You can find my WordPress hosting article here, because of an experiment the comments for that article are here, while the article itself is "on it's own".
Yoast tweaking websites
Follow Yoast on Twitter, or subscribe to this blog by email or RSS!
WordPress Hosting
Liked this post?
Subscribe to the RSS feed or to weekly email updates, right now!
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
Hi Joost,
Great post! I have a question though; how do they handle updates of wordpress it self and plug-ins?
Thanks!
Coen
Automatic update works on my install, that's usually darn easy to fix as it's just a case of making sure the Apache user has write rights to the WordPress install.
on a shared server this can be a serious security flaw. i recommend using suphp or fastcgi for this reason.
well that depends how you're executing PHP, either using suphp or you could run fastcgi as a specific user in specific directories, or or or, dozens of possible ways, some of them are security flawed, some are not :)
BTW, on a shared setup, if permissions are correct you can also allow Litespeed/Apache to write and do plugin updates.
I host a load of WP sites with MediaTemple in the US on their standard shared package and have never had any issues. I'm now looking at new hosts primarily due to SEO reasons. WestHost sound ideal if they have servers in the UK. If they don't, do you recommend any other that are based in the UK and are ideal for WP sites with SEO in mind?
VPS.net has a UK cloud too, so you could go with a VPS and control the setup yourself?
Cheers Yoast I'll check them out
Actually they have two clouds in the UK to choose from now.
Berry van der Linden
Hosts primarily due to SEO reasons?
Well Thanks for the good review and the list however let me say The same content of this post posted from about month in noupe and also for UK2Group So its obviously that this group paying well for reviews like this.
I cant judge it from your review or other sites like noupe reviews That are in the first place pay to review.
Sorry for my bad Lang Trying to improve me Self :-p
Ahmed, since I wrote this entire review myself over the last few days, I'm curious which review you're pointing at :)
I dont say you copied the review but its the same idea
Here is the link
They review another company but for the same owner UK2Group
http://www.noupe.com/spotlight/why-noupe-com-is-loading-pretty-fast.html
I think it's more likely that Noupe read Joost's initially review and that's where the inspiration came from :)
Noupe Review done from one month
Joost did a review 6-12 months ago when he moved to WestHost and W3TC. Noupe read that, and I'm sure (maybe unintentionally) that led to inspiration on doing her post. She since sold the site to SmashingMag though - and it's no longer hosted on ANHosting AFAIK.
And btw Ahmed, nice of you to show my readers how weird this market is: you're calling me out, and yet, you write an awful lot about WordPress hosting yourself, and promote another company, if I look at your site, so maybe you don't like the competition? :P
I don't protest about the business i protest about saying its the best wordpress hosting. yes i do promote some wordpress hosting that you also promote but its just business.
I hope you have a better hosting experience with VPS.net than I did. I had a kernel panic about every other day with their ubuntu image. They claimed they were waiting on a bug fix in the kernel?
Inaccurate activity graphs and multiple down times. Support was very flakey. They gave me a credit , but ultimately I ended up switching to linode.com . They have better prices than Slicehost and better hardeware in my opinion.
I know run a a small slice with WordPress and Nginx.
Hmm sad to hear that John, if you have any issues left with VPS.net I'm sure Nick there (nick@vps.net) would be very glad to take care of them!
John,
I'd be interested in hearing your specific case and how long ago that was. There are over 100 OS images at VPS.NET now, I admit a lot of them aren't production-quality, but that's the greatness of vps.net, it's community driven - the CentOS images are production quality though.
Hi Yoast,
Why do you use litespeed? This webserver is limited by licence restrictions.
Have you ever tried nginx?
Have tried NGinx in another project, the "drop in Apache replacement" feature of Litespeed made it easier for me though :)
The license restrictions are basically - no porn sites, no warez sites, nothing illegal in the US. If a user randomly uploaded a sexually explicit image, that wouldn't be enough for Litespeed to take action, but they don't want a porn site or porn hosting company using their software.
Before VPS.NET started offering Litespeed we reviewed the license pretty extensively.
Appreciate the honesty brotha, we all know we could use more of it from some of the known
names within not just the WordPress community but the internet marketing community as a
whole. Good post Yoast, and Happy Holidays to you and yours as well.
