Geekstorage vs Bigscoots - Best managed cPanel VPS host?
I am looking to rent out a VPS server from one of these companies to cut down on cost since my current host takes more than 24 hours sometimes to reply to a ticket.
I require management host with cPanel/WHM and both of these companies fit the bill. VPS server I am looking at right now are the following: Bigscoots: MScoots2048
This is a very hard decision, I've never had any luck with OpenVZ or Virtuzzo hosts, it appears I keep getting crappy performance out of them and very slow, where Xen Providers have been outstanding for me. Main reason I am leaving current host is that I cannot deal with 1-2 business days response times at times and this is making me annoyed to the point where I need to move asap. Currently I pay $70 a month for the following:
So, with all that said, which one do you think I should go with? Geekstorage or Bigscoots? |
Hi IcEWoLF, welcome to the site. :)
Based on what I know about these two hosts, I think I'd defer to BigScoots for two reasons: (1) Reputation: Their reputation precedes them. Geekstorage has a bit more hit-or-miss reputation with their shared and reseller hosting. I do like their custom billing and domain management panels. It's one of the few really nice ones I've seen to date, aside from Futurehosting. (2) Infrastructure: I'm not all that impressed by OnApp storage solutions. I've talked with a number of high-end hosts, and OnApp setups can easily be setup like crap. There's a number of hosts that use OnApp simply for bragging rights that they're now offering "cloud" hosting. I've used OnApp hosting, and it's honestly not much different from any other well-run SAS 15k RAID-10 array in a single node. I'll probably be reviewing BigScoots in the very near future. :2cents: Not to add confusion to the conversation, but SpeedySparrow also has Xen OnApp VPS hosting. I have one there right now, and it's fine. I was logged into it just today, in fact, doing some testing on it. So that's another host name to throw onto the pile, should you not be 100% set on Geekstorage or BigScoots just yet. |
Hi kp,
Your right, the most recent review that I see from geekstorage was few months ago and since then some negative reviews at WHT. They did say they made some big changes, one going from virtuzzo to xen. Also noticed they recently added a new manager in their group recently. With that said Bigscoots appears to be very flexible and appears to have some great positive reviews. The only thing it concerns me is how much they oversell their machines on openvz since ram usage works differently and how much of that ram is truly available for me to use. Both companies are located in the same datacenter. I do agree about geekstorage being hit or miss. But the horror stories appear to be mainly from shared hosting. I chatted with Scott and he appears to be a really nice person that truly wants their customer to be really happy. Also I will probably need to do more reading on the OnApp product. Bottom line besides server performance I need a web host that doesn't take 12-24 hours to reply to a simple ticket... |
I guess the bigger issue is what you're planning to do with the machine. 2GB of RAM is a decent size for a Linux server, including OpenVZ and Virtuozzo environments. I would be surprised if either OpenVZ or Xen systems were consistently barfing or giving you issues with those kinds of resources. If that is happening, there's probably a deeper issue with either the host, or with the content.
Regarding OpenVZ vs Virtuozzo vs Xen vs others... You've probably seen my easy-to-understand analogy of OpenVZ in other forums online: Quote:
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Back to Topic... ... costs aside. ... virtualization method aside. You're looking for a host that has known-good uptime for their VPS setups, and have an ability to effectively respond to (and resolve the issues of) customers within 30-60 minutes. I know of several great choices, and then the hosts you're looking at now will probably qualify there, too. Again, what is the specific use of the VPS going to be? That can help with selecting the right host. :) |
To host my website (forums) also will be using it to test xenforo ad additional websites projects.
