Get To Business.

Hosting companies are like fortune cookies: “you never really know what you’re going to get”

I remember the time I uploaded my first homepage to the internet, it was with Geocities, the service was free and built a community around itself, but overall, it was just the MySpace web 1.0 (Think of a huge collection of horrible designed WebPages grouped together under one domain but without the web 2.0 features).

Through the years, while I gained experience and felt I had enough of the host-your-site-while-we-make-money-with-annoying-popups model, I began to deal with paid hosting packages. Prices ranging from 3.99$ to 20$ a month, experiencing the services of small resellers and larger resellers that call themselves “web hosting companies” and have a template they bought for 40$ from template sites.

My main problem with them apart from the poor performance (lot of them were overselling their servers), was the slow service and response times since resellers act as an additional contact point between you and the hosting provider.

A few years ago while I was managing several projects for a client that needed a solid and reliable hosting company, I met an English guy that introduced me to the professional aspects of the hosting world. He was working as a technician at a Data center and explained to me a lot about servers, helping me with Linux and providing me with hosting. He also referred me to Web hosting talk forum where I could shop around and find a better hosting company.

I wasn’t ready for a dedicated server yet, but wanted a better performing server with root access; I began studying the VPS market (Virtual Private server). While others were looking for the perfect hosting company for years, I went with ServInt after reading several favorable reviews about them and took the Essential package (which should be enough for starting out).

What I really love about ServInt and haven’t encountered with other hosting companies is the level of commitment. It’s clear their technicians love what they do, their NOC (Network Operation Center) are very quick to respond even on holidays (their average response time is 1 to 3 minutes).

Another bonus is that their servers are fully managed which means you can have them install any 3rd party software for you and they will usually fix problems as you encounter them. They monitor your servers and the services running on it, intervening when there is need.

Combine this with few key advantages:

-    They own their Data Centers
-    They have ten years of experience
-    They are a leader and pioneer in the VPS marketplace.
-    Forum and a community with hundreds of individuals willing to help

The only problem I had with them is that they don’t always make the smartest decisions when it comes to 3rd party software (but you can’t expect them to know everything about everything).

One thing you need to monitor constantly is the amount of resources utilized (CPU/RAM/Storage space), as your server can quickly become unresponsive or slow because you host a few unoptimized blogs/site. For that, I would recommend using VPSinfo, developed by one of ServInt customers to monitor your server and with the next major Release of CPanel/WHM 11, it seems another problem we had (inability to run Apache 2.x with Cpanel/WHM) will be solved.

I might elaborate the different steps of optimizing a VPS in future posts.