Thanks Domenick, glad to see people appreciate it!
Great article. If you can disclose this, how is the uptime with cloud based hosting? I've used a few different web hosts for WordPress sites and I've noticed a variability of uptime percentage of 65% to 99% (even on the same host). Sadly, the shared hosting environment causes this variability and I'm wondering if the cloud environment is a better for uptime. Thoughts?
I've not been on it long enough for any percentages you can use for real, it's been a 100% over the last few weeks, but that's it. For my other sites that already were on VPS.net, it's over 99.5% for the last 6 months or so.
Avoid Streamline hosting. They're bloody awful.
Will do ;) I won't go anywhere else for my WordPress hosting than the companies mentioned above :)
great guide, thought i would point out you can gain more performance and safe more money by ditching cpanel, VPS.net offers free licenses of ispmanager Pro which is very lightweight, i have set up active wordpress blogs using a single node and CDN with different caching plugins.
if you ditch cpanel you can most likely drop node count to 2 nodes. if anyone needs help getting setup on vps.net feel free to contact me
Anthony,
I'd love to see what you have to support that claim. You can disable all the extra services in cPanel. If you're hosting only one or two wordpress sites, sure cPanel isn't a necessity, but you can't reduce a site like yoast.com from 7 nodes to 2 nodes (though, like he said, he'd probably be fine on 4 nodes) just because of removing cPanel.
i would agree that you probably couldnt reduce the yoast site to 2 nodes... it all depends on traffic and content being served, that said if you only host a few blogs cpanel is overkill and usually 2 nodes should be adequate, for example i host multiple drupal sites (which is more resource intensive than wordpress in default form) on 2 nodes with absolutely no issues
Just wanted to put my email address out there - if anyone has any concerns/questions/etc..please feel free to email me directly - nick@vps.net - we can take care of you, get you setup with Joost's setup, etc.
I think you'll find we're good people to work with :)
What a coincidence - I just signed up with VPS.net too and just blogged about them last week (I won't link to it here since I know what it's like when people drop links just for self promotion, especially when - as you mention - there's a decent affiliate commission to be made). I have 3 nodes and we'll soon see how much bandwidth that can handle. I also have W3 Total Cache installed to speed it up. So far so great.
I appreciate your transparency about this whole thing.
I tried Mediatemple's grid service a few years ago and was not impressed. Not sure if that's who you meant in the post. It looks like VPS.net is solid and Nick has been great in assisting me with technical questions. Let's hope it keeps up and all goes as smoothly as I think it will.
I don't like to name names, but yeah...
I've got a question. How to compare speed load? A site with dozens of files will of course slower. I mean, how can I get the idea of certain server serve my wp site than other server? How can I compare it? Thanks before!
Use a tool ling Pingdom's speed test to compare them.
Hi, how many memory of your vps? I mean which vps.net plan?
These are the stats.
Hi Yoast. Very interesting thought as I'm also planning to transfer my account away from the painful "Dedicated Virtual Rage". We are planning to tweak our new server based on your recommendations. Thanks.
Good! Let me know how it goes!
I've been trying to implement your speed recommendations and find that my current host doesn't
have either APC or Memcache. Bummer. So I'm seriously considering switching. Westhost does look
like it has just about the same technical specifications as my current host, and about the same
price range.
However, the list of specifications does NOT included memcache or apc. Would that
still be included? I'm nowhere near enough traffic to go to a dedicated host or cloud hosting. Still, I think with google starting to look at pagespeed for their rankings somewhere in 2010 and for my visitors from all over the globe, I do think I should have as fast a blog as I can manage.
Let me check on that, to be honest, I don't know!
Unfortunately the way memcache is built, it's not safe to run in shared enviorments (memcache, as the name suggests, caches things in memory, however, there's no security to that at all. Anyone who uses that memcache database can access whatever's in the memory - not safe, at all)
Would that be a problem with APC too then?
In a shared hosting situation , yes. Not in VPS though.
Right. Thanks. Virtual Private Server (VPS - looked that up). Another thing to put on my hosting wish list.
That's quite honest of you to detail how much you get, but I think the fact that you get paid for referring people to WestHosts is no surprise.
I'm not using a dedicated WP host as yet, but as I'm now looking to improve the performance of my blog I might consider doing that after reading your post.