I tried KnowHost LA and that left a bad taste in my mouth since it took 20-30 seconds to pull my website or load the page....they couldn't figure out what's going on...even a vanilla site took 10+ seconds to load. -- merged -- I am open minded, I am willing to go with other hosts too besides the above hosts. Just felt the above two had more to offer and possibly less overloaded place. I mainly need a good amount of customer service and also a good server that they don't load many vm's too, a trustworthy company that won't think I am bothering them. I am leery about going with bigger companies because at times they could overload nodes and performance could suffer too.. support & performance would be 50/50. It's also important to me that the host offers reliable server and a backup solution. I do my own backups, but it would be nice to have a host that does nightly backups in-case something bad happens. I currently do remote FTP backups to a shared server that I have with another company that offers "unlimited hdd". To break down what I run: 1 vBulletin website + vBSEO 1 Test vBulletin site 1 backup test site for my live site + vBSEO to test out plugins/addons. 1 XenForo website |
Posts are locked from updates after 60 minutes have passed. I merged your two sequential posts for you. -admin
vBulletin is something I've purposely never run from an OpenVZ container simply because vB can be demanding on resources, and the RAM models used by OpenVZ is easy to over-allocate and run into beancounter limits. I know it works fine on Virtuozzo, due to SLM RAM, and because I've setup/run/monitored vBulletin 3.x and Xenforo forums on Virtuozzo VPS servers from Futurehosting and JaguarPC. OpenVZ allows for excessive overselling (i.e., overloading/over-allocating) of resources, partially due to UBC, which is why vetting hosts (and finding a high quality one) is even more important that usual. Traffic is really what causes vBulletin to rack up MySQL connections, which is a method of using RAM. When your forums are in hidden test mode (either due to password-protected folders, or manual DNS connections), they're essentially getting no traffic, and thus are not really using any resources. How big is your current forum? i.e. -- (1) How many members logged in simultaneously, and (2) How many visitors per day on average? I would actually avoid anybody that promises unlimited backup space. That's not sustainable infrastructure, and generally means they're using crappy low-end hard drives instead of quality RAID storage arrays (either SAN or internal). Generally speaking, VPS backups require secondary paid services, and are not included. That's really more of a shared hosting feature. Your fear of large corporate owned hosts is justified. The medium-sized VPS hosts who have been in business for several years (the 5+ year old ones especially) tend to be the best at support and quality. They've worked through growing pains, and no longer have to guess/experiment with creating the ideal network and hardware arrangement. - Futurehosting is an excellent VPS host, for Virtuozzo. - JaguarPC is good too, but support response time is not as good. Also Virtuozzo. - Geekstorage and BigScoots look like good candidates. At some point, you have to just swallow hard and take a leap of faith with a good looking provider. :) |
I see, so that's the reason why I never had such luck with OpenVZ, also running vBSEO on top of vBulletin 4x is even more harsh.
Generally during the day I average about 60+ connections to the forums, sometimes I can easily get to 100+. I'd say vBSEO is very resource intensive. I tried Hawkhost, not really good for vBulletin forums, noticed often slowdowns. I tried Unixy, very good management, but the servers were not up to part with what's out there nowadays. I tried KnownHost VS3 and the server kept loading slow, not sure why, this was proven from all of my users.. I tested vanilla sites and different platforms, all had the same slow loading results... I've given WiredTree a try before, it was good, I might consider them again, it was for a different project, but they were robust, but again the factor of being a huge vps company and loading several vps per machine becomes an issue when you start testing out server resources. BigScoot offers OpenVZ and I just can't justify paying more, yet getting an OpenVZ system...I can see few months down the road opening a ticket saying that I am overusing ram and that I need to pay more to upgrade. Geekstorage is a hit or miss like kpmedia mentioned.. I am still looking at WHT, but I can't really find a web host that stands in-front of all of them. @admin, I've taken leap of faiths over 3-5 times within the last few months, let me tall ya, been disappointed each time :(. As mentioned before, I don't mind paying, I just hate the fact about moving, downtime, all the stress it comes when moving from one company to another and having to make sure everything works up to par. |
I contacted the owner of BigScoots (unrelated communication), and since this thread was ongoing, I mentioned it to him. He had this to share:
