@vyas said: In a previous post I had mentioned HM will charge $10 to change my Cpanel account to DA basic. The DA basic plan is abt $20
I guess if it was me I could live with that. I mean it's not really just a button press to do the transfer from cPanel to DA. It's admin time. Some charge for that others don't. $10 not to do it myself during my current lazy ass streak would be fine.
@vyas said: In a previous post I had mentioned HM will charge $10 to change my Cpanel account to DA basic. The DA basic plan is abt $20
I guess if it was me I could live with that. I mean it's not really just a button press to do the transfer from cPanel to DA. It's admin time. Some charge for that others don't. $10 not to do it myself during my current lazy ass streak would be fine.
I do it - even manually (at least a few times), to confirm I can do it and it all works properly.
So I can always move away just as easily, in case of any problems.
@vyas said: In a previous post I had mentioned HM will charge $10 to change my Cpanel account to DA basic. The DA basic plan is abt $20
I guess if it was me I could live with that. I mean it's not really just a button press to do the transfer from cPanel to DA. It's admin time. Some charge for that others don't. $10 not to do it myself during my current lazy ass streak would be fine.
I concur, $ 10 is probably a fair charge. Spread that over 1 year and that is not even a topic of conversation
Before this asinine across the board increase including DA based hosting, I would have happily opted for that transfer.
I guess they must have had some requests from customers to add Enterprise, and some are willing to pay accordingly for it. It isn't easy to offer too many different services/plans, i.e. separate Web hosting and WordPress hosting, but they're pretty much the same in most cases.
@HostXNow said:
I guess they must have had some requests from customers to add Enterprise, and some are willing to pay accordingly for it. It isn't easy to offer too many different services/plans, i.e. separate Web hosting and WordPress hosting, but they're pretty much the same in most cases.
The current resource allocation with Enterprise Reseller accounts is a perfect fit for me.
But for anyone re-selling hosting, it's practically a 2x (or more) price increase, because their non-Enterprise Reseller hosting plans have been gutted (vCPU being the bottleneck). That's the second time their reseller resource allocation change (for the worse) has hit in the middle of an existing contract term (the first time was in 2019, when they cut the number of allowed cPanel accounts from 25 to just 10 for their Reseller Entry packages).
One can't really complain about price hikes at the end of a contract term. But moves like this (gutting the resources, mid-term) are quite disconcerting.
Also, the last price hike was allegedly with some room to soak up any future resource price hikes (cPanel and the likes).
But now they are still making a 25% price hike on top of that, even for their DirectAdmin hosting packages.
Sure - they may be spreading the costs, I can understand that, but the price hikes have been extremely drastic and very frequent since 2019. Based on the experience so far, I'm expecting prices to double year after year.
Looking for reliable, high-quality options with resource limits similar to their current Enterprise Reseller hosting (so I can allocate more, or fewer resources per account). So far - Knownhost does it for $900 per three years, then roughly double that for renewal (HostMantis is supposed to cost just under $700 dollars, after the New Year... unless until they increase the prices again).
Having said all that - the service quality - speed, uptime, tech. support reaction time (actually fixing stuff, not just replying quickly with "we'll look into it") are top-class, unmatched by any (premium-priced) provider I've been with. And they are still the cheapest offer for such quality - I can't find anything better. So, like cPanel, they can go on hiking prices - and it's up to the customers to see if it fits them, or move to a lower quality option in order to save some money.
Edit - I just took a look at your reseller offers and pricing. A matching resource account (more than 1vCPU reseller) costs just under $3,000 for three years (per your current prices). So HostMantis can easily double their prices more and still remain at half the price. Why wouldn't a business do that - earn more money, for a top-class service?
I don't like paying more, as a customer, but it makes sense to earn more if you can. That's what you are doing too - based on your current prices.
My main (the only reasonable) complaint with HostMantis are the mid-term resource changes (for the worse). For my use case they haven't hurt one bit, but for anyone re-selling hosting, they are bad.
@bikegremlin said: A matching resource account (more than 1vCPU reseller) costs just under $3,000 for three years (per your current prices).
