The history and sorrows of DesdeLinux with Hostings and VPS

In this world nothing or almost nothing is free, having a website costs money, because you must buy (and maintain) the domain, as well as you need a hosting or server where the site or sites are located.

When a site needs and depends on a MySQL-type database for its operation, when the site is not fully optimized, but above all ... when the site is relatively popular (or at least receives a large number of visits) it can be converted a problem for hosting providers, as the site can consume too many resources.

In the previous article where I mentioned that we were testing a GnuTransfer VPS for several users (Bruno y José Torres) asked me to share the experiences we have had with VPS providers (and Hosting I assume too), so... I am here for that, to explain in parts how it has remained online so far DesdeLinux 😀

Let's explain in parts how we got here 😉

1. Hosting at SlickWebHost:

When we start with DesdeLinux A little over two years ago this was just an idea, a simple site (blog) where Elav and I thought of sharing our experiences and knowledge. At that time we were able to buy the domain and also only one month of hosting on SlickWebHost.com

Hosting with them I don't remember very well how it was in quality, but I do remember that at that time I considered it quite expensive, as it was not a cheap reseller.

We weren't there long, less than a month.

2. Hosting at A2Hosting:

Looking for a better hosting than the previous one, I spoke on LiveChat with several hosting providers that had relatively cheap prices at the time, one in particular caught my attention because many classified it as "a company of geeks", this was A2Hosting.com . I had some talks with them through LiveChat and they convinced me, they provided apparently good hosting and also facilities such as CPanel and Softaculus

En November of 2011 (barely 4 months after buying the hosting with them) we already had big problems, we had drops simultaneously. It did not take long for A2Hosting to send us an email telling us that we (the blog) were consuming too many resources, that we had to upgrade to a higher plan (which includes paying more money), this obviously did not like us one bit so that thanks to the donations of several friends, we were able buy a Hosting with Hostgator.

3 (a). VPS with AlvoTech:

With the donations we received we were also able to buy a VPS with alvotech.de, a German company that sells VPS (virtual servers). We tried at first to put the blog there, but unfortunately it was not possible, at that time the blog was consuming too many resources because it was very poorly optimized, the VPS could not even remotely support the load that the blog would generate.

Instead, we decided to put other services in that VPS like Forum, Paste, IRC, FTP, our MailServer, and some other thing.

Although the VPS presents some other problem from time to time, it is something strange because in general the Alvotech service is really stable, however with restarting the VPS it is solved.

By the way… the VPS works with Debian and is located in Düsseldorf, Germany 😉

3 (b). Hosting at Hostgator:

Once the blog is located in Hostgator everything went for the better at first. Compared to previous providers Hostgator it was without a doubt superior at the time, the site was running smoother, it was buggy, it was no secret that at that time (even now) Hostgator is one of the best hosting providers.

The problem came over time, the more visits we had, the more readers we had, the more popular we became, the more problems we presented on Hostgator.

Once again, it was the same problem as always, we received too many visits, we generated too much processing, we overloaded the server where our Hosting account was, so ... again the annoying errors returned: «Error 500 Internal Server«.

4. VPS with GnuTransfer:

The guys GnuTransfer (Javier specifically) had the kindness and courtesy to send me a coupon to try a VPS for a month totally free, and although we are still in that trial period ... they already have us convinced to buy with them (multiple reasons, I will comment on it in another post).

Today the blog is located on a VPS of GnuTransfer, so far we have no problems, the site works as fast as never before ... no errors, no glitches, a marvel.

I will talk in another article specifically about GnuTransfer and its services because there is a lot to talk about and explain for the moment I will only say that the VPS works with Debian (Wheezy), using Nginx+ MySQL + PHP5 + APC, really optimized everything, to the point that with approximately 60 users online the RAM consumption does not exceed 390MB ... actually, amazing 😀

In this minute we have the plan xen-02048 And it works wonders for us, but ... well, in another post I will tell you the news, because we do not plan to stay with this plan only 😉


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  1.   Oscar said

    Excessive traffic is very good in that you know that you reach a lot of people but bad because it forces you to have better resources. If in the VPS where this gives problems, there is a very good Spanish VPS Cloud company that I recommend, it is called Gigabytes, you have two months free and satisfaction guarantee or money back, I'm there and so far it has not given problems (7 months) in terms of downloading requests, try using Cloudflare, it helps too much, even in the free version .

    I hope everything improves, the community continues.

    1.    eliotime3000 said

      They need to put Debian Wheezy (and GNUTransfer already beat it in that regard).

    2.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      Yes, we plan to use CloudFlare (the free version), we still have to configure it properly.

  2.   Alexander Mayor said

    In my blog I am using Nginx + MySQL + PHP5 + the google page_speed module, you should try it.

    Regards!

    1.    Manual of the Source said

      Just out of curiosity, what hosting do you use?

      1.    Alexander Mayor said

        A dedicated server in ovh, the most basic specifically the KS 2G. Cheers

        1.    rafagcg said

          OVH is not bad. It only has 2 drawbacks. The support has a reputation for being null, so you have to cook it all. But I think that is not a problem because these guys pilot an egg. And don't cram any important domain with them that I have sometimes read problems. And I have 3 with them ... but an important one I have 100% in Spain (the domain) paying 14 euros a year for a .com, if I have to report a company I prefer it to be in Spain.
          Other than that. In the new datacenter in the USA, check what machines and what prices:
          http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/kimsufi.xml

          But if GNUTransfer goes well and they feel comfortable, that is the important thing. OVH is not going to support them, I will tell you that from now on.