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- OpenVZ does have lower resource use and requirements for the host node. - The quality of the admins and techs matter more than the quality of the virtualization layer. - The primary issue with Virtuozzo and OpenVZ (and even Xen, for that matter) is to not overallocate the resources. BigScoots does sound like a safe choice. Though I think most everybody mentioned here thus far is a fairly safe choice. ______ I've read before that Knownhost sets up PHP with different defaults from other hosts. When I was there, I didn't pay that close of attention, and I no longer have servers there (due to lack of need, not for any other reason). If that's true, that could account for some of your slowness. When PHP is setup in certain ways, it can run bogged down, especially with WordPress and specific forum apps. I use the Unixy cPanel/Varnish plugins. I've not used their hosting, but they're quite knowledgeable from the admin side. WiredTree is good. Hawkhost is good, but if you were on a shared plan, that would likely account for the loading issues with something as heavy as vBulletin (or any other forum, for that matter). Forums just do not run that well in generic shared hosting environments. Forums run best when the PHP, MySQL, and server caches have been tweaked for the software. General "one-size-fits-all" type setups are just not very good. This forum was on a shared host for its first year. While the host was excellent (and we still use them), the shared environment was just a poor fit. VPS or dedicated is really required, though some hosts with "semi-dedicated" offerings have optimized for the meatier apps (still generic, but not as bad). EuroVPS has awesome VMWare Windows VPS, though being a premium host, it does cost more. You'd get FastCGI PHP in IIS&, which is faster than Linux PHP FastCGI, as well as RDP access. VMWare runs like a truly dedicated server, for the CPU and RAM allocation. Futurehosting and JaguarPC would be run those sites you have, and both are Virtuozzo cPanel (or Plesk). At least you're trying to narrow down from a list of known-good hosts. :) Do you have any RAM-hungry plugins, perhaps? Chat and shoutbox plugins really beat up a server. This includes the ones that claim to be "lightweight" -- something I've never seen, and probably never will, as "lightweight" chat is a fanciful dream. Outside of that, I just can't imagine any of the named hosts running badly for you. And if you are running chat functions, the hard-to-swallow truth is that you'll eventually need to migrate to a dedicated box. |
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http://www.47r-squad.com in case you wanted to take a look. With that said, BitScoots did reach out to me via PM here and I did get the reassurance from them about their servers being not oversold. It's a tough decision, wallet says go with geek, head says go with bigscoots, and you are saying they are a safe choice. I've also had issues with hosts reducing the amount of cpu usage you can use, I am not 100% sure how cpu usage works in virtual environment and how much of the cpu I can really use on a shared environment. For example, if you load 10-20 vm's per server then there isn't much cpu usage room. Speaking of Wiredtree I noticed is that WiredTree now offers support to Maria DB: Quote:
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At the bottom of your forum, you're still showing the page generation time: "This page was generated in 0.12276 seconds with 23 queries."
That actually eats up resources and delays page load times. It's also inaccurate. Disable it. vBSEO is really not that resource-hungry anymore. :2cents: I ran your site through a few of my favorite analysis tools, notably Pingdom: http://tools.pingdom.com You have several issues, and that does potentially include 2-3 seconds of server-related slowdowns: (1) 10 image unnecessary redirects, which are also lagging in server processing time. (2) No browser caching in use. (3) There's a chance your current host has some fairly high I/O wait settings, as I see a number of odd wait times about every half second or so. For example, a 600 byte (0.6kb) image took almost 3 seconds to fully load. (4) I would dump "histats" because the site times out, an you have 404 errors in-page. (5) On posts where users hotlink to other sites (imgshack, etc), your site waits on those slow sites. Have members use local image attachments. Every time you hotlink to another site, your load time depends on their servers. You could be on the best servers in the world, yet still have the worst overall load speeds if the weakest link in your chain is serving from a $2 account at a cheap host. (6) The forums are very graphic heavy, and several of them are rather large -- especially when combined. For example, the site header image "47ronind3_headerbg.jpg" is 135kb, and because there is no browser caching, there can be recheck/reload lag. The image would have compressed better had you dropped the white layer into the actual image, and not created a CSS screen. Many of your images will compress down further. The avatar "avatar150_6.gif" is 0.7MB in size! Your total page is 3MB on average, which is about 2MB too much. Some related reading: http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/11/21/...d-here-is-why/ (7) vBShout is the biggest weak link in the chain. It can range from anywhere of 4 to 45 seconds in server impact. You'll want to be sure you're on the most current version, as earlier versions (including 6.x) had exploits. You'll need to optimize your server-side cache, PHP and MySQL settings. Alter vBShout refresh times, if needed. And then consider hiding it from the Unregistered usergroup (use vB conditionals), in order to avoid polling by passersby and bots traffic. I think vBShout is re-polling itself multiple times during page load because the page itself takes so long for other reasons. Unrelated to loading speeds... Why does the site have two URLs? www.47r-squad.com and edge.47r-squad.com both appear to be identical? |
edge.47r-squad.com is the CDN server.