Jeez, that is at a price/resource point even proven quality and managed providers wouldn't charge.
Very few providers offer more than 1vCPU per a cPanel account - for reseller hosting at least.
The way prices are going though, it's getting very close to renting a fully managed VPS (with all the pros and cons).
They want to make money - everybody does. Can't blame them. Communism has been thoroughly destroyed, this is the modern zeitgeist (it's very simple, isn't it? ):
@bikegremlin said: The way prices are going though, it's getting very close to renting a fully managed VPS (with all the pros and cons).
I transferred all of my clients accounts on HM DA reseller to a VPS (unmanaged) by another provider, hopefully not going to regret it
Managing a VPS takes time, knowledge and experience.
If you're happy to do it - it could be good (depending on how much you "price" your time).
Likewise - when several websites are under one "account" (or on one VPS without CloudLinux's cagefs), there is a risk of one infected website infecting the others, or one "rogue" script hogging the resources of all the other websites.
@bikegremlin said: Managing a VPS takes time, knowledge and experience.
If you have knowledge and experience it takes no time.
That said even if you do and I do there are times when it is just simpler to use someone like HM or in my case Brixly for some sites. For other sites, I have a cluster setup with DO because for other sites I need MySQL on one VM, NginX on another and so on.
@bikegremlin said: Managing a VPS takes time, knowledge and experience.
If you have knowledge and experience it takes no time.
That said even if you do and I do there are times when it is just simpler to use someone like HM or in my case Brixly for some sites. For other sites, I have a cluster setup with DO because for other sites I need MySQL on one VM, NginX on another and so on.
Questions and thinking out loud:
From what I could test, WordPress performs noticeably faster with LiteSpeed.
I know there are alternatives, but none are as good.
For isolation of one website from the others - is there a FOSS solution that doesn't require CloudLinux?
Talking about dozen or so websites - don't think it's worth it to put each on a separate VPS, but not sure that putting them all onto one VPS would outperform, and be as carefree to run as it is with reseller hosting.
If it takes very little time to keep a VPS updated & secured - how much is it reasonable to pay/charge for the management?
@bikegremlin said: From what I could test, WordPress performs noticeably faster with LiteSpeed.
In shared environments probably. On your own VPS, nah, NginX performs way better. How many of say the top couple of hundred websites use LS? None. They mostly use NginX.
I don't even know anyone who would use OLS or favour LS in anything but shared panel environments, that is really what it's for. To be honest, using my own VPS/dedi I would be happy with Apache to get as good performance to LS. I wouldn't even use the LS cache plugin with WordPress. Bloated crap. Even the managed WordPress providers favour NginX.
@bikegremlin said: For isolation of one website from the others - is there a FOSS solution that doesn't require CloudLinux?
There are options but why would you want isolation with your own sites?
@bikegremlin said: but not sure that putting them all onto one VPS would outperform, and be as carefree to run as it is with reseller hosting.
As carefree as someone else doing it for you? No. Outperform, absolutely, so many limits are removed with your own VPS/Dedicated vs shared.
@bikegremlin said: If it takes very little time to keep a VPS updated & secured - how much is it reasonable to pay/charge for the management?
Can't say, it is such a wide field and I have no experience of managed providers.
Now, I will caveat all of the above with you needing to have the knowledge to configure and tweak the setup. This is where it becomes a fine line. Faster in terms of the website may be a lot based on numbers, but noticeable to your average visitor? Probably not.
And that is where it is a fine line. The difference between letting someone else do it and doing it yourself may not be worth the difference that nobody but you is really going to understand.
@bikegremlin said: From what I could test, WordPress performs noticeably faster with LiteSpeed.
In shared environments probably. On your own VPS, nah, NginX performs way better. How many of say the top couple of hundred websites use LS? None. They mostly use NginX.
I don't even know anyone who would use OLS or favour LS in anything but shared panel environments, that is really what it's for. To be honest, using my own VPS/dedi I would be happy with Apache to get as good performance to LS. I wouldn't even use the LS cache plugin with WordPress. Bloated crap. Even the managed WordPress providers favour NginX.
