Well, over the last few weeks I’ve come to realise that using DreamHost wasn’t a particularly good plan. If I’m honest with you (which hopefully I am most of the time), the cheap price of their hosting and ridiculous amounts of both bandwidth and disk space were too much in terms of temptation. However, there’s been a lot of quite severe downtime and the majority of my patience has been used up.

The major problem is speed. My server is relatively good - the load averages are only around 2.00 to 2.75 on a good day at peak times. But DreamHost do pack an awful lot of people into their hardware, which makes everything insanely slow. Even simple static content load times are pretty shocking. I also find their control panel software to be quite a bit of a pain at the best of times.

I am not too bothered about simply leaving and going elsewhere, even with 5 months remaning on my contract, simply because I only paid around $10 for the entire year. There are quite a few sites that I would need to migrate over to any potential new host anyway, so this does, at least, give me some breathing space.

The question is where to move to. Right now I am thinking that shared hosting doesn’t really suit me - I love to have root access, and I want the freedom to optimize my system. This lends itself nicely to the idea of a VPS setup, as dedicated servers are expensive and complete overkill for a person such as myself.

Right now, I’m looking at VPSLink; more specifically, their Link-1 package using Gentoo. Whilst it’s a good deal, there are some advantages and disadvantages;

Disadvantages

• There’s only 64mb of RAM available at any one time.
• This memory allocation is not burstable; that is, if you go over 64mb, the kernel starts killing processes and things start to break.
• Running an IRC daemon is against the AUP (on the grounds of DoS attacks).
• VPS performance can be quite poor at times.
• Compilation is going to be slow at best and failing at worst, due to the amount of memory gcc takes up.
• Similarly, rsyncs are prone to failure if background processes are running.
• No control panel for reselling.

Advantages

• It’s cheap. This is a big issue for me.
• The amount of traffic I get is fairly minimal, so by running MySQL with a low-memory configuration and using lighttpd, it should be possible to avoid the memory issues.
• If I do run out of memory, I can upgrade my account pretty much instantly to get more.
• Dedicated IP with reverse DNS lookup.
• By using various tips, it should be possible to get gcc to compile pretty much anything. Barring this, I can pawn things off to my remote boxes by using distcc.
• Admittedly, I host a few other sites. However, those guys generally just want e-mail and web hosting, and that’s something I can easily set up.
• I get to run Gentoo!

I’m going to sleep on it and see what happens tomorrow. I may or may not go for it, we shall see.

3:41 am | Posted in Hardware, Site Development, Web Development