Westserve

VPS - three weeks on

It’s been a few weeks now since I dived into the new world of running a VPS as a web server instead of my previous shared hosting arrangement.

It’s been a pretty positive experience.
I chose a managed VPS, which costs more, but it means the hosting company look after all the O/S security and updates. That leaves me to focus on the applications I want to run and managing the various web sites and email configurations.
So far, I’ve cut across this site, plus my two coffee-related sites, Ministry Grounds and the Ministry Grounds Store. All with good success.

Support
I certainly had a learning curve working out the two control panels and how they work. I haven’t used cPanel before (even though it’s the most common kind of panel used in shared and VPS hosts), and it takes a little getting used to.
But that said, I only have praise for the support people at Liquid Web. They have consistently responded to my sometimes dumb questions within two hours and done so with patience and politeness. On a few occasions, I had the initial response within ten minutes. I really couldn’t ask for better support.

Performance.
Generally, I’m very happy with the performance of the VPS. Choosing a VPS based in the States brings latency issues, and it seems like the first load up of, say, this blog can be a little sluggish, but then subsequent loads in the same session are much faster. Straight html pages load very briskly.

Control
Even though I’m still learning the ropes, I love the control a VPS with full root access brings. Something happened to the MySQL server the other morning. I couldn’t load phpMyAdmin to do some tweaking.
On my shared hosting account, that would mean submitting a support ticket and waiting up to 24 hours for someone to do something about it.
I just rebooted the MySQL server with the click of an icon and within 30 seconds was up and running again.
I’ve only just started exploring the possibilities of having such control and flexibility, but it is a revelation so far!