Virtual Private Server

Using our analogy from last week, if a dedicated server is a house, a VPS is an apartment, and shared hosting is a room full of bunks.  A VPS is a general term for a virtual machine.  In laymen terms, it’s taking a big resource (a dedicated server), and using software to break it into several pretend machines.  It’s like taking a big office space, putting up cubical walls, and calling all of the new space offices.  They look and feel like offices, but lets face it – we all know they’re just cubicles…you can hear the buzz of the rest of the office moving around, you don’t have 100% privacy, and you’re all breathing the same air.

A VPS is an extra degree of separation from other users when compared to shared hosting.  The example we used last week, a while(1) loop in another customer’s code, won’t break your site on a VPS.  The downside is that sometimes they’re too small for their own good.  A VPS with 512mb of memory actually burns up a significant amount of that memory running the OS and cPanel (the control panel running your site).  So it’s possible, on a technical level, for your site to perform worse on a VPS than on shared hosting if you don’t purchase the right VPS.  Don’t be afraid of doing that if you talk to our sales department – we’re excellent coaches when it comes to helping you pick which hosting plan is right for you.

Something else worth mentioning is that unlike shared hosting, you can pick your software versions.  What to use a slightly dated version of Apache because a new version dropped a feature?  Sure, we can manage that.  Want to hold off up upgrading ruby on rails? No problem.

Pros: cheaper than dedicated server, private, can change software versions, can reboot at free will

Cons: it’s easy to buy one that’s too small, still not 100% independent from other customers, low resources mean some things like ffmpeg can be sluggish at best

What makes sense for my site?

Let’s start by giving you an idea of what you’re getting into.  It helps that the names are nothing more than descriptions of what each hosting plan is.  Shared hosting is exactly that – it’s a lot of customers sharing a server.  A VPS is a virtual private server – it’s a virtualized server that adds a degree of privacy from shared hosting but isn’t quite a dedicated server.  A dedicated server is, as the name would suggest, a server dedicated to you.

I love analogies so lets throw one of those in.  If a dedicated server is like a house, then a VPS would be an apartment in an apartment building, and shared hosting would be a bunch of bunks in a single room.  That analogy carries pretty well, lets look at it a little more in depth over our next few blog posts.

Shared Hosting

If someone in a room full of bunks gets sick, you’re quite likely to get sick because you’re in such close quarters.  Similarly, if a rogue site gets stuck in a while(1) loop and it’s on the same shared hosting server as yours, it can take your site down temporarily.  It’s just the nature of what you’re buying, it’s susceptible to problems caused by other people because there are no rigid barriers between you and other customers.  That said, it’s a very economical option and it’s great for most sites.

On shared hosting, we don’t update software versions unless it’s a security update.  We’re often asked why and the answer is pretty straightforward – if we make an update from Apache 1.6 to Apache 2.0 or PHP4 to PHP5, it can break a lot of sites.  We’ll always do security updates, but we don’t always do functionality updates.  It’s not because we don’t want to, it’s because we need to keep the environment as stable and consistent as possible.  Ubiquity Hosting possesses the technology to circumvent this problem on a regular basis -  we can let you pick your software version for a lot of software, but we can’t always do it.

Pros: Inexpensive, adequate for most sites, cheap to maintain.

Cons: Can go down when it’s not your fault, not great for a large site, limited permission levels, can’t update all software

Check out next week’s post for information about VPS servers and dedicated servers.

Mike attended the University of Dayton in Dayton, OH. (Go flyers!)  He is an Eagle Scout and an electronics enthusiast.  Mike enjoys spending his free time playing with electronics, camping, barbecuing (he makes ribs for us in his smoker), and grilling.  He can woo women with his sensuous trombone playing, he can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and he cooks Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. He is an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Contact Mike at 312-281-5101 x 500 with all your sales questions.  Stay tuned for another staff bio next month!

6) Encourage your users to recruit – It sounds obvious and it sounds like something your users would do on their own anyway, but that’s the catch – you’ve got to remind them to do it! It’s a simple as asking them to tell their friends.  It may not have even occurred to them to tell their friends about the site.  Word of mouth is the best way to gain organic growth.  Suggest ways that they can let their friends know about the site and suggest ideal archetypes so they can visualize which friends they should be asking.

7) Keep the old members interested – Something site administrators notice is that old members will leave citing “it’s not like it used to be.”  Do something special that keeps the old members interested or allows them to gain social status by nature of the age of their account.

8 ) Find Funding – Running your site certainly isn’t free.  It may start on a $5/month shared hosting account, but if you plan on your site going anywhere, you have to develop a business model.  Sites are businesses, especially large sites.

9) Have Rules – Is it a kid safe community?  It’s going to take rules to keep it that way.  It works the other way around too.  If it’s an adult community, it takes rules to keep it that way.  Either way, rules should make your users feel comfortable, not oppressed.

10) Be ready for revolution – Don’t sweat it when your users seem to revolt. It happens to the best of the best.  Every social networking site or forum eventually have a user uprising.  Don’t lose faith in your site when it happens, if anything, take it as a compliment that your site has been successful enough to have one!