I have a site integrated with my WP install - would the whole site benefit from the setup you've suggessted, or just the WordPress install?
I am going to check out vps.net now. Thanks for the info.
Good post, thanks for being so transparent.
I'm surprised that you use WHM/CPanel - it can be very useful if you are reselling webhosting to a lot of users but it is resource intensive - it doesn't matter so much if you have a massive server with lots of processing power to spare, but for your relatively small server it will be soaking up a substantial portion of your CPU; why take that hit if you are only running a handful of your own websites on that VPS?
I would have imagined that, with your interest in optimization, you would have been eager to reduce complexity and increase performance as much as possible. If you simply wanted an easy interface to manage stuff such as DNS, surely the included ISPmanager Pro would have been a cheaper and less resource-intensive option than WHM?
Also, have you found Litespeed to be worthwhile? Are you using the VPS license and, if so, have you ever run up against the 500 connections limit? Surely that would mean losing valuable traffic when you get bursts of attention?
The 2-CPU license, which does not have that limit, costs half as much as your actual hosting, that seems disproportionate, it seems as if you would be better off simply sticking with Apache and buying a few extra nodes.
cPanel can be tweaked to the point of using very little resources. Afterall, unless someone is using the cPanel interface, or processing logs, etc, what is cPanel doing? There's a lot of myths about cPanel uising a lot of resources, with some simple tweakage.
Disabling all DNS daemons (use vps.net dns) , disabling mail daemons (use gmail), turning off local log processing (use getclicky/google analytics/etc), turning off spamassassin, etc - it might be a worthwhile post since everyone seems to have the idea that cPanel is simply a resource hog.
Hi Nick,
I would 100% recommend WHM/CPanel to anyone who is reselling hosting OR a designer hosting dozens of clients, each of whom wants access to advanced features and their own CPanel login, but it doesn't make any sense if you are only managing a handful of your own websites.
In that case, rather than spending time tweaking all the services that are the whole point of WHM, why not start out with a lighter control panel such as ISPmanager Pro OR completely skip having a control panel and simply write down a list of the command lines for the few tasks you need to carry out, such as adding a new domain or updating Apache via YUM.
There is nothing wrong with using WHM but it is overkill for anyone who isn't reselling hosting, it is not the most effective way to use your resources (even if you spend hours tweaking it, it will still be supporting an infrastructure that the sole user does not need) and, as with any complex software, it inevitably opens up security holes.
Thanks for this tip - I will have to look into VPS - I sounds great
Merry Christmas Joost de Valk,useful post.
I believe that maximum honesty and clarity will always be the best long-term business strategies.
Glad to see both your actions and your words expressing that concept. It's why I follow your blog.
Nice and Great Posting.... Keep Post... Like to follow this blog....
Did you consider the Amazon EC cloud?
Really honest article. I think it's important that people know they have to work at making their sites fast. Most people don't need what you have done. I think the fact that this blog is so insanely fast with even with the images and amount of content and traffic I'm sure it gets is something your readers pay attention to.
Some might find your endorsement and expect the same from Westhost, without doing the legwork to make it happen. This post spells it out.
I personally have been using the WP total cache plugin on your recommendation, learning how it works, and I love it. Just setting up a subdomain on the same server has cut loading time about in half. The plugin makes it really simple to optimize JS and CSS without a ton of cutting and pasting code.
Glad it works for you mate!
Thanks for the article, very interesting. We're looking at changing our reseller host and have been toying with the idea of VPS, still not sure though if it's too much work, as hosting isn't our main business, just something we offer customers we build sites for.
Since you've got a lot of experience in this field evidently, would you mind sharing any tips for companies that offer cPanel hosting in Europe, that is also quick to Asia? We, and most of our customers, are based in Europe but we also have some colleagues in China, so we're looking for a Europe-based host but that's also quick to Asia. We've found that most hosts in the US aren't quick enough for Europe (compared to EU host).. any tips where to look would be appreciated! Hope you don't mind me asking in here.
Karl,
VPS.NET is in London as well. We also offer CDN which would help with your Asian traffic.
i'm considering switching from a Dutch host to one of your recommended ones but how important for SEO is it still to host your website in the country of your target audience?
