Virtual private server hosting

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It’s been quite a while since I last tried to post. This is due to several reasons. A military training deployment took some of my time away. My master’s degree continues to steal chunks of free time from me. My server has been crashing a lot. WordPress runs on PHP and it is notorious for causing strange server behavior. I had been hosting my servers with Midphase.net and was happier with their support than I had been with my previous hosting company, Bluehost. However, I was on a plan that had been phased out and the server my virtual machine was located on had fairly frequent crashes. My load averages were extremely wacky although I was paying for my own private virtual machine with decent RAM and CPU cycles.

VPS.net's node management window
VPS.net's node management window

I finally bit the bullet and decided to switch to Midphase’s new venture they call VPS.net. VPS.net is an experiment in cloud computing. It lets you scale your resources up and down in about 15 minutes. If your site(s) suddenly start getting a lot of traffic you can scale things around quickly in a dashboard environment. My server loads had been averaging 1 to 2 with Midphase’s non-cloud VPS. Since I’ve switched to the new cloud environment with 3 nodes my load averages are sitting a lot lower as evidenced below.

login as: root
root@68.169.44.205’s password:
Last login: Thu Jul 30 18:32:23 2009 from proxy-sov.uk2.net
root@evermore [~]# top
top – 19:57:17 up  8:23,  2 users,  load average: 0.04, 0.06, 0.07
Mem:    786432k total,   739084k used,    47348k free,    54416k buffers
Swap:  1048568k total,    91872k used,   956696k free,   197320k cached
PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
1500 mysql     15   0  118m  12m 2908 S  0.7  1.6   1:02.24 mysqld
31709 nobody    15   0  227m  43m 5172 S  0.0  5.7   0:12.99 httpd
31712 nobody    15   0  178m  48m 4968 S  0.0  6.3   0:10.66 httpd
3509 nobody    15   0  178m  47m 4864 S  0.0  6.2   0:05.98 httpd
3492 nobody    16   0  170m  40m 5432 S  9.3  5.3   0:05.76 httpd
3499 nobody    15   0  168m  37m 4964 S  0.0  4.9   0:04.99 httpd
3508 nobody    15   0  168m  38m 4956 S  0.0  5.0   0:04.25 httpd
3497 nobody    15   0  175m  46m 4340 S  0.0  6.1   0:03.75 httpd
4449 nobody    15   0  167m  38m 4212 S  0.0  5.0   0:03.65 httpd
15172 root      18   0  144m  13m 4304 S  0.0  1.8   0:02.01 httpd
96 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:01.76 kswapd0
3722 root      15   0  103m  40m 1800 S  0.0  5.2   0:01.59 spamd
5859 nobody    15   0  166m  35m 4820 S  0.0  4.7   0:01.43 httpd
5871 nobody    16   0  169m  39m 4832 S  0.0  5.1   0:00.97 httpd
250 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.93 kjournald
32282 root      15   0  100m  37m 1840 S  0.0  4.9   0:00.77 spamd
15526 root      15   0 96040 3772 1004 S  0.0  0.5   0:00.50 cpsrvd-ssl
1648 root      15   0 74796 1008  616 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.33 crond
15515 root      15   0 38036 2284 1176 S  0.0  0.3   0:00.25 authProg

top – 19:57:17 up  8:23,  2 users,  load average: 0.04, 0.06, 0.07

Mem:    786432k total,   739084k used,    47348k free,    54416k buffers

Swap:  1048568k total,    91872k used,   956696k free,   197320k cached

If this keeps up I’ll be pretty happy at VPS.net. One caveat is that VPS.net doesn’t offer phone based tech support – they have an online ticketing system and usually respond within a few minutes to a ticket being initiated. Pricing for a VPS node starts at $20 per month.