VPS vs Semi Dedicated Hosting

[planetzu]

Hello all,

My current host is being a real pain and they disabled my site without any prior warning stating that the site uses a lot of CPU.

This is what they said: "Your account has been abusing CPU resources for an extended period of time and has been disabled in order to ensure continued performance stability of the account and server. CPU seconds used in the past hour: 3127.71000000001, 87% CPU".

This is all fine, but you are at-least supposed to give your client one day's warning. These guys just shut the site down without any warning which is very unprofessional. Let's just say they are the gator guys. I was on their reseller plan.

Anycase, I am planning to move my site to another service provider Hawkhost as they fall within my budget, but I am confused about which plan to chose between their Semi-Dedicated and VPS plans.

My site runs a Wordpress along with a Xenforo forum. The forum has around 100 members and around 35 to 40 active members on a daily basis.

Given this situation, should I go for the semi-dedicated plan or the VPS plan? Their Standard VPS plan offers 512 MB of RAM and 'equal share' CPU. Would this be enough?

Their semi dedicated plan says that it offers 2 CPU cores and 50 concurrent mysql connections.

I am not sure which plan to go for. Hopefully they are not as bad as the gator guys to put sites down without any prior warning.

I also looked at digitalriver as well but it looks kinda confusing to set-up especially for a noob like me so I am planning to stick with a regular a hosting company for the time being. Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

 

[TPerry]

If you don't mind running on personal computer based hardware (CPU, memory, etc) for about $25 a month you can get a Intel Core2Duo E8300, 4GB DDR2, 80GB SATA HD, and 5TB @ 100Mbps at ServerComplete. This is - of course at that price - a totally unmanaged server. You would have to do your own backups, etc and configuration and securing of the server. Nice thing is you don't have to worry about your CPU use per se, because the only person you will be impacting will be you. There are some other providers out there that have some equivalent deals. Check out WebHostingTalk (WHT).

I'm not associated with ServerComplete - just a happy customer (I have 2 dual Xeon L5520 servers and 1 (about to be two) dual Xeon L5639) with them.

 

[Null]

A 512MB RAM VPS should be sufficient (depends on its setup). However, if your budget can stretch a little more, try and get a 1GB RAM VPS.

 

[TPerry]

VPS would definitely work for him (I would agree with the 1GB if possible - it allows a little more "headroom"). I couldn't go back to one (unless it was on MY ProxMox server that I control) even though my sites don't justify dedicated iron for them.
I just like being a greedy little boy.. mine... ALL mine!

 

[Mouth]

1Gb VPS - $10 per month - https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing

 

[Robby]

Hello all,

My current host is being a real pain and they disabled my site without any prior warning stating that the site uses a lot of CPU.

This is what they said: "Your account has been abusing CPU resources for an extended period of time and has been disabled in order to ensure continued performance stability of the account and server. CPU seconds used in the past hour: 3127.71000000001, 87% CPU".

This is all fine, but you are at-least supposed to give your client one day's warning. These guys just shut the site down without any warning which is very unprofessional. Let's just say they are the gator guys. I was on their reseller plan.

Anycase, I am planning to move my site to another service provider Hawkhost as they fall within my budget, but I am confused about which plan to chose between their Semi-Dedicated and VPS plans.

My site runs a Wordpress along with a Xenforo forum. The forum has around 100 members and around 35 to 40 active members on a daily basis.

Given this situation, should I go for the semi-dedicated plan or the VPS plan? Their Standard VPS plan offers 512 MB of RAM and 'equal share' CPU. Would this be enough?

Their semi dedicated plan says that it offers 2 CPU cores and 50 concurrent mysql connections.

I am not sure which plan to go for. Hopefully they are not as bad as the gator guys to put sites down without any prior warning.

I also looked at digitalriver as well but it looks kinda confusing to set-up especially for a noob like me so I am planning to stick with a regular a hosting company for the time being. Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Hawkhost i presume?
I had the same problems, their semi dedicated is not much beter. Believe me.

