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  #1  
04-22-2013, 10:41 AM
RolloTamasi RolloTamasi is offline
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Hi all,

At this moment I am looking at several fully-managed WordPress-optimized VPS-based hosting-packages offered by EuroVPS. Detailed information about these 'new' packages can be found here. Summary: Varnish, NGINX, PHP-FPM, PerconaSQL and Virtuozzo, on EMC Fibre Channel SCSI drives in RAID-10.

I would really appreciate your thoughts on this offer. (Please note the price/specifications table at the top of page 5 of the Google Docs file.)

My question is three-fold:
  1. What is your overall opinion about the offered setup?
  2. Assuming I am allowed to create a custom WP300 package (because I don't need the 6.4TB/month and the 36GB disk space ~that would be huge overkill, I'm just looking for very fast WordPress hosting), which specifications could you recommend me to decrease/increase? RAM, CPU, Port Speed and/or cache time?
    Or in other words: which of these factors mostly contribute to increased site speed?
  3. Instead of Virtuozzo they offer to accomodate Xen at the same price. What would you advise? Xen supposedly offers the benefit of not being disadvantaged by the webhoster overselling its resources. Yet for the same reason Virtuozzo has the benefit of offering the possibility to burst to the fully capacity of the server itself..
    (FYI: They say they deploy no more than 5 customers per node.)
I look very much forward to your thoughts, and if you need any more information please let me know.

Best regards,

Rollo
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  #2  
04-23-2013, 11:25 PM
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kpmedia kpmedia is offline
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EuroVPS is one of the best hosts we've ever used, and we've stayed with them for 7 years. So that's a great choice regardless of what you get there, and they have everything from shared to VPS (of course!) dedicated. I'm not sure which I like best -- the hardware or the support. Both are excellent, and very few hosts can compete. But enough about the host. Let's look at the plan...

Varnish, NGINX, PHP-FPM, PerconaSQL and Virtuozzo, on EMC Fibre Channel SCSI drives in RAID-10.
  • Varnish is nice, and I use it myself with an Apache cPanel server, also at EuroVPS. (Not this server.) The caching does speed up sites, even small ones with minimal traffic.
  • PHP-FPM is what you want to use with nginx. (Just like suPHP is what you should use with Apache cPanel.) That's really it.
  • Percona is fine. I prefer MariaDB, but the point is to get away from plain old MySQL (for Linux) when you can. You'll see a small speed bump on small to medium sites, and bigger gains on large sites.
  • Virtuozzo ... meh. It's okay, but I prefer the CPU isolation of Xen, KVM, or VMware. It's harder to abuse those nodes.
  • EMC fiber, SCSI, RAID-10 ... this is what I meant by they use good hardware!
Caching matters most ... which is RAM (same thing). I'd not cache it too long, or too short, but just right. (Like The 3 Bears! )

CPU is important for running sites, though it depends on lots of factors.

Unless your sites is huge, port speed doesn't matter. Note that some hosts say "1Gbps" (gigabit port speed) for the node, not the container. I don't know if EuroVPS does this, so check. Most hosts don't give a container it's own 1Gbps port without making them pay for it. If so, that's maybe one area where you can cut costs on a custom plan.

The bulk of the price for plans is RAM and CPU share. It's not really about space (unless it's unusually large) or bandwidth. Bandwidth is pretty much ignored these days because it's cheap, and most hosts have a lot. It's the one thing that could be honestly advertised as "unlimited" as far as I'm concerned. You're limited by the port speed anyway. I forget the math. So you won't get any discount there (a token amount, at best), and just a few on the space. Again, you're paying for RAM and CPU mostly... plus whatever the management/support costs are, which is why you'd get this plan.

Get Xen. Not Virtuozzo. Easy decision! Vz is the old way of doing things, Xen is the new way.

"Burst" is false. Virtuozzo is SLM RAM. Your RAM ceiling is always your RAM ceiling. The CPU is "fair share" which means everybody on the node competes for it. This can be fine, but even the best hosts have abusers. I'm now 100% Virtuozzo free. (Now if I can just get 100% OpenVZ UBC free, and get hosts to adopt OpenVZ vswap.) OpenVZ has UBC RAM, which is the old way as well, which calls its RAM "burst". But it's not extra RAM for you to use. It's a bad name that confuses even small-time hosts (or "hosts"). UBC is a term for allocation and kill limits. OpenVZ vswap is much, much better.

