Moving on Up....to a VPS

It seems more and more common for me these days to get questions about which hosts are best to use for CFWebstore sites. In the past, I commonly recommended popular CF hosts like Crystaltech and HostMySite. But it seems over the years its gotten harder and harder to find a ColdFusion host that really makes sure their shared servers run perfectly all the time and don't have issues. It's fairly common when running stores on these hosts to experiences errors from time to time such as query timeouts, low memory errors, session failures, etc. all tracing back to resources just stretched too thin. Sometimes the host will try and see if moving the site to a new server will help and sometimes that can indeed be enough to at least minimize the problems....for awhile. Eventually they will start loading more sites on the box and the problems will start creeping in again.

The problem is simply that with shared hosting, you are at the mercy of every other site on that server. If one site is poorly written and hogging too much memory or tying up the database with long queries, it will effect every other site on the box. Get 2 or 3 such sites, and you start seeing problems regularly. If you are running an ecommerce site and want your site to be up as much as possible, this can soon become an intolerable situation. In the past, your next step was to move to a dedicated server, where you owned (or rented) the entire box and have full control over what ran on it and didn't share resources with any other site. As you might imagine, this is an expensive option, often costing hundreds of dollars a month, far too much for most sites to afford. Enter the VPS!

VPS stands for "Virtual Private Server". The name pretty much describes what it is....you have your own private server, but it's a virtual server, one that is created by software that runs on the actual server, splitting it up into basically separate partitions, each with their own amount of dedicated space and memory. This allows a host to buy full-fledged, heavy-duty servers, and then partition them into multiple VPS servers and sell those for much lower prices than a dedicated server would cost. It's ideal for many smaller ecommerce sites, since they don't need the amount of space and memory a full dedicated server offers, and it brings the price down to a more reasonable level.

So what do you need to know if you are thinking of moving to a VPS? First, consider whether you want to run on a Unix or Windows VPS. Unix has the advantage of generally being less expensive and has tons of software available for free. CFWebstore runs fine on either ColdFusion or BlueDragon running on Unix and you can run MySQL on your server for free as well. However, Unix does usually require a bit more knowledge to work with. If you are not familiar with Apache or SSH, or doing things from the command line, you may find Unix a bit too much to handle. Windows servers generally are a lot easier to administer. On either platform you can usually load on a control panel to help you set up things like your DNS, domains, email accounts, etc. Your host can probably help suggest the control panels according to which ones they support and provide.

Be sure to also check how much maintenance your host does and how much you will be required to handle yourself. You may need to do backups and/or server updates if it's not a fully managed VPS. Many times daily backups may be provided at additional cost. Also check about things like ColdFusion hot fixes and database backups. Be sure you have enough knowledge to know how to monitor your server and make sure it's not overusing resources. You may need to learn a bit about how to set up email accounts, and configure spam filtering, and setting up your ColdFusion server, adding databases, etc. Be sure to find out up front what your host can help with that you are not familiar with, and if they charge for such support.

Many popular ColdFusion hosts are now offering VPS plans. In fact, when you run into problems with your shared hosting, they will often mention the VPS plan as a way to resolve the problems. You may want to shop around a bit and see what is available. You can often find some competitive prices with other hosts...and if you can get your own copy of ColdFusion or BlueDragon and don't need your host to load it for you, that opens up your options even more.

I actually went through 3 different VPS hosts for cfwebstore.com before settling on my current host. AHPHosting.Net is my current host, and they handle a number of other large CF sites, including the popular Houseoffusion.com lists. They run ColdFusion on Windows and can do BlueDragon servers as well (at some cost savings). The prices for the VPS are very competitive, including 1 gig of RAM to start and running off Quad core boxes, very speedy and responsive. They use Virtuozzo software which makes it very easy to log into your VPS to check resources and reboot as needed and have a few different control panels you can use if you need them. They can provide SmarterMail and SmarterStats if needed and I've found the support to be very responsive and helpful with any issues I've had. They've also agreed to give a $10/month discount to my clients, so just mention that you are a CFWebstore customer when you call, or use the coupon "CFWEBSTORE" when you checkout to receive this discount.

If you have had good experiences with any other ColdFusion and/or VPS host, feel free to leave information in the comments for this blog article!