The choice of hosting as it is not five minutes

Each developer at a certain moment is faced with the problem of locating their projects not anywhere else. Naturally, everyone wants the wolves to be full and the sheep intact - an affordable price and acceptable quality hosting are necessary. For me, this moment came two months ago. I will share with you how I solved this problem.

By the time I was thinking about changing the hosting, for several years I was the owner of a virtual hosting from the St. Petersburg company SpaceWeb . That choice was made without much thought and was due to the PostgreSQL I needed. And the price at that time suited. I did not count on high traffic of my sites - there were only five of them. Then my friend and I decided to launch our first joint project and changed the tariff, albeit for a stupid reason - lack of space. For some reason, then we did not think about the loads. The new tariff made it possible to host up to ten sites, create ten MySQL databases and one PostgreSQL. However, this is an ideal option for a small company website. I even placed two such commercial sites on my hosting in order to somehow justify it. But then I wanted more. As the saying goes, "Give me the pills of greed, but more."

Yielding to the popular belief that hosting a hill is cooler and cheaper, he began to sort out everything that Google had offered. At first, his eyes lit up: unlimited disk space, any number of sites and databases! And all this for ridiculous money. He doubted. And, as it turned out, for good reason. Shoveled a lot of forums, found that these Western providers are engaged in overselling, i.e. actually sell what is not. One person uses ten megabytes on the server, and the remaining ninety are free, and they are sold to you. Plus a limit on the number of files, their size. But the worst thing is that you may be denied service with the complete removal of data on a variety of reasons - most often this is due to the excess load on the server. Goosebumps on the back did not run? Delete all data. Without warning. Even those that were heard were not satisfied: DreamHost, GoDaddy, HostMonster. The reasons are standard: overselling, difficulties with payment and technical support, general brakes, hidden payments and restrictions.

Okay, I think, let me see what we have. The choice is big. Many have dealt with someone at work, hence the well-known pitfalls. About something repeatedly wrote on Habré, just met something on the Internet. I can say that for various reasons it was swept off the famous and not so, among them, for example: McHost, Masterhost, Rusoniks, Agave, MTW, FirstVDS, Gino, Majordomo, 1GB. One of the decisive criteria for me was the price.
')
Shoveling mountains of information on " Hostobzor " and " Hosting in detail, " came across the mention of FastVPS .

Opinions on the same "hosting details" common. Some even scared. Especially about the support service and the speed of its reaction. How do you, for example, is?

The most disgusting support in the world, there is one guy who doesn't care about your problems! A server in Down, 2 days of silence. Money disappears, the answer is zero! Mol themselves to blame.

Or that:

I have just connected to the fasstps, but I am already incredibly annoyed by technical support for their products (or rather, the lack thereof)

I decided to ask Habrapoisk what he thinks about FastVPS :)

• 1 topic
• 1 blog
• 1 user
• more than 20 comments

In the comments, everyone is happy like. There are those who use. The topic concerns hosting in passing - only that the author chose a suitable tariff there. Well, also kind of nice? The company's blog is empty, but you could tell a lot of interesting things, for example, about the technologies used.

Afraid of wolves - do not go to the forest. I rented a virtual server. Moreover, there were no worthy alternatives for the “price / resources” aggregate.

For a virtual server, FastVPS offers several operating systems to choose from (I was even a bit shocked by the variety):

• Debian Etch / Lenny
• Fedora
• CentOS 5
• Gentoo
• Ubuntu
• Slackware
• OpenSUSE

And Debian Lenny is highlighted as recommended. I did not think for a long time, because I have experience working with systems based on Debian. He took it, which he never regretted.

Due to the fact that I am not very strong in server administration (and I don’t want to take away the bread from the professionals of this business - I bow to you), I ordered a preinstalled software package that includes: Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQl, PhpMyAdmin , FTP, MTA + 2 week access to the ISPmanager panel. Direct Admin is offered as an alternative hosting control panel. With both of them, I worked quite closely and, in my opinion, the latter is inferior to the first, although maybe I find fault with it. I have not seen the ISPmanager Pro version alive, but I think that its closest competitor is Plesk of the ninth version, although there is no such background à la Windows 7 (those who have seen it will understand). ISPmanager Pro differs from Lite in that it allows hosting on a server to be hosted with clients, accounts, management of their resources and domains. In short, we don’t need a Pro - in the end I bought an eternal license for Lite, but that was later. I was pleasantly surprised that ISPmanager easily installed PostgreSQL and nginx. Nginx is installed in proxy mode and listens to port 80, while Apache is outweighed by 8080. When creating domains through the control panel, virtual hosts for both servers are created automatically. Databases are created with a bang. Extensions for PHP are also installed from the panel. In short, it is better to see once. For example, here .

For one project, I really wanted to hang Apache on port 80, for which I ordered a second IP address. But, to my disappointment, ISPmanager does not allow scatter servers (Apache and nginx) to different addresses. You need to remove one of the addresses, and the good ISP will demolish it from the interfaces, and you have to configure everything with your hands. I postponed this idea indefinitely. Not forgetting, however, to express the wish for separate configuration of servers on the ISPsystem forum.

Besides the fact that in the first week of use I bought a second IP address, I managed to change the tariff. The first took on trial for the same money that he paid for virtual hosting on SpaceWeb. The second is a solid OVZ-3: 300 MB RAM, 900 Mhz CPU, 10 GB HDD. I understand that many here, perhaps, have their own servers :) Well, tell me, how is it good for the first time? I also rented fast ns servers. I did not want to raise my own for several reasons: memory savings, speed, fault tolerance. And all because some domain name registrars do not provide them for free, and this cannot be explained to the client. Especially since a week ago everything worked.

I coordinated most of my actions with the support service. True, it is interesting to know where the unspent funds will go when the tariff is changed? If you are interested in this question, then I was given two options: money can be transferred to a deposit to pay for some other services, or you can postpone the estimated date of the next payment. I chose the second one so that I would not be tempted to spend this money on something else. Frankly, in connection with the above review of this hoster, I did not expect such a quick response of their support service. I asked questions at different times of the day and was pleasantly surprised by the answers in 10-15 minutes. It is important, competent answers. Especially at three in the morning in Moscow. Yes. And I read Habr more often at this time. But technical support (administration) they have paid, but not yet useful. What for? After all, we have Google, Yandex and a set of drivers brain.sys, hands.sys.

I asked a lot of technical questions on the ISPsystem forum. And, having received the required answers, I was once again glad that I chose their hosting control panel.

Now everything is good and wonderful and there are no plans to change the hosting yet. And there are plans to test its reliability by placing sites with high traffic. One, potentially interesting for Habr, is already in progress.

To summarize?

What was: a virtual hosting SpaceWeb.
What we have: a virtual server from FastVPS.
What we want: world peace and happiness for all :) not virtual ...

UPD: At the request of the workers, a post is being prepared about setting up php-fastcgi to run under nginx in the realities of ISPmanager.