New to VPS: Need Advice

[Wes]

Hi,

I haven't yet signed up (will do in the coming weeks) for a Basic VPS (most likely). My previous experience with Internet hosts revolves around shared hosting solutions. With shared hosting all server administration is achieved through the hosting providers control panel and is all pretty straight forward. A VPS (from Blacknight) seems to be very different in that you get your own Linux instance running in a virtual machine with a guaranteed upper resource limit and root shell access. Beyond that you're on your own and sys admin experience would be handy.

What I need is a typical LAMP configuration, to host a handful of (in-house developed) web applications. We are satisfied that Blacknight will be able to scale up our VPS solution as future needs arise, but our concern is with the self management aspect of the VPS. I would imagine it will be me that is admistering the host, and my experience of Linux (Ubuntu) is by no means expert. I have configured LAMP systems before, but I have never worked with DNS, or setup VHosts in Apache, etc. I am aware of Plesk but at the same time I am worried that if I need to go mucking about in a root shell, I might bugger Plesk and we can;t afford to suffer downtime once our application(s) go live, as this will be a production environment.

As I said above our VPS is not to facilitate shared hosting reselling, it is just one or two web applications, with a handful of domain names, SSL, Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL, PHP. I would imagine that we will be installing various PHP extensions over time, and wanting to keep things patched (for security).

Can anyone advise me on what we should do? I am comfortable in a Linux shell, but it would be great if Blacknight or anyone had any tutorials on how to do the typical stuff on a LAMP server, so when we do sign up for a VPS account we don't waste valuable time getting our heads around the environment. E.g. when I register a domain name through Blacknight, how can I get this pointed to and working with my apache instance on the VPS?, basic questions like that.

[reverbstudios]

I've been on the VPS for a few months now and its mostly great but it DOES require a lot of management and knowledge on your part and I've had to email support a lot.

A lot of the time they tell me they can't help me because VPS is unmanaged. I havn't seen any great resources on how to manage the system either..

[BrianORegan]

If you're in anyway familiar with software installation on Ubuntu a LAMP setup is very straight forward, if you're unsure, there is an abundance of step by step guides online to assist you with the install.

Regarding DNS/Vhosts etc if you go for a CP like plesk or DA your configuration environment will be identical to that you're used to on shared hosting package.

The Blacknight staff are very helpful and knowledgeable but it is a self managed service.

It might be an idea to setup a local Ubuntu LAMP server so you can become comfortable with the install.

If you have any issues I would be more than happy to assist.

[joes]

Hi Wes,

Just a quick overview of our experience which may or may not be useful to you.

We were (and for some sites still are) on a Shared hosting package but were advised to get off it and a VPS was suggested as the best option.

The experience has been mixed. A huge overhead, which I don't think is applicable in your case however, was moving over the existing sites, installations and emails as these must be basically manually re-installed.

The front-end control panel (cp.blacknight) we still find very confusing. (Why one should go to the Billing menu to look at Domain entries still baffles.) Plesk itself is quite usable after a little learning of where things are.

One of the great aspects is that you have full control (root access, ssh in to the box etc). However it is also one of the drawbacks. We aren't system administrators and don't want to be however with the VPS an amount of system administration is required. Also be aware that full control comes with caveats. For example we wanted to run Magento which required updating PHP which although we could do it would have resulted in breaking Plesk.

As the others mention it is a self-managed service. Now in our experience the support staff, after stating the fact that it is a self-managed service, have been helpful in working with us to resolve issues even though officially it is outside their remit. Therein lies the problem however for the support staff and us. Small companies like us can't afford a resource to manage a server however in truth a VPS should have somebody doing this.

Weighing everything up if we were doing it again we wouldn't opt for the VPS but would shop around for a more managed VPS (Blacknight maybe this is something you would consider - applying security updates, patches etc and then leaving the application level stuff to the client?).

There is a lot of documentation on LAMP out there obviously but the Blacknight documentation is poor. A case of more is less I think. It is hard to know whether one should be looking at the blog, the knowledgebase, the wik, the forums or the what? More often than not it requires the assistance of Support to help guide us through (which as mentioned earlier although helpful, always comes with the caveat of this is outside their scope of support).

Hope this is useful. Good luck with it.

Joseph

[reverbstudios]

I would agree with Joes 100%. Blacknight, you might do better to offer support or part management of the VPS.

[pkelly]

Hi There,

We will be adding management plans shortly. The management will be a flat rate of 19.95 / month and will cover most things. I only this morning got an e-mail from our Dev team with the details. So _hopefully_ we'll be putting those live in about 1 to 2 weeks and you'll be able to upgrade to a plan that has management without any downtime.

Paul

[joes]

That's great news Paul - look forward to it.

Joseph

[Wes]

Wow, thank you very much for all the responses.

Well it seems the reality confirms some of my original fears. The thing is, we have a development/testing server here in our office (Ubuntu:LAMP). However as this box services an intranet as opposed to the Internet, from an administrative perspective the challenge is somewhat different. I think a production server will need to be locked down to a much higher standard with a documented backup and recovery plan in place.

I can apt-get update/upgrade/install to my hearts content, but if we were to do something like that while using Plesk on a VPS and have it go down, well then to me it's just not good enough. As far as I'm concerned (and I'm sure my opinion is shared by many), a lot of the effort is in the intial installation and security effort. Beyond that it's incremental updates, backups and disaster recovery.

I appreciate that Blacknight will soon be offering a VPS management service, although the pricing model doesn't leave me with a smile on my face. E.g. I would imagine that the initial management effort would be substantial, and minimal thereafter (patch management), except in the unfortunate and hopefully infrequent event of disaster recovery. Then again their offer does allow us budget and cap the cost of the service down the road.

I would be interesting to know what level of management would be available in such a case. E.g. can we simply ring up Blacknight and dictate that we want xyz features available on our existing VPS withing a specific time period. Also do we have to keep an eye on the availability of patches ourselves and request that Blacknight install them. What is the Service Level Agreement? is my question I suppose.

Also can anyone comment on the performance of their respective VPS package. E.g. I am not 100% on what sort of VPS we will require to drive the following scenario. What we are hosting are web applications, with one or two small front end websites. The website will have a very low footprint in terms of transferring image/video files, etc (mostly text). The web applications will have very little in terms of graphics and will rely mostly on the transfer of frequent but small data volumes via Ajax type calls. Now these frequent Ajax calls could be made every few seconds from literally hundreads of client locations simultanously. Each request will kick of some database queries and return low volumes of data.

My concern is that since there could be a lot of requests, my fear is that the server plan we go with will not be beefy enough to service all those concurrent requests. I am not speaking from any sort of experience on the matter of monitoring server loads, so I'm not sure what a basic VPS would be capable of servicing. It would be great if we could get an idea of this without risking failure through trial and error and having to move up and up server plans to find a suitable one.