          1.    Alexander Mayor said

            It is true what you say about support, but it has helped me to learn a lot about server administration, searching by google you will find everything at the end.

            I even managed to configure DNS by hand by editing BIND configuration files.

            The good thing about this company is that they are very cheap, I am paying 142 euros a year.

            As for the domain I do not have it with them, I bought the .com for $ 12 when I had the blog hosted on blogger and it has gone well with them.

            But what you say, if they do well right now, fine.

            Greetings!

          2.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

            Our own DNS (bind9) is something I want to do, but elav recommends that I better not hehe ..

            The technical support is not that it is something of urgency or much less, both elav and I have administered networks and servers for many years, nor is it that we are afraid of the terminal or daemons 🙂

          3.    Alexander Mayor said

            If you are interested I wrote 3 articles describing the process of configuring a DNS server by hand in Debian, let me know and I will send you the link (Not to spam.)

            Regards!

            1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

              Yes don't worry, bind9 is indeed elav's specialty LOL !!
              Like here we write a detailed process about it https://blog.desdelinux.net/tag/bind9

              But ... no way, elav asks me to leave the DNS in the hands of someone else (like NameCheap for example).

              By the way, the other day I was testing nsd3 ... quite interesting how it generates a .db and also checks the settings before starting the daemon, take a look and you will tell me 🙂


          4.    elav said

            I prefer that the DNS service is offered by a company that is dedicated to it. It is safer. U_U

    2.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      PageSpeed ​​gave us problems with ... something that right now I don't remember, I'll have to test it on this server to see how it works.

      About the rest, it is exactly what we are using 😀

  3.   dhunter said

    What cache plugin do you use here?

    1.    ozkar said

      I imagine it must be w3-total-cache or wp-super-cache. No Alejo?
      WP does not have many plugins for that, however, you know well that WP with or without cache is quite silly with concurrent connections.

      1.    Manual of the Source said

        Yes, it is W3 Total Cache.

  4.   ulysses said

    I don't know if I'm the only one that happens, but on both the iPad and iPhone, when I open a post on this blog in the Feedly application, the application crashes. It doesn't happen to me with any other of the 120 subscriptions that I have, so maybe it's a problem in the structure of the feed.

    Sorry if it is not a good place to comment on this, but it makes me angry that I cannot read comfortably from my iDevice.

    1.    elav said

      Look in this post of the forum.

      1.    ulysses said

        Both of them. Continue to fail. I've switched to another feed reader named Reeder on the iPhone and it will be on iPad and OSX soon.

        Thanks for the answers.

  5.   Anibal said

    As I told you in previous situations, it is best to make static (html) as much as possible, use CDN for images and content such as css, js, etc.
    Use memcache in addition to apc. With that they greatly reduce the consumption of the server.

    Many successes !

    1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      APC is what I configured on the VPS, plus the site cache that serves almost all html directly (avoiding a lot of PHP processing)

  6.   Manual of the Source said

    Too bad that in terms of shared GnuTransfer is extremely limited. I had the idea of ​​hiring a plan to see how well the blog is doing, but they only allow 1 domain and 1 database in all modalities. 🙁

  7.   giskard said

    Very good. Waiting for the next post where they will explain more about the GNUTransfer.

  8.   José Torres said

    Thanks for sharing your experiences in this regard. very interesting.

    1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      Thanks to you for reading us friend.

  9.   Outdated said

    Thank you very much for the great effort you make to share with everyone. You are some 'cracks'.

    1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      Not at all, thanks to you for reading us 🙂

  10.   dhunter said

    And what about a static blog generated with pelican and using disqus for comments? Very spartan?

    Another idea: Varnish ...

    http://danielmiessler.com/blog/optimizing-wordpress-with-nginx-varnish-w3-total-cache-amazon-s3-and-memcached

  11.   Bruno said

    And here I came with the millions of Thanks! 🙂

    I support Oscar's recommendation. Use CDN for CSS, JS and Images (The latter only if possible and safe)

    From what I see they use bootstrap and the same I tried CDN servers. Right now Bootstrap has been updated to version 3 of which I have not seen BIG changes (from what little I read), but if they concentrated on resources, since they provide CDN as a great option and the inclusion of icons as an option ...

    Regards!

    1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      We will use a CDN (CloudFlare if I'm not mistaken) 😉
      About the new version of Bootstrap ... I leave that to elav, he is the one who takes care of the design, I take care of the servers and services 😀

      1.    Bruno said

        That good! Successes at that then! the site is still flying!

  12.   gonzalezmd said

    Thanks for the reviews, they are very useful.

    1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      Thanks to you for commenting 🙂

  13.   nn said

    I do not know why you delete me if all I want is to contribute, the following link https://www.digitalocean.com/ It looks better than the one you use, I think, it's a suggestion, that's all.

    1.    Manual of the Source said

      As you can see, we do not erase it, there is a little higher. It just stayed in moderation because the system thought it might be spam. And the truth is that it did have all the appearance of spam, so more careful. Still thanks for the input. 🙂

  14.   eliotime3000 said

    With this decision and the reliable proof that GNUTransfer has motivated me to host my website in GNUTransfer.

    1.    KZKG ^ Gaara said

      I'll make a post talking about GnuTransfer specifically 😉

  15.   Elery said

    It would be good to tell a little about the optimization of the site, something like good practices.

    regards

    1.    José Torres said

      I support the motion. That if I would love to read it.