At this point, I wouldn't need this kind of plan. I know enough to install and secure my own VPS or dedicated servers. But I realize I've become an advanced user, and often even know more than hosting techs. For anybody that's not experienced in these things, it can seem like rocket science as it's not easy, even if you try to follow guides online. So for them -- and you, if that describes you -- it'd be a great plan. Nobody else has such a plan either, from what I've seen.

It will DEFINITELY speed up a WordPress based site. And when you have a good host, you don't have to fart around with hosting-related problems. It just works, and you can focus on you site.

I'm curious what the costs are.

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  #3  
04-24-2013, 02:49 AM
RolloTamasi RolloTamasi is offline
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Hi KP,

Thanks a lot for your elaborate reply, this is very useful information!

As for the precise costs; Please see the top of page 5 of this document. Would you mind (briefly) sharing your opinion about the packages they offer (WP300, WP500 and WP700), and the associated costs? Are these 'sharp' prices?

Thanks again!

Last edited by RolloTamasi; 04-24-2013 at 03:09 AM.
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04-24-2013, 03:40 AM
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kpmedia kpmedia is offline
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The basic formula for the 4gb VPS is this:
- the cost of the VPS (65)
- WordPress fair market charges (29)
- the cost for full support (50)

Now realize that's just my opinion of what those numbers stand for, but it comes out about right for the 4gb VPS. So it's very fair for WP300, considering what all you get. I've got my own ticket in, regarding the higher priced plans. I think it's because of the CPU cores, which nearly makes it a dedicated server, hence the expense.

How big is your site?
From the sound of things, you won't need more than 4gb anyway.

EuroVPS is definitely offering some nice plans there. That's similar to my own customized servers.

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04-24-2013, 03:49 AM
RolloTamasi RolloTamasi is offline
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Great to hear

You're correct that the WP300 will probably suffice. My site isn't big in terms of required disk space or visitor numbers (although those are probably going to increase), it's just that it does employ quite some plugins and that I'd really like to offer those visitors a very fast experience.

Thanks for all your help!
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  #6  
04-24-2013, 04:00 AM
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kpmedia kpmedia is offline
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If you do have problems, come back here and list your plugins. Some of them are just badly coded, and have looping code and similar errors. That includes some popular plugins! Keep that in mind.

I run a lot of plugins myself on some sites -- 46 at the big one -- and keep those on EuroVPS dedicated servers. It's cached like crazy, my custom work. That sites run very well, loads times are about 0.9s -- less than 1 second.

I wanted a quality host, and they were and are it. Someday soon I'll have my 10-page review done. Yeah, you heard that right, 10 pages! When you've been with a good host as long as we have, there a lot of ground to cover. They gave some advice and education to me over the years, and I'm grateful. I probably wouldn't know some of what I do, had it not been for them.

Or if you have any other issues with them or your site, let me know.

Good luck.

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04-25-2013, 07:21 AM
RolloTamasi RolloTamasi is offline
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Hello KP,

After all, one more question;

You previously wrote: "Unless your site is huge, port speed doesn't matter."

Do I then understand correctly that the port speed in itself does not contribute to site speed?
That port speed could more or less be thought of as a 'funnel width', in that it won't alter the speed of what is passing through, as long as it is large enough to let everything through that wants to simultaneously pass through?

More specifically;
Let's imagine I got a 8GB, 6x E5 2.3Ghz cores, 2m average cache time package. Would a port speed of 20Mbps then suffice as long as the site is 'not huge'? Or could the port speed in that situation very well be a bottle-neck that limits the performance that the 8GB RAM and 6 core CPU are able to handle?

Perhaps more to the point: Should port speed increase with RAM and CPU?
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04-25-2013, 07:30 AM
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Port speed won't matter. 50Mbps is no different from 100Mbps is no different from 1000Mbps/1Gbps, when the site does not use that much concurrent bandwidth. You'd have to have a lot of content being pushed to a low of people at once for that to matter. Your analogy is pretty spot on.

I don't like to use anything less than 50Mpbs. I'd not select 20Mbps unless the site was small, and it was unlikely to grow.

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