@bikegremlin said: For isolation of one website from the others - is there a FOSS solution that doesn't require CloudLinux?
There are options but why would you want isolation with your own sites?
@bikegremlin said: but not sure that putting them all onto one VPS would outperform, and be as carefree to run as it is with reseller hosting.
As carefree as someone else doing it for you? No. Outperform, absolutely, so many limits are removed with your own VPS/Dedicated vs shared.
@bikegremlin said: If it takes very little time to keep a VPS updated & secured - how much is it reasonable to pay/charge for the management?
Can't say, it is such a wide field and I have no experience of managed providers.
Now, I will caveat all of the above with you needing to have the knowledge to configure and tweak the setup. This is where it becomes a fine line. Faster in terms of the website may be a lot based on numbers, but noticeable to your average visitor? Probably not.
And that is where it is a fine line. The difference between letting someone else do it and doing it yourself may not be worth the difference that nobody but you is really going to understand.
As with the previous post, not arguing/disputing, just thinking and asking:
I've tested WordPress with a reseller hosting server where I was practically the only user (don't know the specs, so it is not a very useful info) - NginX didn't shine, even when trying different caching plugins. It was far from bad (quite contrary), but LiteSpeed caching plugin, on a LiteSpeed server really shines with WordPress.
I've tried dozens of W3 Total Cache configurations, and many other well-known, and less well known caching plugins.
LiteSpeed is better out of the box, while with some tuning, it's brilliant. Paid WP Rocket came close though, I must admit.
As for the isolation: I've had a website go crazy, taking 100% of its allotted vCPU resources. Plugin conflict and poor design.
OK, I could put the experimental stuff on a cheap reseller account and play there.
But what if when a production site has a problem or a hack?
Isolation keeps it to just the problematic site, not affecting any others (I believe that every website will have a problem, or a hack, it's a matter of when, not if, like with most other stuff - it breaks).
To me, a VPS seems like a (potential) time hog. With questionable advantages (at least the noticeable advantages).
Then again, if decent-quality reseller hosting prices keep going up, I might reconsider (even then, I'd probably rather pay @MikePT for the management, and not worry about that).
@bikegremlin said: me, a VPS seems like a (potential) time hog. With questionable advantages (at least the noticeable advantages).
Sounds like you are not someone with much command-line experience or spent time on configuration. I say that as you are thinking it is a time hog. You get out what you put in. You get more out from less time if you know what you are doing.
Stick with shared/reseller. You will struggle to get out of a VPS what you really want with someone like @MikePT, that is no offence to him, he is going to secure your server and keep it running. Not configure and tweak it to run optimally based on your sites.
@bikegremlin said: me, a VPS seems like a (potential) time hog. With questionable advantages (at least the noticeable advantages).
Sounds like you are not someone with much command-line experience or spent time on configuration. I say that as you are thinking it is a time hog. You get out what you put in. You get more out from less time if you know what you are doing.
Stick with shared/reseller. You will struggle to get out of a VPS what you really want with someone like @MikePT, that is no offence to him, he is going to secure your server and keep it running. Not configure and tweak it to run optimally based on your sites.
I grew up with DOS.
Not afraid of (nor worried about) the command line (though, for everyday use, I'd sure as hell like a control panel).
More worried about checking for hacks, DDoS, are the backups running fine, does the server need any updates etc.
It can be automated, but that has its cons (I don't keep WordPress, or any computer OS on auto-update).
That just sounds like another thing to worry about. Hour per month? More? Don't know, but I think that even one hour taken on that is not really worth it, unless I value my hour well below $30.
Plus I believe that keeping dozens of servers running doesn't take much more than keeping one running. The other way round - keeping one running doesn't take much less time. Am I wrong?
@bikegremlin said: Managing a VPS takes time, knowledge and experience.
If you have knowledge and experience it takes no time.
That said even if you do and I do there are times when it is just simpler to use someone like HM or in my case Brixly for some sites. For other sites, I have a cluster setup with DO because for other sites I need MySQL on one VM, NginX on another and so on.
