4 Things you should know, before moving into VPS

You are interested on moving your site into VPS based hosting (i called VPS as second level hosting, while shared hosting as first level), but you’re still confused on how your site are going to perform under VPS, is it going to be worse than shared hosting or is it going to be a lot better than before. And to make explain few things about it, i’ve decided to write this post

Okay here are what you should know before moving into VPS hosting :

Control Panel

Most shared hosting use CPanel for their client, and that mean if you want a smooth transition from your old shared hosting account into your new vps, your best option is of course to choose the vps hosting account that is using the same control panel like your previous control panel, beside you already familiar with it

Guaranteed Memory / RAM

Back then you don’t need to worry about RAM / Memory problem because most shared hosting use 4GB RAM (at least on my Hostgator account) for their customers, although it’s shared with hundreds or thousands other customers and your memory usage is capped at certain level. But that things won’t happen anymore at VPS, because you’ll get what you pay for

And as a note, memory is the most important things you should consider before getting your vps other than the control panel itself, and trust me if your vps doesn’t have enough memory you’ll see lots of services aren’t going to start / often fail, like the HTTPD (Apache Webserver in my case)

PHPSuexec vs mod_php

Many shared hosting use PHPSuexec on their server, because it is necessary for them to do that as security purpose which is good. Unfortunately, your new vps aren’t going to use the same setup like your previous hosting (most of the time you’re going to use PHP which is loaded as apache module by default on your VPS) so you’ll need to make some modification to your new vps account before started using it

And just in case you didn’t know what is PHPSuexec, i’ll give you an example on what PHPSuexec actually does :

For example, you were running some php script / cms / blogging software that requires you to change permission (using chmod 777 command / change permission using your ftp program) on some directories / files in order to give access to write something into that directory or file

Back then when you’re under PHPSuexec, you can just safely ignore that instruction that tell you to chmod certain files / directories to 777, beside when you run under PHPSuexec you’re going to get a server error message if you try to chmod some files into 777 because PHPSuexec doesn’t want you to run a script with insecure permission

in other words, by using phpsuexec, because it’s (the script) run under your own userid, you can write anything in your own directory (files, etc) without having to chmod it first into world writable permission (777)

As a side note, if i should choose between running php as apache module (mod_php) and phpsuexec, i’d definitely choose to use phpsuexec although that mean i’m losing the server performance and taking up lots of server resources

Basic / Intermediate Knowledge on how to set up things on your VPS

Even though you’re using a managed VPS, you’ll need to know some basic unix / linux command (if you choose linux vps hosting) also knowledge on how to configure something by yourself. Because most web hosting company aren’t going to help you on optimizing your VPS

So what’s the conclusion ?

Based from the above paragraphs, i think you’ve guessed that shared hosting is the best and the easiest way to get your website up and running perfectly. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use a vps, because vps is the way to go when you’re serious about your website