Additional questions at time of VPS signup?

Hi all

As I have outlined in my previous thread, I recently set up a VPS Value account with yourselves and would like to feedback my thoughts on the process.

I think I have commented already on my positive thoughts about the technical assistance I recieved, however I did experience a lot of website down time because of various problems which were caused, in my opinion, jointly by the server not been set up for what I needed and secondly my inexperience as well as inabality to monitor and respond to problems instantly (my site is not my job).

I believe there may be potential for improvement on your part, for example the MySQL service was crashing due to it allocating itself to much in the way of resourses, if the question had been asked "Do you require a MySQL server and what use do you intend for it", you may have set that server up correctly for me, also I have had three errors on my account caused by an IIS error (now corrected by one of your tech support staff) which was again apparently asking for too much memory and causing my ASP message board to crash several times, could the question not have been asked what the website function was going to be, have on it, as well as its size and popularity in order to have that enviroment set up correctly? If not this, parhaps better documentation on how to more appropiately set up the server for the webste intended to be installed by your customers, be it a simple HTML site, or one with ASP applications (like mine), or e-commerce, so on and so forth.

Parhaps my niavity in setting up such servers and website enviroments shows in this post, but I hope you understand the point which I trying to make.

All the best

Rob
Balearic-Jobs.com
 
Hello Rob,

While the setup questions side is really out of our realm, because we give full control, I realize not everyone can know how to admin the server on their own.
that is why I am about to be putting 50% of my time into documentation, we have some exciting things happening in the coming 2 weeks internally, and it will give me the time to focus on this for a few months so that we can get documentation on all aspects of our services, even some on hsphere which may not be covered well elsewhere.

I am looking forward to giving my spell chckr a workout and getting on this soon! :)
 
VPS, especially if you are running alot of things on the base account can have low memory issues, and can require fine tuning. Hence your initial problems. That said, it isn't the norm.

We are working on more documentation, we are working on making VPS an easy viable solution for our customers. We are seeing alot of growth here.. Today, we had another tech join us with Virtuozzo/Plesk experience
 
VPS, especially if you are running alot of things on the base account can have low memory issues, and can require fine tuning. Hence your initial problems. That said, it isn't the norm.

I understand what you are saying Yash, but I was surprised how little it apparently took to knock the server over its limit, for example, I opened Plesk twice in one night, just plesk, and made some changes, I tried to open it a third time later and it wouldn't let me! Apparently it was out of resources. I'm only running a medium sized website with a single MySQL database run message board which at the moment is very quiet (its a seasonal summer website).

The MySQL database issue was a little frustrating as well, surely during inital set up that should be made so that it doesn't try and allocate so much memory too itself on a server which is clearly not designed to accommodate it. I'm not sure what exactly is/was causing the IIS errors, so we'll leave that one! :p

Anyway, all up and running now, fingers crossed. Just thought I would supply some feedback.
 
One thing to remember that is oft overlooked, make sure when you RDP(connect remote) to close any applications you used before disconnecting, the idle apps also use RAM, and I have seen people leave firefox, ie, and other apps open using 4-40MB of RAM for an idle application alone.

I am in no way saying you did this, just mentioning as a reminder to others if they see it.
 
One thing to remember that is oft overlooked, make sure when you RDP(connect remote) to close any applications you used before disconnecting, the idle apps also use RAM, and I have seen people leave firefox, ie, and other apps open using 4-40MB of RAM for an idle application alone.

I am in no way saying you did this, just mentioning as a reminder to others if they see it.

Stephen.

I've been think some more about the resources issue that I have talked about - as I said earlier the site is very quiet at the moment as its a seasonal site which is busiest in the lead up to Summer. At times I could have up to 100 individuals at once drawing information from the MySQL database via the ASP message board. How would you rate the risk providing no applications other than that required for the site is running on the server of the server "falling over" under this load?

I must admit recent experience has taught me to treat this server with a "feathered touch" which is crazy considering its costing me so much more than the shared servers which have always served me well in the past - although admittidly they could not offer the speed and indeed the MySQL 4.1 database that I require now.
 
I will keep a watch on your VPS memory and cpu and tell you after it has been watched, it really does vary by usage and all there.
 
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