VPS hosting advice

Ish

Ish

Ish

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Joined
11 Jan 2006
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Location
West Midlands
Hi

We are currently have 5 websites on a shared hosting account with a UK provider and are exceeding the resources all the time so have been advised to move to VPS hosting.

Do you have any advice in terms of what to look out for or any recommendations. It looks like USA providers are cheaper than UK ones.

We would be hosting about 5 sites, need cPanel and SSL. Ideally we want someoen that incudes migrating our sites over as well.

So far I have looked at www.gatorhost.com and www.inmotionhosting.com
 
Depends on your budget but for a year you could give Google VPS platform a go free with £250/£300 free credit.

It's extremely easy to get setup. This doesn't include cpanel and you would need to set your own host up but if you know what you doing then there isn't a problem.
 
I'd check first to make sure it's not your usual traffic which is exceeding the resources and not someone trying to take advantage of your website. Recently had someone trying to gain access to one of our sites using various VPN IP's, some we blocked but they kept returning. It was maxing out our usage on the shared host. In the end I moved the admin login to a different folder, set it to only allow from certain IP (work), then put a dummy login page in the old folder where they can keep trying to login with no data available. One of the static sites still gets crawlers looking for wordpress backdoors (not wordpress).
 
Steeps said:
I'd check first to make sure it's not your usual traffic which is exceeding the resources and not someone trying to take advantage of your website. Recently had someone trying to gain access to one of our sites using various VPN IP's, some we blocked but they kept returning. It was maxing out our usage on the shared host. In the end I moved the admin login to a different folder, set it to only allow from certain IP (work), then put a dummy login page in the old folder where they can keep trying to login with no data available. One of the static sites still gets crawlers looking for wordpress backdoors (not wordpress).
Click to expand...

I checked my logs today and I had some attempts where they where trying /wp-admin even though I don't even (and never will) use wordpress! lol
 
If you have never run a VPS then fully managed VPS is probably the way to go for yourself. With all the new rules regarding Cpanel licensing which is usually only 5 free accounts the more you add the cost gradually increases substantially. Most hosting will offer you an alternative to Cpanel these usually have unlimited accounts.

Visit this site especially the offers section, you can also ask them any questions I am sure they will give you the best advice
https://www.webhostingtalk.com/
 
What are the errors you're getting, the current limits you have, and what shows in any process / resource usage logs?

Usually it is either a dodgy script (badly coded / inefficient / lack of caching) or a bot trying brute-force logins, unless you do actually have a lot of traffic. Hard to say exactly from the outside.
 
Hi All

Thanks for the advice. The resource usage is purely down to the site traffic as we have a lot of visitors & content.

It would have to be a managed VPS that will go through. I'm just looking at the forum @Lord Alibaski mentioned. It is very handy.
 
Try sticking something like Cloudflare up front which acts as a reverse proxy to your site. So basically if your domain is www.example.com you point it to Cloudflare's server, they handle the request, and talk to your underlying server behind the scenes, then send the response to the client.

A nice benefit is they have edge servers all over the world, so if you have a server in the UK a visitor from say Australia will connect to their Australian edge server which should speed up page load times for them especially for cached content. We have some users in mainland China and a quick test was showing our login page was taking ~40seconds to load before then around ~4s after we implemented it; still horridly slow, but still a lot better.

As default it provides DDoS protection and caching for css/js and images etc. You can configure your own caching rules for paths it doesn't know should cache as default, e.g., if you have an address like /photomanager/get/23498324 which you know could be cached but it hasn't picked it up.

The free version will most then likely be fine for you. If you are getting constant hack requests the pro package might be worth considering as it adds firewall/xss/sqli prevention. We use this one.

Here's the stats page for ours from last week for example.

MFiN2Zs.png
 
You might also want to consider using Azure App Service or AWS Beanstalk for hosting if you have more of a budget. We use Azure ourselves.

You won't get cpanel access, but you effectively get a managed server you can push websites to which you can scale up/down based on resource and let Microsoft/Amazon deal with the underlying server/hardware.
 
Why over complicate it with a VPS? 5 website on a single shared hosting account will always push the limits, make your life easier and a buy an entry level cPanel reseller account from somewhere like StablePoint (use JUSTASK discount code). All hosted on Digital Ocean's infrastructure, AutoSSL will slap an LetsEncrypt SSL cert on all of your accounts automatically. Take about 5 mins to setup and if you chuck them your current cPanel details, they'll migrate the entire thing for free, in an hour tops. Job done and manage free

If you really want a VPS, go with Digital Ocean or Vultr, they have many out of the box templates to use which which will include the likes of LAMP to run your own sites.
 
Thanks for all the information. I have turned on the WP optimising tools and Cloudfare so will see if it makes a difference before looking at VPS etc.
 
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