Will take the other suggestions in consideration and see what I can do about them. :) |
As mentioned, though, I do see some potential I/O wait lag in your current server's responses. So moving may still be a positive option for you, in addition to optimizing the site. Who is the current host?
Given the amount of issues, you may want to consider hiring an admin (kpmedia) temporarily to optimize a VPS for vBulletin. And I refer specifically to an admin that knows vBulletin in depth, not a general admin. Tweaking a server is one thing -- tweaking it to work best with vBulletin and vBSEO is another. That usually runs about $99 or so for a one-time inspection and tweak, and can take a couple of hours. But again, moving to another server first may be required. (It would be a waste to optimize a server you're leaving.) MariaDB is good, though you can add this on your own anywhere. Understand it does use more RAM, but the tradeoff is in performance. Take this into consideration when selecting the amount of RAM in a VPS or dedicated server. I do think 2GB would be fine. It's more of a worry for people who have less than 1GB of RAM, especially those small 96MB to 512MB servers. |
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Thanks for the advice, I did optimizations with vBulletin - vB has a section where to optimize vBulletin by me posting server stats.
I also use vBOptimise plugin, which does help caching most things. Either way I'd rather make the move first before optimizing: |
Varnish cache or an nginx reverse proxy -- though not both together -- are two more potential overall speed-up methods.
APC opcode caching may speed up PHP. I briefly glanced at your logs. You look to be running DSO PHP (mod_php), but I'd suggested either FastCGI (FCGI) or suPHP. |
Used Unixy Varnish Plugin, just didn't see a huge difference, might be just me.
With Unixy we use to run a custom setup, litespeed+Varnish Cache, Joe is a smart guy, made that work, just it wasn't cost effective and the performance seemed minimal. kp, when enabling suPHP I get a 500 internal error. |
Greetings,
kpmedia pointed this thread out to me and invited me to join the discussion and I'm happy to. :) Quote:
We advertised extensively in late 2008 through late 2009 and increased our customer base significantly. We had some growth spurt issues and we addressed them as quickly as we could. Some of those past issues were hardware related (not growth spurt-related), but that's to be expected when dealing with hardware. We actually phased out our last servers that were 3 years or older this year and replaced them with brand new hardware, featuring SSD drives for SQL and 15K SAS drives for file storage (for our shared & reseller hosting servers). Customers don't always take the time to let you know when you're doing things right, the vocal ones are usually the ones you weren't able to please, unfortunately. We are actively running a customer satisfaction survey of our customers right now and we'll be posting the results at the conclusion of the survey (first week of September). We've received a great response so far and the feedback has been overwhelming -- our customers like what we're doing. :) Quote:
When we first tested OnApp, we bought a SAN, bought Starwind and tested it. The performance was good, but it wasn't great. We don't like deploying anything short of awesome. So we took a different approach, we use OnApp to setup and manage traditional VPS. We don't use it with a SAN, we just use the parts we like (the control panel, the templates, the backup features, etc.). As we don't use centralized storage, we don't avail of the OnApp features such as automatic failover, etc. Our OnApp storage setup is local to each hypervisor (traditional VPS). Each hypervisor is presently built with E3-1240v2, 32 GB RAM and 4x15K SAS HDD's in a hardware RAID 10 configuration. The number of VM's per hypervisor is determined by the types of plans on that hypervisor. You get more resources, all around the board, as you increase the number of chunks (go up the plan spectrum). If you are on a larger VPS plan, you'll have more resources server-wide and less users sharing (so more disk I/O, etc). Over the last 5 years, we've tested all different types of setups. From Virtuozzo hypervisors running 8x15K SAS HDD's to these new OnApp hypervisors. From our testing and from feedback from our users, we've nailed with it our OnApp implementation. These VPS are rock solid and fast. There are a couple of things on the horizon - we're seeing good things out of the OnApp Storage beta. We'd like to conduct some tests using this new storage virtualization platform with hypervisors packing SSD's. That's on our radar. We are also constantly developing our own in-house customer portal. On the development front, we've already integrated OnApp, through its API, into the portal and we're testing it internally. Additionally, a major update to our customer portal is scheduled for Q1 2013. We'll be eying further OnApp integration as we look to deploy OnApp's cloud like features. I hope that helps explain a little about who we are, what we're doing and what we're focused on. :) Regards, Jay H GeekStorage.com, LLC |
I see both pros and cons from both worlds now, it's a lot more clear now to me.
