Migration, Security and Optimization

spt7

spt7

New Member
Hello KH Support!

This week i've planned move my sites to KH VPS, but want solve some doubts. Here we go:

- About migration: at this moment i'm running two ecommerce sites, so, the migration procedure by KH team will not affect my service? For eg. (1) the mail service (google apps); i don't want to lose orders and incoming emails. (2) What about DB; i don't want lose new customer registrations, orders, others. (3) And what about with the uptime?

- About security: i know that KH team can improve all security things in my VPS, but want ask something specific. If i have some sensitive information, is there any way to control/monitoring the access to my VPS? I'm talking about KH team access. I know that you are a high level company but you know, i prefer know those things.

- About optimization: i'm planning to request Nginx as reverse proxy + APC + PageSpeed (nginx). Could you tell me if they are a good combo or not? And what will you recommend me?

Thanks for all guys.
Cheers!
 
spt7 said:
- About migration: at this moment i'm running two ecommerce sites, so, the migration procedure by KH team will not affect my service? For eg. (1) the mail service (google apps); i don't want to lose orders and incoming emails. (2) What about DB; i don't want lose new customer registrations, orders, others. (3) And what about with the uptime?
Click to expand...

There will be some downtime involved when it comes to changing DNS records to point to your new KnownHost server. Aside from that it's pretty seamless. Email (since you're using Google Apps) should suffer no downtime at all.

spt7 said:
- About security: i know that KH team can improve all security things in my VPS, but want ask something specific. If i have some sensitive information, is there any way to control/monitoring the access to my VPS? I'm talking about KH team access. I know that you are a high level company but you know, i prefer know those things.
Click to expand...

Sure, you can lock it down however you want by IP, password, etc. and only give us access when/if needed. We do not store passwords on file.

spt7 said:
- About optimization: i'm planning to request Nginx as reverse proxy + APC + PageSpeed (nginx). Could you tell me if they are a good combo or not? And what will you recommend me?
Click to expand...

Nginx + APC is a pretty common configuration and works quite well. I'm not sure about the mod_pagespeed part. I've personally not installed this onto Nginx before but I don't foresee any issues with it.
 
Thanks for the fast reply.

I was looking a VPS plan now and i'm not sure the best option of these: VPS-2 or SSD-1?
Both have the same price and i think that SDD-1 will be better, but i'm not sure. Could you tell me?

Thanks again :)
 
Just my personal opinion, and I am old school, I would go with the VPS2 UNLESS you have the need for speed then the SSD1
The down side of a SSD drive from what I have read is they have a tendency to die sooner/quicker with no warning so a few more backup may be prudent.

Dave G
 
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I'd do the exact opposite from Dave. Unless you need the disk space, go with SSD-1. Speed > Space to me.
 
Thanks for the answers.
So, SSD will be more fast but what about up/down time? Dave G information seems like real.

Cheers.
 
I am going to need to take back my earlier statement about SSD drives not lasting as long as HD drives after doing more research I have found that the new SSD's will on average last 5 years.
This is what I get for quoting/remembering a older article from when the SSD's first came out.

Dave G
 
This topic piqued my interested about SSD.
SSD-1 is about what I'm paying for VPS-2, except the offerings look way better - would actually be cheaper because I think I've got extra RAM on my VPS-2. Tried to check my billing statements to confirm but I just see the base price at $40 with a $4 discount.

Since these are roughly the same price, but you get more with SSD - is it 'too good to be true'?

What are the downsides? 5 years seems about right for hardware dying out. I seem to replace my PC every 3-5 years.

This topic on WHT sheds some light: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1257140
The overall consensus seems to be "mileage may vary" and someone mentioned in another thread, that performance degrades over time.

So with that in mind, how does one determine if their site(s) could benefit from SSD?
All of my sites are database-driven, but there doesn't appear to be any speed issues with any of them. I regularly optimize the tables and cache intensive queries.

Of course, if the pages could load even 10% quicker with SSD than they do now, I'd be willing to give it a try.

My questions:
- Do you have to get a new set of IP addresses if migrating from VPS-2 to SSD, or is the SSD added to the existing setup?
- What happens when performance starts to degrade, can you "upgrade" the SSD or do you need a new VPS?
 
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zombie said:
My questions:
- Do you have to get a new set of IP addresses if migrating from VPS-2 to SSD, or is the SSD added to the existing setup?
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If your VPS is already in Texas, then mostly likely no. If you're in Texas, the entire VPS (with it's IPs) are migrated over to an SSD node with no downtime at all in most cases.

zombie said:
- What happens when performance starts to degrade, can you "upgrade" the SSD or do you need a new VPS?
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We will not allow this to happen. We replace hardware as it ages on regular nodes to keep performance up, and SSD nodes will be no exception.
 
Just sent a ticket to sales about upgrading to SSD!
Luckily, my server IS in Texas so I'm hoping to hold onto those IPs. :)

We will not allow this to happen. We replace hardware as it ages on regular nodes to keep performance up, and SSD nodes will be no exception.
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I had always been concerned about this with even just a regular server, it's nice to know that is pro-actively looked after.
Seen some crazy posts on WHT about peoples' servers crashing over the years. (not about Knownhost at all, but at other hosts in general.)
 
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Been just over a day and a half since I've been on SSD-1.

I didn't notice the transfer, to be frank. The only way I knew I was transferred was asking support, and checking error_log in public_html -- looks like I was only down for a few seconds, according to the MySQL error logs.

One thing I do notice, is when I reset all of the caches at once on the database-intensive site, is that it is a tiny bit quicker (than on VPS-2 with cache disabled).

Overall, no MAJOR increase (on an optimized site), but even a little bit is worth it in my book! This also means there's less work for me to do on the database-intensive sites that don't presently cache. :D


Edit: After the post above, I did some testing in the back-end of the site tonight. Vast majority of the time it would load in ...maybe 1ms whereas on VPS-2 it would take 2-3ms for the same intensive task (uncached).
Got it to hiccup & stall for quite a few seconds a few times doing similar tasks. Nothing I could replicate, so it's assumed to be network congestion.

Later on...
Front-end: Noticed a bug tonight (unrelated to SSD) so I disabled a portion of the site's cache until I can fix.. no noticeable change in speed!
 
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zombie said:
Been just over a day and a half since I've been on SSD-1.

I didn't notice the transfer, to be frank. The only way I knew I was transferred was asking support, and checking error_log in public_html -- looks like I was only down for a few seconds, according to the MySQL error logs.

One thing I do notice, is when I reset all of the caches at once on the database-intensive site, is that it is a tiny bit quicker (than on VPS-2 with cache disabled).

Overall, no MAJOR increase (on an optimized site), but even a little bit is worth it in my book! This also means there's less work for me to do on the database-intensive sites that don't presently cache. :D


Edit: After the post above, I did some testing in the back-end of the site tonight. Vast majority of the time it would load in ...maybe 1ms whereas on VPS-2 it would take 2-3ms for the same intensive task (uncached).
Got it to hiccup & stall for quite a few seconds a few times doing similar tasks. Nothing I could replicate, so it's assumed to be network congestion.

Later on...
Front-end: Noticed a bug tonight (unrelated to SSD) so I disabled a portion of the site's cache until I can fix.. no noticeable change in speed!
Click to expand...
Thanks for share it!
So zombien, would you recommend buy SSD-VPS instead VPS?

Thanks!
 
Well, 24 CPU to me sound way faster than 8+ (8 probably being the standard, else it would be 9+ or 10+ right?)

I can't explain this in technical terms because I know little about hardware, all I can do is speak for the speed differences.
 
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