Questions and thinking out loud:
From what I could test, WordPress performs noticeably faster with LiteSpeed.
I know there are alternatives, but none are as good.
For isolation of one website from the others - is there a FOSS solution that doesn't require CloudLinux?
Yes - Cloudlinux, CageFS/LVE, is based on technology already built into the kernel (obviously, modified further at a kernel level, but same concept). You've got change rooting, which creates synthetic filesystems to isolate site, and CGroups, to throttle/manage resources. Both are extremely robust and will properly isolate a site if configured properly. Obviously, you could do some black magic with SELinux too if you want - there are a few ways of going about it.
Talking about dozen or so websites - don't think it's worth it to put each on a separate VPS, but not sure that putting them all onto one VPS would outperform, and be as carefree to run as it is with reseller hosting.
A reseller hosting is just a managed server - whether a VPS will outperform depends on:
a) how well the server is managed
b) what the VPS's performance itself is
If it takes very little time to keep a VPS updated & secured - how much is it reasonable to pay/charge for the management?
You'd typically look at time cost + buffer for something like this. Hardening/updates is something that can be automated, so generally it's a low time cost, but if you're providing "full" management you've got to factor in things like support requests, debugging issues that will inevitably show up, etc. So, that's why you've got such a wide range of prices. I find what's typically charged - $35 - $100/m a steal considering you'd almost certainly pay that hourly elsewhere.
I've tested WordPress with a reseller hosting server where I was practically the only user (don't know the specs, so it is not a very useful info) - NginX didn't shine, even when trying different caching plugins. It was far from bad (quite contrary), but LiteSpeed caching plugin, on a LiteSpeed server really shines with WordPress.
I've tried dozens of W3 Total Cache configurations, and many other well-known, and less well known caching plugins.
LiteSpeed is better out of the box, while with some tuning, it's brilliant. Paid WP Rocket came close though, I must admit.
@bikegremlin said: From what I could test, WordPress performs noticeably faster with LiteSpeed.
In shared environments probably. On your own VPS, nah, NginX performs way better. How many of say the top couple of hundred websites use LS? None. They mostly use NginX.
I don't even know anyone who would use OLS or favour LS in anything but shared panel environments, that is really what it's for. To be honest, using my own VPS/dedi I would be happy with Apache to get as good performance to LS. I wouldn't even use the LS cache plugin with WordPress. Bloated crap. Even the managed WordPress providers favour NginX.
As a managed WP provider, I'll note this - NGINX is extremely popular, though it doesn't come down to just performance.
Litespeed is a niche product for the shared hosting environment. It makes WordPress caching simple, so you give the illusion of speeding up a site by 10x or 20x, simply because it's caching versus, like 60% of customer run sites that aren't. Why doesn't F500 use Litespeed? Simple: NGINX is much more widely supported, (F5 is magnitudes greater than LS), more well known (so, easier to find experts) and you don't have to deal with licensing (though, there's NGINX plus, and such cost is typically a lesser issue in large enterprises).
Litespeed...has it's share of stability issues too.
However, is LS more efficient/faster than NGINX? Probably. In most cases, yes, but nominally. Not the point where it makes sense to compromise on the aforementioned to shave a ms here or there.
As for @bikegremlin's observation. It's really not apples to apples, and there is so much more at play with your environment that you cannot conclude one is faster than the other solely based off that. For one, what kind of files are you serving? compressed on the fly, or pre-compressed? Caching - how was that actually handled? FastCGI? Rewrite w/ PHP fallback? (in which case it becomes only PHP, because there isn't such thing in NGINX). Did you apply the NGINX conf for WP Rocket? https://github.com/SatelliteWP/rocket-nginx
To me, a VPS seems like a (potential) time hog. With questionable advantages (at least the noticeable advantages).
For some, absolutely. For others, you get better stability, flexibility, and sometimes performance.
Plus I believe that keeping dozens of servers running doesn't take much more than keeping one running. The other way round - keeping one running doesn't take much less time. Am I wrong?
