Yep.

You’ll find that with me, I often take things to an extreme level and I’m not satisfied with people doing things for me. Before I launched this website, I had no previous knowledge of how servers worked. I get curious, and I do things, kind of like a kid. I wanted to know what it was like to manage my own server, without having to pay the high costs associated with dedicated servers.

What have I been doing? I’ve been playing with VPS technology for quite some time now. Now that I have finally set everything up, and learned quite a bit, I would not recommend an unmanaged, no control panel VPS to the average user. Why? Well it’s really not that easy to setup if you don’t know what you’re doing. Especially if you have no Linux knowledge, it might seem downright impossible. I did have past Linux experience, but this did not excuse me from screwing up.

Still, I did not do everything manually. ISPConfig is helping me out with the Bind9 configuration files, FTP, website statistics, e-mail, SSL, etc. ISPConfig isn’t easy to setup in the first place if you’re not familiar with all of the programs it comes with, there is quite a bit of manual configuration that needs to be done *before* you compile ISPConfig. Also, try to not install other control panels before ISPConfig as this WILL cause you problems. Other control panels play with configuration files on all the host essential programs. What’s that mean? Well, when you go in and install ISPConfig after having a previous control panel, some configuration files are messed up, and the program will not work with ISPConfig. My e-mail was screwed up because of this.

Yesterday the site was basically down. Why?

Apache and MySQL seem to think you have unlimited resources, they allocate way more than what you actually need. This caused MySQL to crash, thus causing the database error you may or may not have seen.

If you have a low memory VPS, or any VPS for that matter, you probably need to go in and edit the apache2.conf. It’s not hard to find the values that need to be modified, google it. Next, you’ll want to configure MySQL as well to allocate less resources, it really doesn’t need that much. Again, just google this as well, there are plenty of articles about this. If you’re lazy and don’t know how to use google, here’s an article that basically shows what you need to modify for MySQL and Apache.

These modifications made my server go from crashing constantly, to having plenty of free memory. I don’t know what the default values are for, perhaps sites that are getting an unlimited amount of unique hits per day. I think this is  possibly why people complain about VPS performance being worse than shared – they have yet to properly configure everything.

There you have it. I own my host, I have full control to install whatever software I wish. Something I did not have on my shared host. I have a dedicated IP, I have my own name server. I have my own mail server. All of this for only about $60/year. Amazing, huh?

Of course for regular people I believe shared hosting is the best option Either that or get a managed VPS with a control panel.