VPS providers with decent support...

srichards

srichards

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I've been with solarvps for 18 months. They used to be good. They seem to have changed where they outsource support to and they're useless. The EU Based support were really with it and used to solve issues very quickly. The new ones take ages and everything is a struggle. They can't even do a simple configuration change and check it works. They'll claim something works when the log files show immediately it doesn't and yet they don't check them at all!

I know enough to be dangerous and when to get someone else to do things but at the moment I'm finding I'm always solving my own problems. I pay them for this and they are unable to sort most of the problems I've had recently.

I'm currently using whm/cpanel but I used to use plesk so either is ok.

Upper limit for cost is £42/$67 a month. At the moment that gets me 4GB of RAM, 60GB disk, twin cpus and 3 or 4TB of transfer, cpanel and centos 6.

1&1 are no good, was with them for a while and the support was non existent. Hostgator were dreadful. Eukhost I used to be with but they have outsourced support and they also cut my server off due to a bug in plesk and wouldn't re-enable it for days so I won't use them again.

It seems that every 18 months or so I have to find another vps provider as the one I'm with descends into being useless!
 
We use TSO host for our Uk VPS (windows based), talk to them about your needs as they have various options.

Everything else we do is dedicated which starts at £150 a month for a decent company (self managed)

You've mentioned what you get, what do you use? Ie is the CPU load high, high memory usage. How much traffic do you use?
 
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cant comment on VPS specifically but TSO support and CS has always been excellent over the several years I've been with them.

they're very flexible, if the option you want isn't on their site give them a shout.
 
I keep to that spec then I know I'm not going to have a problem with big bills for extra bandwidth or find that some spamming cretin has kyboshed the entire server. Most of the cpu load is due to spamassassin dealing with complete rissholes.

TSO host is way too expensive unfortunately.
 
Spec from company A is different to company B. You could be on an old Xeon from 4 years ago or a brand new Xeon. So knowing what processor you are on, the CPU load will help identify what you need. The traffic also gives us an idea of usage, so if you have 4Tb, but only use 100Gb then you don't need 4Tb.
 
I've only had the vps for 18 months. I think it's a xeon 2.2Ghz.

I'm not bothered what I use currently. It varies so much I'd rather just have a fixed amount that covers most eventualities :)

The current problem I've got was solved in seconds by another support team. My solarvps lot have had days and couldn't fix it. I've lost confidence in them altogether. It's another basic mistake they've made.
 
https://www.tsohost.com/managed-servers/linux-vps

£100 a month gets you 4 cores, 3Gb RAM, 80Gb HDD and 1800Gb traffic

So more expensive, lower specification, but more reliable, better support.

So if you want to reduce costs, do you really need those things?? £70 a month gets you half of the above.

Go cheap and keep moving or stump up the cash for the right product.
 
Budget is 40 ish a month. It's basically a hobby web server and email server. Spending significantly more than that would be silly.
 
If it's a hobbie, why a VPS?

Why not get the smallest VPS?
 
Dale_tem said:
If it's a hobbie, why a VPS?

Why not get the smallest VPS?
Click to expand...

Because the smallest ones often won't run cpanel or plesk. You need about 2GB of actual memory to do it. I upgraded to 4GB only recently as it was seemingly short of memory even with 2GB. I've already shifted from plesk to cpanel to get more choice of provider and after doing that I won't want to try the shift into shared hosting again. I tried it a few times and it doesn't work at all well compared to having a vps.
 
I've found a pair of possibles: http://www.host-it.co.uk or http://www.cloudnext.co.uk. Will probably have to make do with 2GB rather than 4GB of memory to work within the budget.

Looking at solarvps's price structure they have gone cheap. They were charging more when I first joined them. Probably explains why they've gone to the dogs. Tempted to remove the paid for included support as they don't actually fix anything.
 
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While I have been working with products from various different VPS providers over the many years (the first one in the 1990s was on a sun sparc running IRIX which was big-endian, which spectacularly broke all our code ), I can't help with your search as all the VPS I have used have been without anything like cpanel or plesk (or if they have been present we have disabled / ignored them). That said, we service about 1/4 million users connecting to our server on average once a week each on the most basic VPS offered by webfusion and memset (not much over a tenner plus VAT each from memory). The mysql database that serves as a backend to all this has grown to over a gigabyte nowadays, but even with that being continuously replicated between the two servers so it stays synchronized we don't get close to any usage limits and the load average on either server rarely gets above 0.1

cpanel and / or plesk sound like absolute resource hogs if they need 2GB RAM to work correctly :( . My hobby VPS (from 123-reg, aka webfusion) has 512MB, as does tmy dedicated server at home (but that's a pi running raspian).

Pottering around in /etc until stuff works is most of the fun of running linux!

(edit for typing errors)
 
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The memory usage is partly down to using Wordpress and having spam assassin running. I used to have plesk in one GB. It seems more responsive with more memory and no swap space is used. It could be total overkill. The actual memory plesk uses is about 50-75mb and I think cpanel is similar.

I've mainly heard bad things about webfusion :/ I have looked at them a few times.
 
If it's just for a hobby why even a vps? wouldn't a shared service do? Either way have a look at Vidahost, I've used them a few times and they are spot on and their support is UK based and you always get a response and usually within 15 minutes. Not sure their VPS will be within budget but even their shared servers are fast.

EDIT: Just looked on their info pages and their vps is £49 a month or £499 a year (suspect you may need to add vat too) https://www.vidahost.com/web-hosting/overview
 
I run too many bits and bobs to fit onto a shared hosting model. I have my own dns, email as well as hosting. Plus I prefer being able to run my own versions of things and some shared hosting is more restrictive than others in what you can change eg php settings.

Disk space offered with vidahost isn't enough at that price level. You have to allow several times usage so you can keep local copies of backups over a few generations as well as remote copies.
 
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If its a hobby site, why vps? I use fasthostingdirect, run a joomla and Wordpress websites through it without issues and it's cheap. Support has always been ok
 
Many years of running a vps and trying shared hosting has already proved a vps is the only sensible solution. Shared hosting is often slow and you're at the mercy of techs that will randomly update php and potentially break things or cause security issues. I'd rather have the choice of when I update things.
 
TSO dont tend to just break things, I really would drop their guys an email and ask if they could do something a bit closer to budget.

your requirements really do sound a bit bespoke though and you'll never get that for cheap without sacrificing other areas.
 
i've been with RackSRV.com and they're very good and reliable. I only left them because I wanted to cut my costs down. Im currently with DigitalOcean.com. Server has been online for 'Up 86 days, 10 hours, 43 minutes'.

RackSRV is based in the UK.
DigitalOcean has a few data centers around the world.
 
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I was looking at digital ocean but you're on your own a bit. I'll check out racksrv.com, Ta.
 
I used to be cPanel and Plesk loyal, but Webmin + Virtualmin is free. Setting it up is quite easy too, they have a installer that will do most of the work for you. All you have to do is setup your username and password basically and Webmin + Virtualmin is done.

It took me a few weeks to get used to it, the initial first week was the hard bit, once I got everything setup, getting my email server configured with SPF and DKIM keys took the longest, everything else fell into place.
 
Just to update this. I dithered for ages and tried tsohost on a basic shared hosting package expecting wordpress to load slowly and the email to be slow as well. I was wrong. WP site loads as quickly as the vps and email is more reliable if less configurable. It's saving a fortune and I'm surprised it is so good as every other shared hosting service I have tried has been really slow (20+ second page loads) with wordpress.
 
TSO are worth it. Great support and the servers aren't overloaded. I've been with other companies with similar performance, but the support was very poor in comparison.
 
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