In theory, maybe. Once you've got automation (ansible, chef, or just a git of bash) done for one server, it is easy to apply that to multiple. At the same time, you've now got 12x the things to monitor, and 12x the chance that someone, somewhere, will break something. And, if, say, KernelCare releases a bad update (which is definitely has before), you've now got 12x the servers to fix. There's a balance...somewhere.....
@johnk - Thanks for the interesting views from a providers perspective.
What I can say from a personal perspective is that I have been able to get better performance using NginX and other caching plugins than LS and their plugin. But as you say, it's all about balance, there is no perfect solution. There is more to it than just webservers and plugins.
Importantly the difference in performance either way is often nominal that may make you as the site owner feel good given all the effort for that nominal gain but have zero impact on visitors.
A decent provider, shared/reseller should do just fine for most until you break beyond a specific traffic/load that may require a more sophisticated setup but really, if you don't need that, don't do it is my view. That is going down the VPS/dedi route for no reason or known gain.
@Lee said: @johnk - Thanks for the interesting views from a providers perspective.
What I can say from a personal perspective is that I have been able to get better performance using NginX and other caching plugins than LS and their plugin. But as you say, it's all about balance, there is no perfect solution. There is more to it than just webservers and plugins.
Fair & valid - though, you'd have to keep in mind introducing new/other plugins no longer makes it apples to apples. What are the other plugins doing/serving? You'd typically want to slim it down to the point where the sole different is literally litespeed WS, or NGINX. Again of course, nominal difference. (I'm referring to LSE. OLS is crap.)
A decent provider, shared/reseller should do just fine for most until you break beyond a specific traffic/load that may require a more sophisticated setup but really, if you don't need that, don't do it is my view. That is going down the VPS/dedi route for no reason or known gain.
In all cases, I see a VPS/dedi as a performance/flexibility to budget option. If you have the budget, and need high traffic, VPS/dedi is far from your only option. (ie, WP VIP. lot's of other options out their, sans needing to pay $5000/m+). You'd typically host on a VPS/Dedicated when you/your organization has the expertise to manage/configure it, so you don't need to outsource. (which, is really what paying these enterprise agencies is. )
@johnk said:
Lots of interesting discussion - just a few questions I thought I'd answer:
And, if, say, KernelCare releases a bad update (which is definitely has before), you've now got 12x the servers to fix. There's a balance...somewhere.....
This is why I prefer testing any changes/updates in one test environment, before applying it to production.
The main reason I keep any auto-updates disabled.
Thanks for the thorough response and explanation.
I find direct provider feedback ("from the other side") invaluable.
What's your take on DirectAdmin (vs cPanel) in terms of server management and keeping it all running smoothly?
From a user point of view, it looks a bit like duct-tape & WD40 solution compared to cPanel, though at this moment it is fully functional and I can do whatever I need to do with DirectAdmin as well.
Comments
I guess if it was me I could live with that. I mean it's not really just a button press to do the transfer from cPanel to DA. It's admin time. Some charge for that others don't. $10 not to do it myself during my current lazy ass streak would be fine.
I do it - even manually (at least a few times), to confirm I can do it and it all works properly.
So I can always move away just as easily, in case of any problems.
Detailed info about providers whose services I've used:
BikeGremlin web-hosting reviews
I concur, $ 10 is probably a fair charge. Spread that over 1 year and that is not even a topic of conversation
Before this asinine across the board increase including DA based hosting, I would have happily opted for that transfer.
VPS reviews and benchmarks |
I guess they must have had some requests from customers to add Enterprise, and some are willing to pay accordingly for it. It isn't easy to offer too many different services/plans, i.e. separate Web hosting and WordPress hosting, but they're pretty much the same in most cases.
Enterprise Reseller Hosting • Shared • Reseller • VPS • Backups • cPanel
The current resource allocation with Enterprise Reseller accounts is a perfect fit for me.