It's still on the list of advice all the SEO's give to host in the country where your main audience is. It's also clear that a website that's hosted in the country where your audience is, is (all other things equal) likely to be faster. So I'd say find a better Dutch host.
So neither VPS.net Cloud Server or WestHost is a good option then in your opinion?
Hi Wilfred,
I am a customer of the dutch Flex Webhosting for VPS. I host my own sites and the sites of my clients there on one VPS and up til now everything has gone very well and the speed is indeed better than when you host your sites overseas. The service is also great and it's a Dutch company. Maybe that's something you need?
I of course get no money to tell you this, I am just a satisfied customer.
http://fxw.nl/index.php/product-vps-dds
No, I've been begging these guys to open a Dutch datacenter but they haven't yet. I've had great experience with Qweb in Holland though, so I'd give them a try :)
Hi Joost,
Although I don't need a second VPS yet, thanks for the link. I didn't knew that company yet. I may try them out if I got to expand with a second VPS. :-)
Everyone seems to be getting religion and confessing about their affiliate relationships now that the new FTC regulations are in place. It's refreshing to see the honesty surface, and I appreciate the value that Yoast adds to the WordPress community.
Bob,
Could you reply with a link to information regarding: "... new FTC regulations ..." please.
Thanks.
Jeffa - please see my article http://sboguide.com/joomla/business-strategy/4-marketing/54-ftc-prepares-to-crack-down
Bob
It's been a longer issue for me, and I don't know whether I really fall under FTC regulations (I'm not actually in the US, but IANAL), though I'll happily comply with it as I think it's a good thing.
Joost, one question about NetDNA. Is that http://www.netdna.com ? If is that, I don't find any page with the prices / plan for CDN. You can give me a suggestion ?
Christian, I presume it's the "Flexible Site Offload" at http://www.netdna.com/flexible_site_offload.html, which has got package prices down the bottom.
Yes, I think you're right (there start with 15 cents / GB , I think enough).
But... if you purchase a VPS from VPS.net, you can buy a CDN solution from same company, https://www.vps.net/cdn-signup (with "only" 7.5 cents / GB ).
:)
However, on the NetDNA, you can pay only 3.9 cents / GB if purchased in advance. That's great! ;)
I'm curious Joost, You never mention what version of Lite Speed you are using. Just basing it off of their own benchmarks there isn't any kind of substantial improvements by running LiteSpeed Standard the free version. So are you running the LiteSpeed Enterprise? And if you are running the Enterprise what license works with the VPS.net hosting? Is the VPS licensing compatible? I notice there are some notes on LiteSpeed's site about how the VPS licensing is for true VPS's not server virtualizations so I'm not familiar if that license is compatible with VPS.net.
Using the Enterprise version, the VPS version is compatible most of the time, as long as you don't need 500 concurrent connections (which keeping in mind connections last milliseconds, that's a lot of visitors on your site at one time)
Then the license must be purchased separately?
From what I'm getting from it yes LiteSpeed is a separate license, it's not too bad though. $14 per month or $150 per year. And from what I can tell looking at their benchmarks it basically doubles the performance give or take for PHP. So if you are using 2 nodes on VPS.net it's like having the performance of 4 nodes (almost not really but you probably get the idea). Definitely looks interesting. I notice they also have a 15 day trial on the enterprise version so you can do some testing to see if there is an actual performance increase before buying for your particular website.
Jason,
That's correct. You can also switch back and forth really easily. In the Litespeed control panel there's a "switch to apache" button, and since they use the same config files...it's just a simple restart of httpd.
@Nick Nelson, the "switch to apache" sounds good.
@Jason Diehl, another 14 $ / month for my project is too much. I already calculate VPS + CDN and that is enough much :)
Nice post Yoast, I haven't tried VPS.net but definitely like your thinking behind why you switched hosts. I've been doing a lot of speed work on various sites and am very grateful for people in the community who share all their hosting tips and tricks.
You do point out hosting referrals are big business as we know. I actually suggested the other day that Frederick of W3 Total Cache post up some affiliate links on his site. As I am sure everyone who uses his plugin would be more than happy to support him in this way. A lot of people will be changing host just to use it, I know I am.
Hi Joost,
Are such hosting services suitable for hosting of Magento websites too? Or what would you advise in Magento hosting anyway? It depends a European webshop which expects around 500 visitors a day (first 6 months), 2.000 products and expansion plans to 12 European countries...
Hi Bram,
if it's for a European webshop, with its clients coming from around Europe, I'd go for hosting in Europe too, so if you chose VPS.net, I'd pick the UK cloud location. other than that: yes VPS.net should be able to host Magento websites too, it might be a bit more work to select the proper image and install all the required add-ons for Magento though.
Good luck with it!
Cheers
Joost
As long as you get at least 6 nodes - I'm generally able to assist with or do the initial setup for you, regardless of what software you're installing. Did a few wordpress ones today - a youtube clone one yesterday. Not much we can't do. :)
Just sign up - and then email me at nick@vps.net - or put a ticket in ATTN: Nick
I was considering using vps.net for my blog, but I eventually went with liquid web. I might consider switching to vps.net because of the scalability you mentioned, although my blog is very small at the moment.
Due to popular demand VPS.net is now offering to set people with the exact same setup I have, for free, if you use at least 6 nodes! Check out the update at the bottom of the post :)
Smart move - celebrity images :)
I spent the last month setting up my VPS @ VPS.net and I loled when I saw that I set up exactly the same as you did. I even have the multi core LiteSpeed license since VPS.net is now offering it for a reduced price! I had a very good experience with VPS.net so far, I can too highly recommend it. And APC and W3 Total Cache too! (still funny, the exact same setup...)
Oh and I added MySQL 5.4 beta to further improve the speed. Have you taken a look at it yet?
Mark
@Mark
When you say that they are giving you a reduced priced on the multi core LiteSpeed license, how much of a discount is it?
On their forums, just yesterday, VPS.net said that they don't sell LiteSpeed licenses because LiteSpeed would not enable them to offer their users a decent discount.
We don't publicly offer them, but we are able to sell licenses, just not at much of a discount. :)
Oops sorry for my big mouth Nick. :-) Good luck with LiteSpeed donnacha!
It's nothing we were trying to keep "secret". We do sell licenses. It's just not available via the control panel - and we can usually only negotiate a slight discount.
@ Nick
Okay, so, you DO offer them, but you didn't want to say that in your forums?
Fair enough, but could you tell us if this multicore LiteSpeed license is part of the new "Yoast Style" setup?
Yoast is on the VPS license. The multi-core license provides no advantages over the standard VPS license except the 500 connection limit. If you speak to Litespeed, they will suggest you stick with the one core license as that allows all the other apps to use the other CPU.
Thanks Joost for your candor! I just joined your mailing list and appreciate your fine work.
Joost, I am new to WordPress, I bought Thesis last month and I am in the process of switching from a static website to Word Press. WP will be the basis for my current and future websites - all of which will be blogs. I just signed up with Liquid Web but will probably change and emulate your structure (I plan to have a bunch of sites). But right now, I am trying to reconcile a few things that you have written in the past with your current views. Kindly assist.
1. I have reviewed your 11 Top WP Plug ins article where you recommended WP Super Cache, does W3 Total Cache take the place of WP Super Cache?
2. Can you share why you went with NetCDN rather than Westhost - you endorsed them both but
if there some further useful guidance you can offer that would be relevant to making that decision?
3. Soon after buying Thesis, I found your Definitive Guide to Higher Rankings for Your Blog (and watched your video presentation as well) and later I saw you formed a relationship with StudioPress I think. I've already bought Thesis but I still want to implement whatever is useful from your previous guides in my Thesis blogs. Do you have a short list (or long list) of plug ins that you would still recommend for SEO optimized blog templates like Thesis?
Thanks for your help, your great blog and have a Happy New Year. I will be contacting Nick as well.
Michael,
Can't answer some of your questions. But just wanted to answer what I could. 1: W3-TotalCache does replace WPSuperCache, it's just a new "style" of caching.
2: Can't answer this one..but I can say NetDNA is a CDN provider, and at the time Joost went with them, we didn't offer CDN at VPS.NET.
3: You made a great choice with Thesis. Chris Pearson makes a great product. It's quite good for SEO out of the box, although I'm sure Joost will have suggestions on how to make it even better.
