Posted on Sunday, 3rd July 2005 by sean
CCNPRecertification.com, and some other sites, have run off my cable modem since inception. The server started to become bogged down after time, so I thought it time to pay for some off site hosting.
Dedicated servers were in the $100US/month range, and the $5/mo cheapie hosting deals didn’t have the features I needed. Virtual Private Servers (VPS) caught my eye. The idea here is that the provider has one physical machine, which is split up into several virtual machines (much like VMWare). You get root on your own VPS and are isolated from other people, but don’t have to pay for your own box.
Whenever you get into a shared services arrangement you want to know how many people you’re sharing with. It’s quite possible to load several hundred people on a server and get pitiful performance all around. So I searched around for VPS providers and reviews of them.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find any decent VPS reviews (a big reason I’m writing this one). However I did manage to find a handful of people offering the service. Some had prices that were too good to be true ($10/month), which led me to think that they’d be loading the heck out of the servers. A couple refused to answer questions about their service (ie how much memory is in your server, how many people are on it). My favourite was Dot5 Hosting, who responded:
virtual server is also a sort of shared server and we do not disclose the specs of virtual server. And we assure that
you get equal resource of your share of server resources
I’m sure I’ll get my share, but what is that?
Finally, I came across www.GoDaddy.com , which is also the place I’ve been registering domain names for the past several years. The specs on the servers are currently:
- Dual Intel Xeon 2.4GHz w/HyperThreading
- 12GB DDR RAM (shared among all virtual machines)
- 5 x 146GB Ultra 320 SCSI Hard Drives, RAID-5 (shared)
In addition, the server is limited to 60 people.
$35US/mo gets you 10G disk and 500GB transfer. Though you can pay a year in advance and get a 20% discount, I figured I’d give it a try for a couple of months and see how it goes.
After signing up, I was able to access my system through the control panel on GoDaddy.com. Total time from me submitting the form to logging in to my server was around 4 hours. Had I waited for the emails to prompt me for the next steps, though, it would have taken around a day.
The system itself runs RedHat 9, which is somewhat dated. However, the kernel is a specially compiled one for the VPS. It seems the VPS software is Virtuozzo, which looks fairly advanced. It’s possible to seamlessly migrate instances from one server to another and reallocate resources between the servers. Pretty slick when compared to VMWare and such.
Upon logging into the system, it looks just like a regular dedicated server except for some devices:
# mount
/dev/vzfs on / type reiserfs (rw,usrquota,grpquota)
# ifconfig
venet0 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
inet addr:127.0.0.1 P-t-P:127.0.0.1 Bcast:0.0.0.0 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4393338 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4632432 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:540461382 (515.4 Mb) TX bytes:1799679322 (1716.3 Mb)
venet0:0 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
inet addr:x.x.x.188 P-t-P:x.x.x.188 Bcast:x.x.x.188 Mask:255.255.255.255
UP BROADCAST POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4393338 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4632432 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:540461382 (515.4 Mb) TX bytes:1799679322 (1716.3 Mb)
venet0:1 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
inet addr:x.x.x.204 P-t-P:x.x.x.204 Bcast:x.x.x.204 Mask:255.255.255.255
UP BROADCAST POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4393338 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4632432 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:540461382 (515.4 Mb) TX bytes:1799679322 (1716.3 Mb)
You might note I have two IP addresses… After signing up and logging in to your server, you can request more addresses through the control panel at GoDaddy. I’m not sure how many you can get, I got one extra and there is still a link saying “ask for more IP addresses”.
In addition, I’ve got access to some 6 gigs of memory:
# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 6196656 6183684 12972 0 2203932 700208
-/+ buffers/cache: 3279544 2917112
Swap: 12586916 5256936 7329980
So, after a month I’m pretty happy. Performance is good, I’ve seen no downtime, and I’m satisfied with the price. That said, there are a few things that aren’t perfect.
- The Plesk control panel is a pain to remove. I wanted to remove it because I don’t need it, and it was causing some dependency problems. The problem was that when I tried to remove the “psa” package, it tried to delete some rows from the MySQL database and some files seemed to be missing. I ended up downloading the Plesk RPMs, extracting the .sql file, running that, and removing the packages. Perhaps it was the order that I did things, maybe not.
- You must use their relay server for email. I didn’t immediately notice this, and had wiped out their qmail install in favour of sendmail.
- They do relay checks on you. I was seeing email from “emailsupport AT godaddy DOT com” being bounced due to relay, so I allowed relaying for the godaddy domain. A few hours later connections to their relay server were denied for me. After stopping the relaying, my access was restored in a few hours.
- The Red Hat 9 is a bit of a pain due to its age. However, I set up yum at Fedora Legacy, who still support it (I’m downloading the recent PHP errata as I type this. The only trick is that you have to exclude both the kernel and iptables packages with exclude=kernel*,iptables in /etc/yum.conf.
- The kernel has statically compiled modules in, and the list of iptables modules is limited. This means that some of the advanced iptables rules I’m used to (TCP state matching) weren’t available
In summary, I’d recommend GoDaddy’s Virtual Private Servers, and will continue to subscribe to mine.
BTW, if you decide to buy anything from GoDaddy, I’d appreciate you clicking through the link below which gives me a small cut and helps support this site.
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Posted in General | Comments (4)
March 28th, 2006 at 8:55 am
Nice review. Finally some sanity. Anyways, bein g that this post is about 8 months old, how is the service so far with go daddy?
March 28th, 2006 at 9:35 am
It’s been pretty good. I’ve been seeing some high disk latency in the
past few months which I took up with support, their answer was “everything
is good”. I’m not thrilled about that, but for what I’m paying and the
hassle of moving, I’m still a happy camper.
Thanks for the reminder, I’ve been meaning to write an update including
some graphs on the latency and some other stats I’ve been keeping.
April 26th, 2007 at 8:46 am
I’m using a godaddy virtual private server but don’t seem to have access to iptable. Did you do anything special?
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