Some advice on acquiring a VPS

Davyc

Davyc

Well-known member
From someone who has, for the last 30+ years, used shared hosting, I'm being tempted towards a VPS, so I have the ability to add more of what I would like (such as Elasticsearch, and a more effective caching system) as well as other advantages that I am becoming more aware of as I look into what a VPS offers.

Where I need advice is basically on what I need in terms of vCPU's, memory and storage and how easy it is to manage a VPS. I want to stay with my current host IONOS, and they have some, what I consider, to be some good deals on a VPS. It can either be managed through their own propriety console, or a free version of Plesk is also available; I have no experience of either. cPanel is not available.

These are the configurations on offer:

www.ionos.co.uk

VPS Hosting UK | Cheap » from £1/mth | IONOS

Virtual Server Hosting in the UK » Unlimited traffic up to 1 Gbit/s ✓ SSD NVMe storage ✓ Free Plesk Web Host Edition ✓
www.ionos.co.uk www.ionos.co.uk

I will be hosting three Xenforo sites on the server. So, will this be worth the effort of a learning curve, or would it be better to stick to shared hosting; I've never had a problem with their shared hosting, but you can't install anything such as a caching system or Elasticsearch.

Advice please.
 
More importantly, are you able to keep that vps secure, do you know what you are doing?

If so, try it first with a cheap VPS (with a minimum of 2gb of mem) and install Centminmod by @eva2000 so no other dashboard is needed

If all goes well you should pick a VPS that suits your needs. That mostly depends on the number of visitors on your XF sites so I cannot recommend you on that.
 
duderuud said:
do you know what you are doing?
Click to expand...
The simple answer to this is no, lol. I've never used a VPS before, having only ever used shared hosting, which is why I'm seeking advice.

As for visitors, both my sites have received over 20,000 visits for one (this is since opening) and the other over 41,000 visitors. In regard to members, only a handful on each site and none of them active; my sites are mainly for my own personal pleasure, so not much on the emphasis of activity. I've heard of Centminmod but wouldn't have a clue how to install it, lol. Again, hence my request for advice.
 
Don't use a VPS unless you have at least a basic understanding of OS security, hardening and overall administration.
Centminmod does a lot for you but you still need to know what to do if something goes wrong.

Read a lot of tutorials, watch a lot of YouTube videos and just get familiar with Linux administration and test things out on a local VM.

In the meantime you can either hire someone to do it for you or rent a managed VPS (which cost a lot more) like this
 
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You usually need VPS when hosting company tells you you're using too much resources. :D

From what I see, you don't need VPS.

But, if you want to play with VPS, just to get the feel how it is, you can try it, test it, see how it goes for you. Working with Plesk is easy, in some aspects I prefer it to cPanel, but you have to see what you need.

If you have money, and you want to play with it, why not, you will learn to work with it.
 
When looking at control panels for VPSes, it might feel bad to pay for them as it's extra cost on top of your VPS plan. From personal experience, do not use CyberPanel. At the time of writing, the current version is 2.3. It's held together by thoughts and prayers, and you'll spend just as much time trying to work around the various issues you'll encounter, probably more time than you'd spend managing a CentminMod setup.

For example:
  • Their update script is nothing more than "fetch the latest commit of the selected github branch" and it will also reset your folder permissions, so be ready to chmod -R your /data and /internal_data folders
  • Issuing LetsEncrypt SSL certificates works about 35% of the time. You'll receive no feedback on whether it's using a self-signed certificate or not, and you have to guess the URL for the "System logs" page to find out the error as that is not linked anywhere. Most of the time, the error is just "LetsEncrypt timed out and we didn't retry".
  • Literally every piece of documentation they have on their website is broken, as is most of the search results from DuckDuckGo/Google. Either broken as in "this was posted on our old forum and there is no redirect" (404), or broken as in "this was posted on our old forum and is now in an archive non-staff can't access" (403), or broken as in "all the images in our Knowledge Base articles are referencing our defunct Wordpress install and are now missing".

Their documentation (that does work) is also woefully lacking, it's definitely not for those without experience.

I know they have a v3 in development and I surely do hope this version will be a bit more polished, but I'm definitely going to generate a VPS snapshot with my host before attempting to upgrade.

---

For positives, I'll say that LSWS+LSPHP is blazing fast, faster than any other combo I've encountered in my 20 years of doing this. I'd trade that for the stability of cPanel if I could.
 
I've been running my first VPS since a year or so. It's been a frustrating and joyful experience at the same time. I've certainly learned a lot since then. Although I've chosen for a managed one running WHM with 5 available cPanel accounts. Makes everything a little easier. But the possibilities are truly endless and you can do anything you want with it.

I see replies like "you don't need a vps until your host says so' - Well it's not always about needing it but for me it was most certainly wanting it and have the freedom you don't get from a shared hosting.

One thing I've learned the hard way, if you play with settings, make snapshots of the VPS so you can roll back. I pay around 350USD yearly including the 5 cPanel accounts for 6 vCPU Cores, 16 GB RAM, 400 GB SSD.
 
DragonByte Tech said:
When looking at control panels for VPSes, it might feel bad to pay for them as it's extra cost on top of your VPS plan. From personal experience, do not use CyberPanel. At the time of writing, the current version is 2.3. It's held together by thoughts and prayers, and you'll spend just as much time trying to work around the various issues you'll encounter, probably more time than you'd spend managing a CentminMod setup.

For example:
  • Their update script is nothing more than "fetch the latest commit of the selected github branch" and it will also reset your folder permissions, so be ready to chmod -R your /data and /internal_data folders
  • Issuing LetsEncrypt SSL certificates works about 35% of the time. You'll receive no feedback on whether it's using a self-signed certificate or not, and you have to guess the URL for the "System logs" page to find out the error as that is not linked anywhere. Most of the time, the error is just "LetsEncrypt timed out and we didn't retry".
  • Literally every piece of documentation they have on their website is broken, as is most of the search results from DuckDuckGo/Google. Either broken as in "this was posted on our old forum and there is no redirect" (404), or broken as in "this was posted on our old forum and is now in an archive non-staff can't access" (403), or broken as in "all the images in our Knowledge Base articles are referencing our defunct Wordpress install and are now missing".

Their documentation (that does work) is also woefully lacking, it's definitely not for those without experience.

I know they have a v3 in development and I surely do hope this version will be a bit more polished, but I'm definitely going to generate a VPS snapshot with my host before attempting to upgrade.

---

For positives, I'll say that LSWS+LSPHP is blazing fast, faster than any other combo I've encountered in my 20 years of doing this. I'd trade that for the stability of cPanel if I could.
Click to expand...

I've experienced *none of these issues (and I have deployed countless instances) so far, other than their documentation being scattered because they moved much of it at one point without implementing redirects.

*A few years ago, I had SSL issues with one client's installation, but CyberPanel resolved that a long time ago.
 
MySiteGuy said:
I've experienced *none of these issues (and I have deployed countless instances) so far, other than their documentation being scattered because they moved much of it at one point without implementing redirects.

*A few years ago, I had SSL issues with one client's installation, but CyberPanel resolved that a long time ago.
Click to expand...
I don’t know what to tell you. Their forums are also largely useless as the devs don’t respond to any queries, so you rely on the community themselves to find the solution and post back.

There’s other issues I could mention but it’s hard for me to write out everything on mobile.

It’s definitely not suitable for running in a production environment unless the person running it is comfortable with the command line. I dread having to update it to patch this new SSH vulnerability.
 
Davyc said:
The simple answer to this is no, lol. I've never used a VPS before, having only ever used shared hosting, which is why I'm seeking advice.

As for visitors, both my sites have received over 20,000 visits for one (this is since opening) and the other over 41,000 visitors. In regard to members, only a handful on each site and none of them active; my sites are mainly for my own personal pleasure, so not much on the emphasis of activity. I've heard of Centminmod but wouldn't have a clue how to install it, lol. Again, hence my request for advice.
Click to expand...

Ionos, possibly expensive, not seen or used their VPS but a good friend of mine uses them for email, but the free (cheap) tier gets expensive when you expand a few mail boxes , he is paying around £180 Uk a year for 5 email accounts 2 with 10 (might be 20) gb of storage, im swopping him over to mxroute later this year as its a no brainer - cheaper and more storage for unlimited emails and domains......

For VPS I use Hetzer now (exclusively), very cost effective and the control panel and backups and snapshots are superb, have around 7 VPS and a dedicated with them at present.

CMM is fantastic @eva2000 is just the best - thanks @eva2000

As for what VPS - are you looking at one for the 3 forums ? or one for each forum ? and how busy is the forum ? traffic ? bandwidth ? Best thing with Hetzner is you can upscale really easily if you find the VPS is not good enough.

Its very easy to spin up a hetzner VPS, install CMM with Alma or Rocky and do some testing over a week
 
MySiteGuy said:
I've experienced *none of these issues (and I have deployed countless instances) so far, other than their documentation being scattered because they moved much of it at one point without implementing redirects.

*A few years ago, I had SSL issues with one client's installation, but CyberPanel resolved that a long time ago.
Click to expand...
1730218222410.webp

CyberPanel can go **** itself -.-
 
eva2000 said:
Ouch @DragonByte Tech that your server or just sharing someone's screenshot ?

What Are My OPTIONS? CyberPanel v2.3.6 pre-auth RCE

Few months ago I was assigned to do a pentest on a target running CyberPanel. It seemed to be installed by default by some VPS providers & it was also sponsored by Freshworks.
dreyand.rs

github.com

bug fix: pre-auth · usmannasir/cyberpanel@5b08cd6

Cyber Panel - The hosting control panel for OpenLiteSpeed - bug fix: pre-auth · usmannasir/cyberpanel@5b08cd6
github.com github.com
Click to expand...
My server. I got the notification from my web host that my CyberPanel version was vulnerable 2 hours after the attack had taken place.

Since CyberPanel doesn't have a working auto-update feature and running the upgrade script often requires a reboot of the server because its upgrade process is so poorly written that the server is left in a non-functional state after running it, I had no real way of knowing this was even a thing.
 
eva2000 said:
Given the RCE writeup can see why CyberPanel would be a frequent target for 0 day exploits :(

Hopefully you have a usable backup to restore data from.
Click to expand...
Yeah, although it is six days old. I paid for CyberPanel's advanced pack - or whatever it's called - to enable daily backups to S3 like I had with cPanel, but the instructions provided didn't work as the instructions were for an older version of CyberPanel and they couldn't provide up-to-date instructions. I have to rely on the host's backups.

Needless to say, I deeply regret my decision to use this absolute dumpster fire of a control panel. I'll likely bite the bullet and go back to cPanel, this sort of garbage where you have to run a shell command and reboot the server to do something as simple as applying security updates is exactly what I wanted to avoid when using a control panel software.
 
cPanel / DirectAdmin if my customers want a control panel.

While expensive, nothing comes quite as close to cPanel in terms of ease of use and maturity. Yes, I get absolutely shafted on their pricing, but everything "just works" and they fix things when it's broken. Can count on one hand the number of tickets I've had with them over the last 10+ years of using it.

Even testing the backup and restore process with Jetbackup integration in a DR scenario:

1730284870185.webp

Anything that doesn't need a control panel (which most of the time is purely because they want incoming emails), gets Centminmod ;)
 
Alan_SP said:
You usually need VPS when hosting company tells you you're using too much resources.
Click to expand...
I was told I needed a VPS by my previous host Nimbus. (Lot of database crashes). It didn't help.

I switched to @MattW shared hosting, it was cheaper and Matt got all the issues sorted out (the sites were under some kind of frequent attacks I believe, I don't remember the exact details) but the sites now performs better and have been fine now for years since then.
 
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MattW said:
cPanel / DirectAdmin if my customers want a control panel.

While expensive, nothing comes quite as close to cPanel in terms of ease of use and maturity. Yes, I get absolutely shafted on their pricing, but everything "just works" and they fix things when it's broken. Can count on one hand the number of tickets I've had with them over the last 10+ years of using it.

Even testing the backup and restore process with Jetbackup integration in a DR scenario:

View attachment 313174

Anything that doesn't need a control panel (which most of the time is purely because they want incoming emails), gets Centminmod ;)
Click to expand...
Yeah, I’ve paid for 2 years in advance with my provider and over the weekend I’m going to be reimaging my VPS for cPanel. A cool €360 and change for the remaining time on my VPS plan for the cPanel license, but it has to be done.

Anyone who suggests using CyberPanel is doing a disservice to anyone listening.
 
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