Thanks! I've been looking for a good VPS Host forever! Now I've found one. Knowing that they saw what you we're doing and offered it to everybody is great! Thanks again.
Hope to see you at VPS.NET soon! Joost has a great setup, and it'd be stupid for us not to allow our clients to take advantage of it as well since he's been so kind to share it!
Love the cloud concept (would love it more it there was one in Australasia!) and the base price isn't too bad but I see the managed package is an extra $99/month. This makes it cost-prohibitive for us. I guess you 'technically competent' guys can manage it yourselves and don;t need the package but for those of us that are less competent, could we manage without it or is it recommended?
Benz1,
We find a lot of people add cPanel/WHM (cpanel.net) to the server - and are quite comfortable managing it, in addition, we offer $10 "server admin" tickets anytime you need something done on the server which may not be covered by our general support (IE: software upgrades)
Thanks Nick, WHM/cPanel is not a problem, (is there an additional charge for this?), it's more the server management I'm concerned about. For example, our current VPS is 'fully managed' and includes the following:
Software Management
We provide full 24/7/365 phone and help desk support for all software that comes installed on your managed server, including the OS and control panel, as well as for a variety of other commonly used hosting software packages. Additionally, we provide proactive security updates to ensure your server is always secure.
Proactive Monitoring
We provide advanced monitoring for your server and the services on it. Each server comes with 24/7/365 monitoring as well as proactive response to any downed services. Sleep soundly knowing ***** is watching your server.
Hardware Management
We provide full support for the hardware in your server, backed by one of the industry's best SLAs. In the rare event of a component failure, we guarantee to replace it within 1 hour with the replacement parts we keep on-site. We also provide a suite of tools in our client portal to give you complete control over the hardware in your server.
Network Management
We provide a secure and reliable networking environment through careful network engineering. Network reliability is guaranteed by a 100% uptime SLA. Each client is isolated to their own private VLAN for security and our entire network is constantly monitored for performance. Through *****, clients can manage bandwidth usage and alerts, IP addresses, DNS, and more.
Server Hardening
Our ***** package is a comprehensive set of services and tools designed to enhance the security, performance and reliability of your server. It includes an advanced firewall, e-mail anti-virus and anti-spam systems, HTTP DOS and intrusion protection, kernel and filesystem hardening and more.
Can you please advise which of the above are covered without the additional managed package?
Can you also please advise what additional clouds you have coming online? I understand one is being added in Seattle shortly, are aby others planned? Are you able to provide IP addresses and URLs of sites hosted on these clouds for testing?
Many thanks.
Nick, would appreciate your comments on the above comment re managed servers?
Thanks.
Benz1
Just wondering, from an SEO point of view, is each server on the cloud seen as the same 'virtual' IP address or would search engines see the 'real' IP of the server? How many IP addresses to you get with an account or is it so many per node?
Are there by any chance plans to set up a cloud in Australasia at some point?
Thanks.
Every server has it's own IP address. As far as anyone from the outside is concerned. Each cloud server is an individual server. You get 1 IP per Server, each additional IP is $1/mo/IP. You'll find we issue in small blocks too - so you get quite a random assortment of IPs too for your SEO purposes.
Hi, Joost.
I have been use about cloud server, I think it's will be fine if they use for private website. I have trying to build them and sell with my product on shared hosting and install them on WP, but the cloud server cannot handle it and more overload. That is my experiences :).
Not sure I understand - we have many people with 100+ blogs on their cloud server without a problem. As long as you can allocate proper resources to the server, then it'll handle it! :)
Hi,
Just a few questions based on your comments:
* we got ourselves a cloud server at VPS.net, (7 nodes at the moment, though 4 would probably be sufficient);
* we installed a clean CPanel image, and picked the Chicago cloud as the location;
* we replaced Apache with LiteSpeed;
* we installed APC so we could do database and output caching with the help of Frederick's awesome W3 Total Cache plugin;
* we set up our CDN, NetDNA in my case but VPS.net has a great one as well, again with the help of W3 Total Cache and a so called "origin pull" set up.
- what firewall do you use here? Is it dotdefender (available through vps.net) or something else?
- what other programs or plugins do you use to get the most out of it, including security ( a list would be useful)?
- would you recommend the use of modsecurity?
- how did you replace apache with lightspeed? was it through vps.net or some other? could you provide a link to more info/costs on this?