 

[TPerry]

Semi-Dedicated is just a shared host with a "little" more allotments from what I understand. Once you start banging the ceiling on a shared host, it's normally a pretty good idea to go to a VPS (unless you can find one of those RARE shared hosting providers that limit the sites on their server to an abnormally low amount).

 

[planetzu]

Hawkhost i presume?
I had the same problems, their semi dedicated is not much beter. Believe me.

I was referring to Hostgator; I think it's really unfair that a hosting company just puts down your site without a prior warning. How is a client supposed to know how much resources his site is using? Doesn't he deserve at-least a 24 hour warning period? It's appalling how ridiculously unprofessional these companies are. It's almost unreal. Not sure if there is any other industry where they can afford to be so unprofessional and uncaring of the customer.

I am planning to move to hawkhost vps plan as I hear they are better but looks like they are not? They do have a 1GB plan which is not too overpriced. So I am considering that temporarily. Will need to take some server management tutorials and move to either digitalriver or servercomplete soon.

 

[WSWD]

Semi-Dedicated is just a shared host with a "little" more allotments from what I understand. Once you start banging the ceiling on a shared host, it's normally a pretty good idea to go to a VPS (unless you can find one of those RARE shared hosting providers that limit the sites on their server to an abnormally low amount).

This... there is nothing "semi-dedicated" about most semi-dedicated plans. It's one of those buzzwords that some hosts used in the early 2000's to lure clients in. It was the early 2000's version of "cloud".

In the case of Hawkhost, you are simply allowed slightly higher CPU usage, higher mail limits, higher MySQL connections, and they apparently make more frequent backups.

Now...there actually WERE such things as semi-dedicated servers as well. A host might split up a dedicated server in 1/4 or 1/2, and instead of paying for a full dedicated box, you would pay for a portion of it. Those existed when VPSs and virtualization technology weren't really commonplace. The semi-dedicated servers were nothing more than VPSs with huge resources.

How is a client supposed to know how much resources his site is using? Doesn't he deserve at-least a 24 hour warning period? It's appalling how ridiculously unprofessional these companies are. It's almost unreal.

Trust me, that this is probably the only time you will ever catch me supporting Hostgator...especially true now that they are owned by EIG. I don't like them. Their service is horrible, etc. However, I've been in the industry almost 20 years. I've seen it all. It would be great to give every client 24 hours notice. Hell, it would be great if you didn't have to suspend the client at all. Why lose a good, paying client if you don't have to? But there are indeed times where you cannot give the client notice. Whatever they're running can very often cause the entire server to be unstable, cause the server to crash, possibly repeatedly etc. Are you going to affect (and potentially lose) hundreds of other clients, so that one client can abuse the server's resources? Last I checked, there are all kinds of nice little graphs in HG's cPanel that show you how much CPU you're using, how many connections you're making, how many processes you're running, etc.

If HG is indeed telling the truth with the 87%, there is no way any reputable company would allow 1 client to use 87% of the server's CPU resources. What's left for everyone else? 13% for all the other users? No...

 

[planetzu]

But there are indeed times where you cannot give the client notice. Whatever they're running can very often cause the entire server to be unstable, cause the server to crash, possibly repeatedly etc.

I do agree with what you are saying but in the email they clearly state that "Your account has been abusing CPU resources for an extended period of time".
If it was abusing CPU for such an extended period, they really could have mailed me about this earlier so I had enough time in my hands to look for alternatives.

 

[WSWD]

I do agree with what you are saying but in the email they clearly state that "Your account has been abusing CPU resources for an extended period of time".
If it was abusing CPU for such an extended period, they really could have mailed me about this earlier so I had enough time in my hands to look for alternatives.

Absolutely! If it has been happening for an extended period, there is really no reason they shouldn't have said something the first, or second, or tenth time it happened.

 

[tommydamic68]

I have recently turned to semi - dedicated plan. Hoping all goes well.