterday though reinforced in my mind that a VPS is not for everyone. I’ve had a VPS for this site and my other domains over the years. I eventually discovered I didn’t need one. Shared hosting was fine for my needs (and budget), providing I could find the right shared host. Even though I am a techie at heart, doing this stuff is not where I wanted to spend my time. I could usually work around shared hosting issues and if I couldn’t, I could usually find a better shared host and move my stuff there.
VPS Pitfalls
What are some of the pitfalls of a VPS? Here are some:
- Generally you don’t get much handholding. You usually get a web host control panel like Plesk to take a lot of the grunt work out of managing a VPS, but you can’t get rid of the technical behind the scenes work altogether. For example, the client I worked with yesterday abruptly ran out of virtual disk space. He likes to keep tons of images that are attached to posts on his VPS. He got no warning emails that he was about to use up his quota. This resulted in a cascading series of failures that me and his web host got to clean up. In his case, it appears that abruptly running out of space corrupted his database. phpBB was trying to write to the phpbb_moderator_cache table and it failed. It corrupted this table, showing it in the list of tables but it wasn’t actually accessible. I got to clean up that issue while he got to figure out just how many system backups he could safely store in his virtual space. With 20GB of attachments and about 80GB of space, you can’t make too many backups without triggering problems.
- You may be paying too much for file space on a VPS. Prices for a VPS generally start around $50/month. If you have a lot of static files like images and videos, a lot of these static files could be moved into the cloud, you could conceivably pay a lot less money rather than buying more virtual space on your server when you need it. Putting attachments in the cloud not easy to do in phpBB although there is a dated AWS S3 extension that could be used, if you have the technical skills to set it up and migrate the files.
- You really need to have some intermediate or advanced Linux skills. Do you know how to check the size of your physical and logical volumes? Do you know how to give a volume more space? If you do, great, but if you don’t you’ll have to rely on your host’s tech support and probably pay for the special support. You need to know SSH, how to navigate around your VPS from the command line and change file and directory permissions. To install some software, you might have to know how to use a package manager. It’s up to you to monitor your server’s performance and troubleshoot issues like emails getting blocked from going out.
- Good shared hosting may be cheaper and meet your needs. Finding good shared hosting can be hard and the market constantly changes. Although shared hosting has many downsides, it is considerably cheaper than a VPS and someone else manages the infrastructure for you, generally speaking.
- Like with shared hosting, there are lots of VPS hosts out there that aren’t great. Generally, you won’t know how good an experience you will have until you try it.
For these reasons and others don’t assume a VPS is the solution to your problems, even if you are willing to pay $50/month or more. It’s nice to get fast response time and that can be very helpful for things like search engine optimization, where fast page loading is a critical factor for high placement in a search index. It’s nice to see things run smoothly and reliably, which is generally what happens when you are on a VPS. When things go awry though, it’s likely to be a painful experience, unless you have the skillset for managing these sorts of problems.
VPS host recommendations
I am usually asked for recommendations for shared hosting. For a VPS, the best I’ve seen so far has been MediaTemple’s VPS hosting. I’ve had a client on a MediaTemple VPS for twelve years and system problems have been virtually nonexistent. I don’t recommend their Grid service, although that experience is some years old. A self managed VPS plan with two virtual CPUs and Plesk, for about $50/month, has proven very reliable for this client. MediaTemple is now owned by GoDaddy, and some say things were better before they were bought out, so certainly things can change for the worse.