But for anyone re-selling hosting, it's practically a 2x (or more) price increase, because their non-Enterprise Reseller hosting plans have been gutted (vCPU being the bottleneck). That's the second time their reseller resource allocation change (for the worse) has hit in the middle of an existing contract term (the first time was in 2019, when they cut the number of allowed cPanel accounts from 25 to just 10 for their Reseller Entry packages).
One can't really complain about price hikes at the end of a contract term. But moves like this (gutting the resources, mid-term) are quite disconcerting.
Also, the last price hike was allegedly with some room to soak up any future resource price hikes (cPanel and the likes).
But now they are still making a 25% price hike on top of that, even for their DirectAdmin hosting packages.
Sure - they may be spreading the costs, I can understand that, but the price hikes have been extremely drastic and very frequent since 2019. Based on the experience so far, I'm expecting prices to double year after year.
Looking for reliable, high-quality options with resource limits similar to their current Enterprise Reseller hosting (so I can allocate more, or fewer resources per account). So far - Knownhost does it for $900 per three years, then roughly double that for renewal (HostMantis is supposed to cost just under $700 dollars, after the New Year... unless until they increase the prices again).
Having said all that - the service quality - speed, uptime, tech. support reaction time (actually fixing stuff, not just replying quickly with "we'll look into it") are top-class, unmatched by any (premium-priced) provider I've been with. And they are still the cheapest offer for such quality - I can't find anything better. So, like cPanel, they can go on hiking prices - and it's up to the customers to see if it fits them, or move to a lower quality option in order to save some money.
Edit - I just took a look at your reseller offers and pricing. A matching resource account (more than 1vCPU reseller) costs just under $3,000 for three years (per your current prices). So HostMantis can easily double their prices more and still remain at half the price. Why wouldn't a business do that - earn more money, for a top-class service?
I don't like paying more, as a customer, but it makes sense to earn more if you can. That's what you are doing too - based on your current prices.
My main (the only reasonable) complaint with HostMantis are the mid-term resource changes (for the worse). For my use case they haven't hurt one bit, but for anyone re-selling hosting, they are bad.
Detailed info about providers whose services I've used:
BikeGremlin web-hosting reviews
Jeez, that is at a price/resource point even proven quality and managed providers wouldn't charge.
Very few providers offer more than 1vCPU per a cPanel account - for reseller hosting at least.
The way prices are going though, it's getting very close to renting a fully managed VPS (with all the pros and cons).
):
They want to make money - everybody does. Can't blame them. Communism has been thoroughly destroyed, this is the modern zeitgeist (it's very simple, isn't it?
Detailed info about providers whose services I've used:
BikeGremlin web-hosting reviews
Let me put it in a less diplomatic way. HostXNow? Lol, no.
I transferred all of my clients accounts on HM DA reseller to a VPS (unmanaged) by another provider, hopefully not going to regret it
Managing a VPS takes time, knowledge and experience.
If you're happy to do it - it could be good (depending on how much you "price" your time).
Likewise - when several websites are under one "account" (or on one VPS without CloudLinux's cagefs), there is a risk of one infected website infecting the others, or one "rogue" script hogging the resources of all the other websites.
Longer drivel on the topic:
Is a VPS better than shared/reseller hosting
Detailed info about providers whose services I've used:
BikeGremlin web-hosting reviews
If you have knowledge and experience it takes no time.
That said even if you do and I do there are times when it is just simpler to use someone like HM or in my case Brixly for some sites. For other sites, I have a cluster setup with DO because for other sites I need MySQL on one VM, NginX on another and so on.
Questions and thinking out loud:
From what I could test, WordPress performs noticeably faster with LiteSpeed.
I know there are alternatives, but none are as good.
For isolation of one website from the others - is there a FOSS solution that doesn't require CloudLinux?
Talking about dozen or so websites - don't think it's worth it to put each on a separate VPS, but not sure that putting them all onto one VPS would outperform, and be as carefree to run as it is with reseller hosting.
If it takes very little time to keep a VPS updated & secured - how much is it reasonable to pay/charge for the management?
Detailed info about providers whose services I've used:
BikeGremlin web-hosting reviews
In shared environments probably. On your own VPS, nah, NginX performs way better. How many of say the top couple of hundred websites use LS? None. They mostly use NginX.
