End of Servint contract, considering move to Linode

Adam Howard said:
This leaves 3 final deciding factors when shopping for host, which are not generic.

1) Dependability and support (do they actually deliver on their claim and do they support you)
2) Ram
3) Price

Now there are millions of web host out there. But as you know, only about 1/2 (we could argue less at 25%) of them actually do provide #1. But that still leaves thousands of other web host remaining to shop from. Which leaves the last two.... Ram and price.

$79.95 - 2GB of Ram - linode.com

For this price, I could get a low end or mid range dedicated server.... Depending on where I go.
Click to expand...
I totally agree with you. Personally, I never liked a virtual solution, you are constraint to their standards and cannot upgrade the OS or sometimes even install a more recent package. Not my cup of tea.
As you said very well, for $79 I could get a real box with better specs than what they offer at linode:
CORE 2 DUO E4300 1.8GHz, 4GB RAM, 2 x 160GB SATA 7200RPM with 5000GB Traffic 100Mbps
http://iweb.com/dedicated/clearance
 
Floren said:
I totally agree with you. Personally, I never liked a virtual solution, you are constraint to their standards and cannot upgrade the OS or sometimes even install a more recent package. Not my cup of tea.
As you said very well, for $79 I could get a real box with better specs than what they offer at linode:
CORE 2 DUO E4300 1.8GHz, 4GB RAM, 2 x 160GB SATA 7200RPM with 5000GB Traffic 100Mbps
http://iweb.com/dedicated/clearance
Click to expand...

On the flipside you'll have snapshot backups of the entire machine and can easily upgrade/downgrade "hardware" specs.

Once you exceed a certain budget the cons do start to outweigh the cons though. And of course it still depends on your particular situation. For example if you have a large site that needs to be able to scale up and down automatically you practically -need- virtualization.

Personally I have a VPS with ServInt because the price & support is a steal. The performance is not as good as I would like but for my particular use-case that's not a deal breaker. Being able to submit a support ticket to have a particular package installed that's not available in the package manager and have it be resolved within 5 minutes is well worth the money (the fact that I am able to do this myself is besides the point, as I'd rather pay not to have to bother with this kind of stuff myself).

Those iweb clearance sales look very tempting though :) Too bad they're all sold out.
 
Floren said:
I totally agree with you. Personally, I never liked a virtual solution, you are constraint to their standards and cannot upgrade the OS or sometimes even install a more recent package. Not my cup of tea.
As you said very well, for $79 I could get a real box with better specs than what they offer at linode:
CORE 2 DUO E4300 1.8GHz, 4GB RAM, 2 x 160GB SATA 7200RPM with 5000GB Traffic 100Mbps
http://iweb.com/dedicated/clearance
Click to expand...
I've know few VPS's where you're stuck with what you got.

The last VPS I had I could switch OS's at will and upgrade them as I saw fit. Pick from Debian, Ubuntu, SuSe, Cent OS, and a few others. Pick between 32 bit or 64 bit of each. From bare bone install or basic installs or even Plesk Control Panel already installed for free (I personally, hate plesk and would not recommend it, but you could install something else yourself.).

You could even upgrade the resources and plans at will.

http://www.server4you.net

Is just one of many....
 
wrx1 said:
These stats are fairly close to what we run. Few more user users, few more posts, but all in all, pretty damn close. I would check out my site (link in sig). We are running 2 512 servers and are barely even throwing a load on them. I just renewed for another year and it was $430 for the year after the discount. I think I could easily double or traffic on our current setup without issue.

As for managed, I am running on 2 years of uptime on my servers, never had any issues. In the 4 years that I have been on linode, I was only down for a few hours when they were getting a DDos attack. Other than that, they have been rock solid. If you have any questions, let me know and I can help out as best as I can.

Russ
Click to expand...

Comparing our forum homepages I see your page speed score is a bit better than mine, 92 vs 90. I'll have to dig in and see why that is. I can say that your page seems to load about the same as mine in "Guest" mode in an uncached browser, I tested with Opera, both took about 8 seconds on first load, 2 to 3 seconds on reload.

I may decide to yank out my installation of xenportal and replace with a static homepage, I'm not sure how much value I'm getting from the portal.

Linode is at the top of my list of potential new hosts, thanks for the info and insight, I hadn't considered getting two smaller servers to split the load, sounds like something I should consider!
 
I would put that down to more simply, your site is very niche and not highly searched. Add that addon to a more popular niche, and suddenly you will double / triple your traffic... and when talking about doubling or tripling a few hundred thousand people a month, server costs then exponentiate to meet the demand. Long tail traffic can be great for small boards to get them noticed, though completely crushing for larger forums in the wallet.
 
Anthony Parsons said:
I would put that down to more simply, your site is very niche and not highly searched. Add that addon to a more popular niche, and suddenly you will double / triple your traffic... and when talking about doubling or tripling a few hundred thousand people a month, server costs then exponentiate to meet the demand. Long tail traffic can be great for small boards to get them noticed, though completely crushing for larger forums in the wallet.
Click to expand...

Probably true. I think my traffic problem goes back when I was still using vB and its RSS Feeder, we were creating threads from ebay RSS feeds, threads with a single post to current auctions and of course a link. The feeds generated lots of long tail activity, we were creating 200 or so new threads every day to Civil War related auctions, that additional traffic helped my ad revenue and also clicks to ebay for Viglink.

When the Google in the November update yanked 80% of our traffic away, I panicked and deleted all ebay threads, like 12,000 threads, and moved to xF. I think xF helped us recover about 10% of that traffic.

I'll never get that traffic back I guess, Google would never tolerate it in today's environment. Live and learn!
 
Don't beat yourself up... people panic all the time when it comes to Google. When you're experienced, you learn never to make rash decisions with Google, because Google are actually quite smart in this sense of learning who is gaming them and who isn't, by who suddenly makes radical changes to their site after an update and who doesn't. The best thing you can ever do with Google, is don't change anything based on Google, and just keep doing what you're doing.

It is the #1 issue with people who think chasing Google is the solution to their traffic needs, when in fact it is the worst thing one could ever do when running a web site. Google brought out a punishment system, some sites dropped off the face of results, some got punished, some just dropped out for other reasons, yet people react and run around getting rid of all their links from sites they paid to be listed / advertised upon.

These people conclude they got punished by being listed in some directory, yet why didn't everyone listed in that directory get punished? Because Google haven't punished such buying links... more they punished the site due to where they where getting links, ie. old link farm techniques, very dodgy websites doing some nasty stuff behind the scenes. Now... there is currently a bunch of people running around the web in a panic believing this latest dash will save them, yet all it does is prove to Google that they're chasing and manipulating Googles results.

The best action with Google is always no action. You analyse over a period, you make slight tweaks... you analyse over further months, you make another tweak, repeat the process. It takes years to truly tweak a website for performance in Google, and the majority of that traffic still comes down to the topic, originality, authenticity and overall the market demand being targeted. For example, there is a bigger demand for clothing than forum software, thus one could receive millions of daily visits, the other would be hundreds.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom