Pushed to upgrade my VPS!!!

[NahhaB]

Hi,

I have been a VPS customer for more than a year now and I really like JPC and specially customer service.

Today, my website went down for hours till now and the reason according to techs is the high load. I've tried to explain that I have not developed anything or done any script changes for the past few months and the traffic on my website had been higher than nawadays specially last month. Even statistics I have supports what I'm saying, so I see no rational reason to drive resources to 100% all of the sudden.

I have proposed to upgrade to Enterprise VPS although I'm 100% convinced that nothing changed in my website during the last 2 months. And even with this proposal, support people think that this will not resolve the issue and I need to upgrade to dedicated server.
I have few questions:

- Why suddenly after I paid the invoice my server went down and I need to upgrade??
- Why upgrading to the next level or even to the highest VPS level wont resolve the issue? Who can explain this for a website that is stable for 2 months and suddenly it needs only a dedicated server!!!!

I really but it seems that I will start looking for another host as I dont agree in princple with the way I'm beeing pushed to upgrade and pay about 3x my budget!!!
(ticket#12687201)

[JPC-Veena]

Hi,

We do not ask anyone to upgrade unless they are causing severe load issues on the hardware node. Your vps is doing that and techs have tried assisting you but the traffic/cpu usage of the php scripts on your website is crashing the entire node and affecting all other clients on this shared hardware. We cannot let that happen. Please review the scripts, I believe it is the traffic to your forum causing the high usage.

[NahhaB]

But after restricting access to the forum to my IP only, it was very slow. few minutes ago, restriction was removed and the site started to hang up and stoped responding within few minutes although only 10 - 15 users are online. How do you explain this? Please remember that last development has been done was more than 2 months old, and triffic was an average of 500+ users online with no issues for the past few months !!!

Please check from your side once again, apachi configuration, php config, hardware, etc...

[the_ancient]

But after restricting access to the forum to my IP only, it was very slow. few minutes ago, restriction was removed and the site started to hang up and stoped responding within few minutes although only 10 - 15 users are online. How do you explain this? Please remember that last development has been done was more than 2 months old, and triffic was an average of 500+ users online with no issues for the past few months !!!.

It could very well be your account was abusing resources all along,

CPU, RAM, etc are all burstable, so if the node was not full yet, or the other users on the node were not using their resources you would have been allowed to bleed and take some of their resources..

So even if it worked for 2mos that does not mean it will work once your forced back in to the confines of your Guaranteed specs

I still feel everyone in the hosting industry is overselling the idea of VPS's, they are not really all that great IMO, and very few people actually need a VPS, VPS are for people who need custom configuration, not people seeking a stop gap from shared to dedicated hosting..

High volume, high traffic sites should be put on SDX plans.

Please check from your side once again, apachi configuration, php config, hardware, etc...

PHP apache are both on YOU under a vps, not on Jag, your running a virtual server, thus the name V(virtual)P(private)S(server), the hardware is controlled by a visualizing program, in this case Virturozzo, You given a Clean slate from which to build your own platform, with some free configuration put in their.

[Gwaihir]

Indeed, this sounds like an SDX site more than a VPS one. NahhaB, why VPS?

Nevertheless, it might be too big for SDX to. Whatever happened to the ideas for SDX+?

[Frank Broughton]

Yes SDX has a some what limited daily bandwidth.

NahhaB what server you on?

[Ron]

500+ users online

[NahhaB]

The question that needs answer is:

With only one user online (when we had IP restriction) the website was too slow
When we removed the restriction, and with the first 15 - 20 users came in it hanged up after few minutes (with only 20 users only)

[NahhaB]

Keep listening to your self, convince your self that it is the customers fault while my website is down for about 24 hours now. Thank you JPC...

[Ron]

Nahhab,

I can't magically diagnose the issues you are having. There may be something going on with your VPS or your node. This is something you're going to have to work out privately between JPC support staff and yourself.

To answer one of the questions you posed in your first post, upgrading to a higher plan won't help if your VPS requires more than a certain amount of CPU. All of the environments are on equal share CPU, and while higher-plan VPSes are probably on machines that have fewer VPSes to share with (I don't know if they do that, but if the machines are RAM limited they must) still you have to "play fair" with the other VPSes on the node for CPU resources.

At first blush, without knowing your setup personally, 500+ users online concurrently sounds like a whole lot of resources for a VPS.

[jason]

Think of a VPS as a three- to five-year-old computer serving your site. That not a 100% accurate description for a number of reasons, but that's essentially what you've got. A VPS is a server that is partitioned into many little servers. Each one of those little servers gets a chunk of the finite resources of the host server. While JPC is pretty good about allowing "wiggle room" on their servers, there is only so much of that you can give and still make a profit on the server, so JPC is naturally going to put as many accounts as they can on one server.

As the_ancient said, your site may very well have always been overusing resources, it just may not have been noticed before. Without having access to your server I can't confirm or deny this, but it is certainly plausable. As the overall server starts to see more use then naturally there is going to be less wiggle room for your VPS and you (and potentially other VPS owners) will start to notice.

500 concurrent users to a forum seems to be a lot. I've got an old P3 box with 512Mb of RAM sitting in the other room that I use for backups and some development and testing. It works great for my needs, but it can slow if I try to do too much at once. I can't imaging it being able to handle 500 connections at once, and it is, essentially, the same specs as a VPS.

As others have said, a VPS is not designed for power, it is designed for flexibility. I use my VPS to host development sites for client review, a few low-traffic sites of my own, and a few things that I can't do with a shared plan, like a multi-user source code revision system. The VPS lets me tinker to my heart's content, but I wouldn't trust it to host anything big.

Bottom line, JPC wouldn't be asking you to upgrade if they didn't think it was the only course of action. If you don't need any of the flexibility that a VPS affords you, ask if support thinks your site would run on an SDX box. You won't get quite the flexibility, but you'll get more power, and that seems to be what you really need.

--Jason

[Vin DSL]

Think of a VPS as a three- to five-year-old computer serving your site...

LoL!

VPS is like a 125-pound quarterback with a skirt on - lots of control but no nads!

SDX is more like a 250-pound middle linebacker with brass knuckles...

[NahhaB]

Thanks everybody,

But the question still needs an answer, why would the VPS be too slow responding to one user only, and it hangs up with 15-20 users?

I can go and discuss your points and not necessarily be against or with but I think the above question is my concern right now..

[Vin DSL]

Do you allow 'guests' on your site[s]?

How about ants, web indexers, search bots, worms, et cetera?

LoL!

500+ users online

Reminds me of a site I admin in Italy - it'll have 995 'guests' online, and 3 'members'...

Hello?!?!?

[NahhaB]

Do you allow 'guests' on your site[s]?

How about ants, web indexers, search bots, worms, et cetera?

LoL!



Reminds me of a site I admin in Italy - it'll have 995 'guests' online, and 3 'members'...

Hello?!?!?

Thanks for the tip, this is one thing we are looking to now.