digitalFAQ.com Forum - Avoid HostGator dedicated plans; three reasons why...

I've been migrating one of our customers off of a HostGator dedicated server this week, and onto one of our high-end semi-dedicated plans. And over the past few days, what I've seen is a so-called "dedicated" server that performs worse than a VPS. Even a budget VPS like BuyVM! Here's several reasons why you should avoid Hostgator dedicated severs...

Reason 1 - cPanel and WHM

We have dedicated servers in several place around the world: U.S. east coast, west coast, and central. We even have sever in western Europe and eastern Europe. Our server is Lithuania, eastern European, on the other side of the world, and cPanel and WHM load faster. That's pathetic! On our USA servers, accessed by folks in the USA, pages change almost as soon as they clicked.

But oh no ... not Host Gator! I can literally load 5-10 pages in cPanel or WHM on a good dedicated server at Namecheap or a Xen VPS at Site5 in the same amount of time that it takes to load 1 page on HostGator. ONE!

Reason 2 - Disk I/O with dd

dd is a built-in feature of Linux that tests the I/O performance. For the laymen, that means how fast the hard drives can read or write your sites. It's one of many things that can make a site load slow.

Running a simply command with dd shows shocking results:

Quote:

Ninjahawk, a non-premium/non-budget host. It's an OpenVZ vswap host, with decent customer density per server (i.e, not overload or "oversold"). The results was 111 MB/s, which is average for an OpenVZ VPS.

Code:

root@server14:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

16384+0 records in

16384+0 records out

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 9.66466 s, 111 MB/s

Quote:

BuyVM, an extremely low-cost budget host (not "cheap" because they good!). This is $15/year 128MB VPS using OpenVZ UBC, the outdated, inaccurate and inferior "burst" method of OpenVZ memory management. I know Francisco (the owner) takes great pride in their drive setup, which gives good (albeit inconsistent) IO performance. And it shows! A $15 yearly VPS gets a whopping 180 MB/s!

Code:

root@server7 [~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

16384+0 records in

16384+0 records out

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 5.97028 s, 180 MB/s

Quote:

EuroVPS, a premium cloud VPS in Europe, using VMware and OpenStack technology (which is much better than OnApp "clouds"). They only use the best of hardware, and it has RAID-10 SAS drives. As expected, the results are double that of most VPS, rivaling low-end dedicated server, at 176 MB/s. Only the best from EuroVPS!

Code:

root@server4 [~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

16384+0 records in

16384+0 records out

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 6.11254 s, 176 MB/s

VMPort VPS, known-overloaded Root Level Technologies (same as Urpad, Semoweb)

Code:

[root@server13 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

16384+0 records in

16384+0 records out

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 17.4154 s, 61.7 MB/s

Code:

[root@server13]# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

16384+0 records in

16384+0 records out

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 9.57343 s, 112 MB/s

Hostgator dedicated

Code:

root@server [~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

16384+0 records in

16384+0 records out

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 13.4543 seconds, 79.8 MB/s

To be continued...