- whats APC, where do i get it, how complicated is it to install/use and can it be done through/by vps.net?
- whats the cost of using netDNA for the CDN?
last question, would the use of Managed services from vps.net cover all of this 'back-end' work for a total newbie who simply wants to replicate your 'package'
Thanks
Robbert
Robbert, I can answer some of these questions for Joost..
He only has a (fairly simple) CSF Firewall in place - http://www.configserver.com/cp/csf.html
DotDefender does not work with Litespeed. However, Litespeed does work with mod_security and writes to the error logs in a fashion that CSF and Fail2Ban can both recognize and re-act..(block/etc) - it's a little more work without DotDefender, but it's completely do-able.
I'm not sure on which other plugins, other than of course W3-TotalCache. Can't answer there.
VPS.NET offers Litespeed licenses at $14/mo (same price you pay Litespeed, just goes on your VPS.NET bill, and with that, we/they do the installations)
APC is a PHP Cache so to speak - "PHP’s APC Module, which caches PHP opcode instead of forcing PHP to reinterpret the scripts every time they are executed." - For Joost's referrals, we do install APC as well, you simply have to drop me an email. nick@vps.net.
Can't answer the CDN question, but we offer CDN as well - starts at .075c per GB
Our managed services package does cover all of the above. With that, you have your full staff of 24/7 system admins to do as you desire. :)
Thanks!
Litespeed licenses are too expensive :O :(
Agreed - $14 is ridiculous when you consider the overall cost.
Just this afternoon you were down a couple of hours due to a DNS problem as you indicated
at Twitter. Please elaborate.
Ha now you are up again an I'm down again for the third day in a row.
Happy,
Basically VPS.NET (we) changed the IP of yoast.com to resolve some inner-networking issues, which shouldn't have been a big deal, however, the CDN had some issues with the new IP - the site itself was up - but the CDN was not "talking to it"
I signed up with VPS.net yesterday and after getting my server the way I wanted it's running great, I was worried having only 1 node would slow things down a bit but it's quite speedy and I'm using hardly any resources on it. I'm happy I made the switch as I have been having trouble with hosts recently (too many customers and not noticing when the server is being overutilised) and seeing as I have experience setting up web servers on Linux I thought I would give it a go, my favourite aspect is being able to have everything the way I want it.
Awesome news with the 1 node ben. Are you using a control panel?
I'm using ISPManager Pro, it's working well, though if I were to do it again I would probably go with something that would work with Lighttpd.
I was having some trouble where after a few hours the server would slow down to a crawl and the initial HTTP connection would take several seconds, but after a few PHP tweaks it seems to be happy now.
Still not sure what was causing it but it seemed to be memory related as now I have ~20-30mb of RAM available instead of the ~5mb it would have when it was doing that.
Hey Joost,
Just wanted to bring our WP specific service to your attention. page.ly. We have automated the installation of a pre-config'd wp.org installs in a WordPress only hosting environment.
Would appreciate your feedback.
@joshua - I heard your interview on WPWeekly, page.ly sounds interesting, it would be handy if there was some sort of forum or comment thread like this for asking questions about your reseller program.
@Joost --- were you ever able to find the time to finish up and release the vps stats plugin for wordpressmu?
I have also some nodes @vps.net and must say that I like them. My blog is hosted by webfaction because their servers are great configured to run WordPress. Sure it's shared hosting but you can do a lot via SSH using you linux user name. They don't have that full featured CP but offer a great service.
Your site are too slow for me (I'm from Italy)...
Is my web devlopment blog slow for you in Italy?
I'd definitely recommend getting ahold of W3 Total Cache on your blog :)
Right! But now seems to be ok ;)
Hi Joost!
Hope you are well. I am ready to sign up
1. do I just click any link on your site that says vps.net and will that enable you to get commission, I wouldn't have heard about this solution without you so want to make sure you get it.
these other 2 questions I asked before but maybe you missed them - could you kindly comment if you can
2. Can you share why you went with NetCDN rather than Westhost - you endorsed them both but
if there some further useful guidance you can offer that would be relevant to making that decision?
