To VPS or not to VPS, that's the question

[Poirot]

Huh?? I'm not selling anything.

No probs, Nut. Your idea was a bit out of the expected and a bit funny in a way, a salesman could not have done it better!

[jason]

The general mantra around here is "SDX for power, VPS for flexibility." You will never get the power that you have now from a VPS, so if your only concern is blacklisting it probably isn't worth the move. Since you are already on SDX, I assume you run a site that needs the extra power.

I'm currently using both VPS and GogaDeal (the SDX's little brother). My main business website is hosted on a GigaDeal plan, as it has (though the actual servers, plans, and plan names have changed over the years) since 2001. Up until last year I had been hosting about five permanant sites from that plan, as well as a handful of temporary development sites for client projects. Then I decided to go to VPS.

When I signed up for the VPS I did so with the intent of canceling the GigaDeal plan once I got everything moved. With the VPS I was able to give all of my sites their own control panels (which is helpful for the one I host for an organization with which I'm involved--when I decide to step back from my currently active role I'll happily keep hosting the site, but I'll probably pass the active management of the site to someone else). Isolating project sites also lessens the chance that I'll accidentally break something on my main site when working on a client site. I also can do things on the VPS that I can't do on the GigaDeal, like run a multiuser SVN+SSH revision control system and create web apps that interact with Mailman mailing lists (a work in progress with the aforementioned organization's site).

After observing the performance of the VPS (it is only a Discovery plan) however, I decided to keep my business' site on the GigaDeal. The VPS, while great, is a bit slower than the GigaDeal server and keeping my main form of "advertising" separated from everything else means that, if I were to someday, somehow hose the VPS, I wouldn't have to worry about the site being down. At the same time, however, if my GigaDeal server experiences a catastrophic failure I can use the VPS as a failover system and my site running again in a very short time.

VPS administration is pretty easy. I am running the Interworx control panel and that takes care on most updates automatically. Everything Interworx-related is distributed in RPM packages and Iworx interfaces with yum to do updates automatically, so it is pretty hands off in that regard. Other control panels work in similar ways, but it is important to know how they work and what tehy do before you decide on one. When problems arise, support is still there to help, just as you've probably come to expect from JPC. Since no one is monitoring your individual VPS instance, however, it is still up to you to make sure things are being updated correctly and that no holes exist that someone could use to attack the server. There is a very good list of best practices for doing this pinned in the VPS and Dedicated forum here and there are many knowledgeable regulars here ready to help you out if you get stuck.

I liked Euronut's suggestion to farm email out to the VPS...I haven't tried that myself, but it sounds like a great idea if you are concerned about blacklists but still need the power of SDX. I am considering getting a small, cheap VPS from another provider to use as a secondary DNS. I like the flexibility that maintaining my own DNS affords, but maintaining both primary and secondary on the same box is asking for trouble.

--Jason

[EuroNut]

I liked Euronut's suggestion to farm email out to the VPS...I haven't tried that myself, but it sounds like a great idea if you are concerned about blacklists but still need the power of SDX.

Thank you Jason

It's actually just a poor man's version of what the big boys do - Separate servers for separate jobs. You won't see Google hosting web and mail on the same server, and I like splitting tasks out to different boxes where the volume of traffic to any one element is heavy. I suggested DirectAdmin because, whilst it's quite a "lite" control panel compared to cPanel/WHM, it's pretty versatile on the mail side, and easy to get to grips with via the web interface for someone who hasn't actually had to manage a server or VPS before. Once you master the basics, you can then dip your toe into using root for stuff.

The DNS control is easy to handle too