I don't even know anyone who would use OLS or favour LS in anything but shared panel environments, that is really what it's for. To be honest, using my own VPS/dedi I would be happy with Apache to get as good performance to LS. I wouldn't even use the LS cache plugin with WordPress. Bloated crap. Even the managed WordPress providers favour NginX.
There are options but why would you want isolation with your own sites?
As carefree as someone else doing it for you? No. Outperform, absolutely, so many limits are removed with your own VPS/Dedicated vs shared.
Can't say, it is such a wide field and I have no experience of managed providers.
Now, I will caveat all of the above with you needing to have the knowledge to configure and tweak the setup. This is where it becomes a fine line. Faster in terms of the website may be a lot based on numbers, but noticeable to your average visitor? Probably not.
And that is where it is a fine line. The difference between letting someone else do it and doing it yourself may not be worth the difference that nobody but you is really going to understand.
As with the previous post, not arguing/disputing, just thinking and asking:
I've tested WordPress with a reseller hosting server where I was practically the only user (don't know the specs, so it is not a very useful info) - NginX didn't shine, even when trying different caching plugins. It was far from bad (quite contrary), but LiteSpeed caching plugin, on a LiteSpeed server really shines with WordPress.
I've tried dozens of W3 Total Cache configurations, and many other well-known, and less well known caching plugins.
LiteSpeed is better out of the box, while with some tuning, it's brilliant. Paid WP Rocket came close though, I must admit.
Same experience with Porkbun managed WordPress hosting - OK, but not as fast as HostMantis reseller (they too are using NginX).
As for the isolation: I've had a website go crazy, taking 100% of its allotted vCPU resources. Plugin conflict and poor design.
OK, I could put the experimental stuff on a cheap reseller account and play there.
But what if when a production site has a problem or a hack?
Isolation keeps it to just the problematic site, not affecting any others (I believe that every website will have a problem, or a hack, it's a matter of when, not if, like with most other stuff - it breaks).
To me, a VPS seems like a (potential) time hog. With questionable advantages (at least the noticeable advantages).
Then again, if decent-quality reseller hosting prices keep going up, I might reconsider (even then, I'd probably rather pay @MikePT for the management, and not worry about that).
Detailed info about providers whose services I've used:
BikeGremlin web-hosting reviews
Sounds like you are not someone with much command-line experience or spent time on configuration. I say that as you are thinking it is a time hog. You get out what you put in. You get more out from less time if you know what you are doing.
Stick with shared/reseller. You will struggle to get out of a VPS what you really want with someone like @MikePT, that is no offence to him, he is going to secure your server and keep it running. Not configure and tweak it to run optimally based on your sites.
I grew up with DOS.
Not afraid of (nor worried about) the command line (though, for everyday use, I'd sure as hell like a control panel).
More worried about checking for hacks, DDoS, are the backups running fine, does the server need any updates etc.
It can be automated, but that has its cons (I don't keep WordPress, or any computer OS on auto-update).
That just sounds like another thing to worry about. Hour per month? More? Don't know, but I think that even one hour taken on that is not really worth it, unless I value my hour well below $30.
Plus I believe that keeping dozens of servers running doesn't take much more than keeping one running. The other way round - keeping one running doesn't take much less time. Am I wrong?
Detailed info about providers whose services I've used:
BikeGremlin web-hosting reviews
I had grown up by DOS, my first language was COBOL but neither is going to help us in 2021.
Lots of interesting discussion - just a few questions I thought I'd answer:
Yes - Cloudlinux, CageFS/LVE, is based on technology already built into the kernel (obviously, modified further at a kernel level, but same concept). You've got change rooting, which creates synthetic filesystems to isolate site, and CGroups, to throttle/manage resources. Both are extremely robust and will properly isolate a site if configured properly. Obviously, you could do some black magic with SELinux too if you want - there are a few ways of going about it.