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!  There are literally hundreds of small things to learn when taking your site from one member to one million members.  Don’t be afraid to keep notes on what works well for you and what doesn’t.  There is no set formula for success.  Experiment, evolve, and enjoy!

1) Have community organizers – Any seasoned veteran at running a social website can tell you that a good moderator team is the difference between life and death for any online social community.  Social networks, forums, and even the big boys like Digg all have moderators, community liaisons, community guides, etc.  It doesn’t matter what you call them, but trust me, you’ll be glad you solicited their help.

2) Listen to your users (kinda!) – Always be seeking feedback from your users.  The site may be free, but they’re still customers and they may just even have some ideas that you haven’t thought of.  That being said, you can’t please everyone.  So take their complaints and suggestions with a grain of salt and make sure it fits in the big picture.

3) Know what you want – Having a clear vision of where you want your site to go is the first step in getting there.  If you host a forum about fish and you’d like to eventually have the forum be about marine wildlife, ease the community in that direction or it might not get there on it’s own.

4) Keep the content fresh – A social network or forum are nothing without users that keep coming back and posting more user submitted content.  A couple posts a day by a couple moderators may be all it takes to keep users coming back.  People don’t like to sign up for sites that only have old content.

5) Don’t make it too complex – There should be a single, easy to understand, general concept to your site.  Don’t divide the focus between user profiles and a forum.  You have to decide if you want to be Facebook or Yahoo Answers, it’s significantly harder to try to do both.

We’ll continue this list next week with suggestions 6-10.  Have some suggestions?  Let us know by commenting on this post!

Ubiquity web hosting is on twitter – be sure to follow us for news and promotions!

http://www.twitter.com/ubiquityhosting

Ubiquity’s self-managed / infrastructure brand – Ubiquity Server Solutions – is also on twitter.  Be sure to follow Ubiquity Server Solutions as well for tweets on what we’re doing behind the scenes!!

http://www.twitter.com/ubiquityservers

• Revised unmetered bandwidth deals and made our 12TB promotion permanent
• Re-released Ubiquity Overstock with an automated pricing system and smooth new interface
• Overstock systems are now placed in an RSS Feed for bargain hunters and resellers (subscribe!)
• Began offering nLayer and Abovenet bandwidth via our IP transit product
• Chicago network has gone 10gig! We have begun turning up 10Gbps connectivity to each of our upstreams.

• Launched an entire new ubiquityservers.com that’s far more informative and useful
• Opened Ubiquity’s nationwide IP Transit network for resale in all of our locations as a brand new service
• Began offering r1soft backup solution to dedicated, colo, and vps clients
• VPS provisioning automation system moved from alpha to beta – instant VPS provisioning ensues
• Implemented sFlow monitoring of Ubiquity’s network to make performance more clever
• Increased level 2 support coverage at our NOC with more staff
• Improved add-on pricing on all of our dedicated server options

10 Service Improvements from January

• Achieve consistent initial support ticket responses beneath 10 minutes
• Give public real-time statistics of our support stats for total transparency (here)
• Relaxed cancellation policies to match our best competition (from 8 days to 72 hours)
• Increased facility stocking policies, and implemented a 1 hour h/w replacement SLA
• Increased headquarters and Seattle facilities coverage with several new staff members
• Increased the number of headquarters support staff using live support – chat now online truly 24/7, like our other channels of support
• Semi-automation of VPS provisioning, decreasing most VPS deployment times to under 4 hours
• Increased SNMP monitoring policies on all managed servers
• Raised the bar on network performance following our network upgrades, now supporting a 0% packet loss SLA on our internal network
• We are now offering r1soft CDP backups for free in our cPanel shared hosting

As 2009 progresses, we’ll be making monthly updates on new features and improvements, so check back often.

• We’ve upgraded routers and distribution switching in all of our facilities to massive and redundant Foundry network cores.
• We’ve added XO Communications to our upstream in addition to Mzima Networks for additional routes
• We’ve turned up BGP on our new routers for seamless fail-over should one carrier have issues
• We have a shiny new Chicago data center that’s unbelievably nicer than the old one in every way
• Our network has grown to now exceed 1000 physical servers
• Our team has grown to now include approximately 30 full time staff for even stronger 24/7 support coverage
• We’ve expanded data center operations to include Atlanta, Georgia
• We’ve created public Wiki’s full of useful information for self-managed and managed hosting customers
• We’ve assembled a completely new hosting platform that’s even better than before at hosting Java and Ruby applications
• We’ve accomplished all of these thing without needing to raise costs or pass down rising energy costs – passing the economies of scale from our growth down to you

Another cool metric resulting from this – is to check the Ubiquity/Nobis ASN (AS15003) on major tools like CIDR Report, where our network rank is climbed drastically out of over 25,000 ASN networks to be occupy space in the top 2,500 following the addition of another /18 and the addition of XO and downstream peers.  As we move into 2009, we’ll try to do a better job keeping you updated on all of the exciting improvements going on behind the scenes.