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You've chosen to own your errors. "We made some mistakes, but here's how we learned from it ...." And that's how any well-run business should respond. So many hosts try to: (1) blame customers, (2) blame the datacenter or hardware vendors, (3) blow it off as unimportant or "overblown", or (4) pretend it didn't happen. Regardless of the excuse, it's always somebody else's fault. I see it on WHT, Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere every day. That's the modus operandi of the investor-owned large hosts, as well as the kiddie hosts. It's good to see that you're in that in-between minority that chooses to be transparent. I just wanted to mention that. :) @icewolf: These are the kinds of things you need to look for in hosts. It separates the customer-centric from the self-centered. :thumb: |
True, many hosts will never come forward even if they made a mistake.
Both companies are at the same datacenter, but very different fundamentals on how they run their vps server (technically speaking) Both have great hardware to backup their claim. Both offer backup solutions in case of disaster. Reason I like mid-ranged hosts is because they spend more time with their client-base where on large companies you are just another number. I have 1 week to decide where to go, but I feel good about both companies. |
BTW, would you guys recommend giving MariaDB a try with XtraDB?
I saw Wiredtree was advertising it, not sure if the following hosts would even support the following. Oh btw, I removed vBSEO this last week from my server. :) |
MariaDB and Percona can both provide performance increases over standard MySQL. Then again, you can often tweak MySQL values for optimal performance for many small and medium-sized sites. At some point, benefits of MySQL replacements is only felt by users on large shared servers, or by large sites on servers.
WiredTree is a good host. But I don't know that it's any better/worse than what GeekStorage and BigScoots have to offer. Again, when you're compared known-good or respected hosts, the decisions can get harder. Although they had an implosion back in may Downtownhost has Xen based servers, and VPS customers have generally been pleased. (Their shared platforms are the ones that took the hit some months back, along with sibling budget-priced company Ninjalion.) Removing vBSEO is unlikely to provide much performance gains. It's been leaner since the 3.5.x versions. Keep in touch. I'd like to know what you pick, and to see how you fair at whichever new host you decide to go with. :) |
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Hi KP, we chose GeekStorage, they did everything I asked and then more.
We got MariaDB + XtraDB. We did some optimization php and mysql side. The optimization configs were provided by eva2000 (vBulletin tech support guru): https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/show...r-optimization (You can only access this section if you are a licensed vB holder) They did some optimizations to the server and things are looking good now: I have to say Matt has been fantastic, the guy knows so much, plus he takes his time to explain everything to me so I don't feel stupid and having to google for each answer. JayH has been very nice too. The server has been screaming fast so far and I couldn't be happier with the performance. I will eventually leave a feedback about them at WHT too because they made the server move a breeze. Far less trouble than my previous migrations. They did everything I've asked and more. With this said, this move is saving me lots of money monthly and also providing me excellent service. The customer service within business hours has been stellar, everytime I got a reply was with things being done and taken care for me instead of "we are looking at this please hold" like many other hosts do. I suppose they truly deserve the name Geekstorage because they are Geeks. :) See attachments. Pre-Stats & after Stats |
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