Yourserving.com and FreeVPS Virtual Private Server

UPDATE: I no longer use yourserving.com because their customer support staff forwarded my email to a hacker's account, without any security verification, based on just an email support ticket request from a gmail account that was unrelated to me. This allowed the hacker to hack my domain hosting account access my domain name inventory and attempt to transfer away one of my valuable (3 letter!) .com domains. The attempt failed because of the security monitoring by my domain name host, but I figured that since it was easier for a hacker to get a support ticket processed than it is for me when I ask for support, maybe I'd better switch providers.

I switched to yourserving.com in August 2007. I didn't have all the details at the time I switched other than I would be getting a 256mb VPS with 40gb of disk and 200gb of data transfer per month.

I moved from a shared hosting server with 220 other domains and a first-page-to-display start time of 15 seconds to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with dedicated resources (memory, processor, processes, namespace...) and a less than 1 second first-page-to-display start time. The cost went from about $10 per month to $30 per month, but so far, I think the increased speed and extensive access (ssh command line) makes it more than worth it.

I'm going to document what I learned since switching, but first, a word or two about the configuration of my new server...

The hardware is an 8 processor Xeon server co-located in Miami, FL. Since I am running on a VPS, I can't really tell how much memory it has or how many VPS's can run on it. My VPS is limited to 256mb of memory, 40gb disk, 85 processes, and 30% of the total processor power of the host.

You control the VPS thru the web browser using the h-sphere management software. You can use the control panel to restart the VPS, set up email, control DNS, and do other functions a sys admin would want to do. You can add email users and aliases as well as set up virtual domains for your server (I did this for mojocode.org and mojocode.net).

From the time I ordered until the time I could ssh into my server took less than 24 hours. Because of my particular configuration, it took me another 24 hours to get my website up and everything configured, but that was because of my configuration and the need to adapt to the new server's setup from my old generic server.

Tech support for the few issues I ran into has been a little spotty. Using the chat support is easy to do and a fairly short wait time, but about 1/2 the time I get told to submit a support ticket to get senior support. About 1/2 the time I submit a ticket, I receive a quick (4 hour or less) response. However, on several occassions I have had to wait several days before I get a response. I wish support was a little faster more initially helpful more often, but the people I've dealt with are friendly and helpful as they can be.

The VPS is FreeVPS. FreeVPS supports several operating systems, mostly based on Redhat. The VPS at yourserving.com is running CentOS 4, a Redhat Enterprise 4 clone.

It is a little tough going back to Redhat after so many years on debian/ubuntu. I miss the familiar setup and sysadmin friendly setup and update methods. I also like the way ubuntu sets up packages like Apache 2.

One of the difficulties I've had is upgrading some of the packages. I can get used to up2date and yum again, but with the VPS, I often get my update job "killed" or the update process will just hang. I have a ticket in with support about how to update PHP and MySQL using these packages (rather than just putting in my own RPMs), but I haven't heard anything in awhile about my request.