A reseller hosting is just a managed server - whether a VPS will outperform depends on:
a) how well the server is managed
b) what the VPS's performance itself is
You'd typically look at time cost + buffer for something like this. Hardening/updates is something that can be automated, so generally it's a low time cost, but if you're providing "full" management you've got to factor in things like support requests, debugging issues that will inevitably show up, etc. So, that's why you've got such a wide range of prices. I find what's typically charged - $35 - $100/m a steal considering you'd almost certainly pay that hourly elsewhere.
LiteSpeed is better out of the box, while with some tuning, it's brilliant. Paid WP Rocket came close though, I must admit.
As a managed WP provider, I'll note this - NGINX is extremely popular, though it doesn't come down to just performance.
Litespeed is a niche product for the shared hosting environment. It makes WordPress caching simple, so you give the illusion of speeding up a site by 10x or 20x, simply because it's caching versus, like 60% of customer run sites that aren't. Why doesn't F500 use Litespeed? Simple: NGINX is much more widely supported, (F5 is magnitudes greater than LS), more well known (so, easier to find experts) and you don't have to deal with licensing (though, there's NGINX plus, and such cost is typically a lesser issue in large enterprises).
Litespeed...has it's share of stability issues too.
However, is LS more efficient/faster than NGINX? Probably. In most cases, yes, but nominally. Not the point where it makes sense to compromise on the aforementioned to shave a ms here or there.
As for @bikegremlin's observation. It's really not apples to apples, and there is so much more at play with your environment that you cannot conclude one is faster than the other solely based off that. For one, what kind of files are you serving? compressed on the fly, or pre-compressed? Caching - how was that actually handled? FastCGI? Rewrite w/ PHP fallback? (in which case it becomes only PHP, because there isn't such thing in NGINX). Did you apply the NGINX conf for WP Rocket? https://github.com/SatelliteWP/rocket-nginx
For some, absolutely. For others, you get better stability, flexibility, and sometimes performance.
In theory, maybe. Once you've got automation (ansible, chef, or just a git of bash) done for one server, it is easy to apply that to multiple. At the same time, you've now got 12x the things to monitor, and 12x the chance that someone, somewhere, will break something. And, if, say, KernelCare releases a bad update (which is definitely has before), you've now got 12x the servers to fix. There's a balance...somewhere.....
@johnk - Thanks for the interesting views from a providers perspective.
What I can say from a personal perspective is that I have been able to get better performance using NginX and other caching plugins than LS and their plugin. But as you say, it's all about balance, there is no perfect solution. There is more to it than just webservers and plugins.
Importantly the difference in performance either way is often nominal that may make you as the site owner feel good given all the effort for that nominal gain but have zero impact on visitors.
A decent provider, shared/reseller should do just fine for most until you break beyond a specific traffic/load that may require a more sophisticated setup but really, if you don't need that, don't do it is my view. That is going down the VPS/dedi route for no reason or known gain.
Fair & valid - though, you'd have to keep in mind introducing new/other plugins no longer makes it apples to apples. What are the other plugins doing/serving? You'd typically want to slim it down to the point where the sole different is literally litespeed WS, or NGINX. Again of course, nominal difference. (I'm referring to LSE. OLS is crap.)
In all cases, I see a VPS/dedi as a performance/flexibility to budget option. If you have the budget, and need high traffic, VPS/dedi is far from your only option. (ie, WP VIP. lot's of other options out their, sans needing to pay $5000/m+). You'd typically host on a VPS/Dedicated when you/your organization has the expertise to manage/configure it, so you don't need to outsource. (which, is really what paying these enterprise agencies is. )
This is why I prefer testing any changes/updates in one test environment, before applying it to production.
The main reason I keep any auto-updates disabled.
Thanks for the thorough response and explanation.
I find direct provider feedback ("from the other side") invaluable.
What's your take on DirectAdmin (vs cPanel) in terms of server management and keeping it all running smoothly?
From a user point of view, it looks a bit like duct-tape & WD40 solution compared to cPanel, though at this moment it is fully functional and I can do whatever I need to do with DirectAdmin as well.
Detailed info about providers whose services I've used:
BikeGremlin web-hosting reviews