3. Soon after buying Thesis, I found your Definitive Guide to Higher Rankings for Your Blog (and watched your video presentation as well) and later I saw you formed a relationship with StudioPress I think. I've already bought Thesis but I still want to implement whatever is useful from your previous guides in my Thesis blogs. Do you have a short list (or long list) of plug ins that you would still recommend for SEO optimized blog templates like Thesis?
Thanks and best regards,
Michael
Hey Michael!
1: just clicking the link will do :) (thanks! ;) )
2: NetDNA was around before VPS.net had a CDN solution, and I've had a good experience with them, so no real reason to change hosts.
3: Thesis is pretty good in and by itself, I'll do a post on what you need to do in combination with Thesis soon. I've worked with Brian Gardner and his StudioPress team for a while indeed, but we've now decided to go our own ways, though I do think (and hope) he's picked up some knowledge from us working together.
Thanks Joost! Nick has been extraordinarily helpful in answering my questions here and one on one. So I am very comfortable with making the move. Only wish I didn't have to choose the management option ($99 USD per month) but I think that might be the safest way to go for me - and then I hope I just have to concentrate on my blogs.
I will keep on the look out for your Thesis post. Really looking forward to that - any sense of when it will come out?
Thanks for an outstanding blog!
Hi Joost,
I read this article when it first came out. I host a couple domains on a linux box at home behind a comcast DHCP address. I'm planing to move the wordpress site to godaddy delux hosting as part of my learning process. I'm very comfortable managing my own linux host, I haven't use online hosting much at all. Perhaps I should just get a linux virtual host (probably prefered) but for now I'll continue exploring hosting plans.
I'm looking for suggestions for moving. I thought I would put up a new wordpress at some temporary domain name. Configure it to my liking, backup content from current site, upload to newsite, then reconfigure DNS to point to the new hosted site.
What tools are available to backup content and perhaps themes and restore to another site?
Thank you for providing a forum I trust to ask these questions.
- jeffa
Hey Jeffa,
you can use XML export and import in WordPress: it works amazingly well. Another way is to use Lester Chans DB plugin and just restore the database to your new host, then do some queries to change the URL's.
If you're comfortable managing your own stuff, VPS.net is a great solution, you can do it all yourself and would probably not need more than 1 or 2 nodes for simple sites!
Joost!
Thanks for the heads up on XML export/import. I kinda went duh when I read your reply the second time after spending some time experimenting with a .sql export and import and realizing what you were refering to was a WordPress admin tool.
The move to godaddy went pretty smoothly, I'm trying to familarize myself with some of the hosting services out there. Every time I wanted somethig I though standard it seemd like godaddy had an additional charger for it.
It was a good opportunity to upgrade WordPress, themes and plugins. I like the motion and pixel themes from Sam at 85 ideas. I'm currently using the pixel theme. Using your google analytics for wordpress plugin for about a year. I took the time to install the w3 total cache that I've heard so much about. I believe that because of the way I ordered and deployed services the sitemap.xml is not working. I first configured rodaw.net, imported the xml and got it running to my liking. Then I pointed the rodaw.com to that same site. I can reach the rodaw.net/sitemap.xml but not the rodaw.com/sitemap.xml I think if I can determine the actual path I can set that manually in the sitemap plugin configuration.
So now it's off to look at VPS.net again. A little more linux and a little less 'friendly wrappers' (godaddy) sounds appealing. I don't know how easy it will be to add a subversion server at godaddy. I think I'm ramblin' on a bit long winded now. Thanks again for the great site and your comments.
Umm... say Joost one more thing? :-) can you recomend a theme and plugin that have fairly straightforward Google addsense capability?
c ya.... - jeffa
http://www.rodaw.com is now hosted at VPS.net. I set up an account and two virtual domains fairly easily. Nice to have a linux site that I know how to configure. I'm thinking I could have saved myself some time and just went there in the first place.
c ya.... - jeffa
Hi Joost! Is there any other way to contact nick? I basically signed up using your link and I emailed him regarding the same setup that you have. Unfortunately, It has been one week already and I still don't have my site on vps.net. My last email that I got from him was he's trying to setup the A records for the DNS and after that no more reply.
We find most clients are still afraid of hosting on a cloud, at least for serious applications.
Enterprise clients like to physically touch their infrastructure vs. being in a virtual world.
Anyone else running into this ?