technology, networking and IP telephony
Posts tagged HOSTING
Linode VPS Hosting
0October 31, 2011
by Michael McNamara in Blog
I’m home sick today with a nasty sinus infection, so I thought I would make a quick post about Linode. Last week (maybe two weeks ago now) I decided to give Linode a test drive by signing up for a Linode VPS 512. The increase in traffic to this site and the discussion forums has been significant enough over the past 6 months that I’ve been trying to stay ahead of the curve rather than falling behind (I personally hate a slow site). I’ve been coming up against my 40GB/monthly transfer limits with RIMU hosting even after setting up a CDN so I went looking for alternatives and found Linode.
I ran some quick and dirty benchmarks using Unixbench (1 parallel test) and here’s what I found;
| No | Guest Operating System | Architecture | CPU | Description | Results |
| 1 | CentOS 5.7 | x86 | 1 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5540 @ 2.53GHz | VMware ESX 4.1 HP BL490c G6 | 1010 |
| 2 | CentOS 5.7 | x64 | 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5160 @ 3.00GHz | HP DL360 G5 | 935 |
| 3 | CentOS 5.7 | x64 | 4 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5540 @ 2.53GHz | HP BL460c G6 | 1005 |
| 4 | CentOS 5.7 | x86 | 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU @ 2.80GHz | IBM x345 Series | 387 |
| 5 | CentOS 5.7 | x86 | 1 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5506 @ 2.13GHz | RIMU Hosting – XEN 1vCPU | 290 |
| 6 | CentOS 6.0 | x86 | 4 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz | Linode Hosting – XEN 4vCPU | 495 |
Note: I currently use the IBM x345 Series server as my test and development server so I don’t have to worry about destroying my live production server.
A number of the servers above are virtualized with either VMware or XEN and some are physical. I’ve provided some comparison data in servers 1-4, the two of interest are 5 and 6.
You can see from the numbers that the Linode server beat out the RIMU server by quite a margin. I also chose to have the Linode server placed in their Newark, NJ data center which is geographically closer to me in Pennsylvania than the Dallas, TX data center that my current VPS resides in. With that location change I noticed a big delta in the RTTs to/from the two locations. From my Verizon FiOS home broadband I get around 50ms to the Dallas, TX data center while I’m getting around 20ms to the Newark, NJ data center.
There are other pros and cons between RIMU and Linode which I won’t completely go into here but in my specific example it was the storage and transfer bandwidth that caused me to look elsewhere. I have nothing bad to say about RIMU, they’ve given me more than 18 months of great service.
Last week I moved the blog (that’s this site) to the Linode VPS and it seems to be running great. If everything continues to run smoothly I’ll migrate the discussion forums and remaining sites over to Linode and cancel my RIMU account over the next two weeks.
Have you noticed the speed increase or any other issues with this site?
Cheers!
Server upgraded to a Virtual Private Server
3May 8, 2010
I took a few hours this evening and migrated my blog (along with the discussion forums) over to a new Virtual Private Server (VPS) at RIMUHosting out of their Dallas, Texas data center.
It wasn’t too difficult but it did take some fiddling with the Apache configuration to create the various virtual hosts and then importing the various databases and re-creating the various database user accounts.
I’m really pleased with the immediate performance increase.
Please leave a comment here if you have any issues and/or problems.
Feel free to let me know how the site performs for you!
Thanks as always for your support!
Cheers!
Update: May 8, 2010 at 11:15PM
I’ve just noticed my first big problem.. seems the RSS/XML feed is not working because of a whitespace issue. It may take some time before I can get this one fixed… might need to roll back to the old server for a while.
Is it time for an upgrade to my web host?
7April 26, 2010
I’m truly amazed at how fast the time flies. I’ve been blogging for 2 1/2 years now and it’s been a very exciting adventure. It all started back in October 2007 when I created an account on Blogger. In July 2008 I decided to branch out by purchasing my own domain name. At the same time I converted from Blogger to WordPress, hosting it on a Go Daddy shared web hosting account. At the time Go Daddy was a convenient one stop shopping purchase, for both domains and web hosting.
I’m now coming up on the renewal for Go Daddy and I’m considering upgrading to a virtual private server (VPS).
Why? In my role with my current employer I work with hundreds (almost thousands) of servers, both virtual and physical. It’s always been a little depressing to know what’s possible from a real server and then settling for what I can personally afford with this being a hobby. In addition to my wanting more control over the environment I’ve seen a significant growth in traffic to both my blog and the discussion forums which are hosted on the account.
Over the past 6 months the traffic to my blog is peaking daily at around 1,000 page loads which is pretty decent in my opinion for the amount of material I have posted and the narrow focus of that material.
The traffic to the discussion forums have really started to ramp up over the past seven months.
As both of those endeavors have grown I’ve noticed the response time of the site go up. I’m the first to recognize that while some of the reason is the traffic a large portion is also the number of features I’ve added to the site over the past 2 years. Thankfully the little bit of advertising I’ve been running has helped defray the current hosting costs (thanks for the support!). With that in mind I’m considering stepping up to a VPS solution in order to provide a significant performance boost and provide a platform for future projects.
Anyone have any recommendations on VPS web hosting? I’m probably looking at a budget of $30-$50/monthly, let’s not forget it’s just a hobby and I have no intention of giving up my day job! (I’m told my grammar is terrible and I need to spend more time proof reading).
I was considering RimuHosting based on a blog post from Colin McNamara, not directly related but anyone with that name must be smart ;).
Cheers!
