Quote:
Originally Posted by Sly
I am in absolute amazement over how many of you think that it is totally acceptable and common to have a virtual account that doesn't work properly and is not properly supported. With us, you are paying for the bandwidth and the space and the resources... you will receive the same quality support whether you are paying $10 a month or $500 a month.
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Sly is right.. Phat and some other hosts give just as much effort to their virtual, I know we used to when we were selling it, but eventually just stopped accepting new accounts.
For the most part, however, the typical user experience in a virtual environment that caters to multiple adult accounts is not going to be a great one. There are simply too many variables with load, traffic, email, etc. So, unless you end up lucky and at one of the few hosts that excels at virtual hosting, I'm of the opinion that it's likely going to be a dissapointment.
On the dedicated side, here are some things that people can do to limit their risk and expense if they choose that route:
1) You can always ask your host to cap your port as a failsafe. Either toggling your server port to say 10 megabit can do a lot to prevent a worst-case scenario with bandwidth utilization. Also, some hosts that have the right type of switches in place can do a more granular cap - like 5 megabit, 15 megabit, 30 megabit, pretty much any variable you choose. If you fall into this category I would recommend looking at your peak traffic and choosing a cap that is 20-50% above your peak usage. On 95th percentile you're going to drop the 36 highest hours of usage.
2) Good members area protection... I always recommend ProxyPass but there are other alternatives like StrongBox, etc, that can limit your risk with members sites.
3) If you are posting large movie or picture files on your sites then investing in some anti-hotlinking solution is a great idea. We offer LinkSentinal for free to our client. It's a premium antihotlink software that has a lot of functionality. I don't know if it's marketed yet but the same people that sell/write ProxyPass created this and we were part of the beta test over a year ago. The other option would be just to use .htaccess protection. Over time or perhaps right away you could expect to see some bandwidth savings.
4) If you can do without a control panel, great. If you happen to find a host that is fully managed so they can create and control the environment this will be far more efficient on server resources than say Cpanel which has lots of things running by default that end up putting the server under unnecessary load.
Just be wary of dealing with unknown hosts when it comes to inexpensive dedicateds. Sometimes you find a great value, sometimes you find something that is oversold and just as problematic as a virtual account. The bulk of companies selling cheap dedicateds (<$150/mo) aren't truly delivering a great service. Either because they're selling below cost, oversubscribing bandwidth on a switch, not giving great support or have some other factor that interrupts their ability to give excellent service.
Cheers,
Brad