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mpbiz

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Apr 29, 2010
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Just switched to DigitalOcean. $5/month VPS with an additional 2 months free. 1 click wordpress install on ubuntu. A couple hours of headaches caused by my own lack of server experience but that's on me.

If you don't mind a small learning curve these guys are the shit. Great docs and the VPS is just as fast as my old one that was $60 a month.

Shoutout to ayzo for your recommendations in numerous threads.

Just wanted to spread the word.
 


Made a tough decision deciding between them and RamNode | High Performance SSD VPS | SSD Virtual Private Servers | SSD VPS Hosting | OpenVZ - KVM | Atlanta - Seattle - Netherlands | DDoS Protection. Chose RamNode mostly due to performance reasons.

Raid 10 SSD on Intel Xeon CPUs with 4 cores. Other reasons as well.

Got 35% off for life with ramnode, can't go wrong with either, though. I've heard great stuff about both, never seen RamNode discussed on here but it's praised everywhere else when it comes to performance on a VPS.

Use code LET35 for 35% off for life.

Either one definitely comes with a learning curve if it's your first setup, but I got pretty much everything up and running in less than a day, and I didn't know jack shit about linux, apache, centos or any of that shit.


Edit: Oh, and the support is excellent! Nick, the owner, has always emailed me back immediately.
 
While we're on the topic of unmanaged VPS, anyone care to help me out?

I have my domains setup with namecheap.com, and I'm using their DNS and "URL forwarding" them from there to my IP address. I have the '@' and 'WWW' pointing at my IP with record type as 'A (address).'

Is this the right way to set it up? If so it's fuckin slow. Should I setup DNS with my VPS?

When I run speed tests on my website straight from my IP it says my site is faster than 97% of all sites tested, from the domain name it's 95%. Doesn't seem like much but every milifuckinsecond counts, right?

Edit: I bet if I optimized my site and actually gave a shit I would hit 99-100%. Using Pingdom for this, btw.
 
After some good word of mouth from other programmers, I had considered them. However someone on hackernews posted benchmarks that seemed that Linode is still faster. Used Linode a lot in the past, still believe.
 
Fatbat said:
Eh, all DNS requests are handled by third parties. Your server isn't handling DNS requests directly, that's just silly.
Click to expand...

I'm sorry, but why would you even question me on this? I don't question you on design / creative issues.

When was the last time you setup bind on a server?

When you type a domain name into your browser, it asks your ISP where to go. Your ISP asks one of the root namesevers where to go (everyone uses the same root nameservers). The root nameservers then give a direction of where to go, and from there, the actual nameservers are contacted asking where the request should go. The actual nameservers then reply, giving you the IP of the server.

Now instead of having requests required to resolve Namecheap server, then the actual server, both sets of requests could be handled by the actual server. Not exactly a huge deal, and nothing anyone is going to notice, but nonetheless more efficient.
 
I like to set up the host records at namecheap on these unmanaged VPSs to keep it as simple as possible. I've used Ramnode for months now and it is awesome. If you use something like minstall, you can get away with ridiculously low ram. These minimalistic/low memory setups can take a serious beating. It makes cPanel look completely absurd (unless you need it).

https://github.com/KnightSwarm/Minstall

There are other low-memory guides out there as well.

BuyVM has a nice setup as well with an off-loaded Mysql for $1/mo

Finally, Prometheus has iwstack, which lets you play with cloud servers at a fraction of the cost of Rackspace or Storm on demand.

LowEndTalk

You can get excellent, high performance hosting very cheap these days if you can go the unmanaged route. But things change fast in that world, so make sure you have a recovery plan and offsite backups.
 
Kiopa_Matt said:
I'm sorry, but why would you even question me on this? I don't question you on design / creative issues.

When was the last time you setup bind on a server?

When you type a domain name into your browser, it asks your ISP where to go. Your ISP asks one of the root namesevers where to go (everyone uses the same root nameservers). The root nameservers then give a direction of where to go, and from there, the actual nameservers are contacted asking where the request should go. The actual nameservers then reply, giving you the IP of the server.

Now instead of having requests required to resolve Namecheap server, then the actual server, both sets of requests could be handled by the actual server. Not exactly a huge deal, and nothing anyone is going to notice, but nonetheless more efficient.
Click to expand...

Surely it's also more prone to failure as well?

If your DNS pops, you have no server and no email. If your server pops you've got nothing. I use DNS Made Easy (and/or CloudFlare/Namecheap), so that way the DNS are independent of the server and if it goes down I still have email. It seems far safer, in my opinion of course, but I do know you know a lot more about this than me. :)
 
-God- said:
Surely it's also more prone to failure as well?
Click to expand...

Not really, unless you're a large site that has load balancing in place, and is distributed across multiple servers. If your site is just on one server though, then it doesn't make any difference. If that server goes down, your site is down, regardless of where the DNS is hosted.
 
-God- said:
Surely it's also more prone to failure as well?

If your DNS pops, you have no server and no email. If your server pops you've got nothing. I use DNS Made Easy (and/or CloudFlare/Namecheap), so that way the DNS are independent of the server and if it goes down I still have email. It seems far safer, in my opinion of course, but I do know you know a lot more about this than me. :)
Click to expand...

How dare you bro, Matt knows more than GOD about internet stuff!
 
Now it's the next morning and I've taken Matts advice and moved them over to my server, I can see the decreased load time, I think it's noticeable. Definitely looks up the DNS info way faster than before but for some reason it's still at 95% while my IP address is close to 98%.

Guess that's about as close as I can get it to my IP address? After a good bit of image optimization, browser caching and some other small shit it should be about the same.
 
spy-vs-spy-1.jpg

Matt vs. Matt
 
juicebox said:
Now it's the next morning and I've taken Matts advice and moved them over to my server, I can see the decreased load time, I think it's noticeable. Definitely looks up the DNS info way faster than before but for some reason it's still at 95% while my IP address is close to 98%.

Guess that's about as close as I can get it to my IP address? After a good bit of image optimization, browser caching and some other small shit it should be about the same.
Click to expand...

Minifying CSS, html,js? If your scripts load in your head try moving them to the just above the closing body tag or footer. There's a few other tweaks you can try to get a few more percent.
 
dmnEPC said:
Minifying CSS, html,js? If your scripts load in your head try moving them to the just above the closing body tag or footer. There's a few other tweaks you can try to get a few more percent.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'm going to try all that. I can also optimize all the images A LOT, which I need to do. Not sure how leverage browser caching?

Should I host jquery.min.js on my own server? Right now I have it pointing to Google.
 
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