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I’m looking for a managed VPS. Does anyone have experience with either a Media Temple Dedicated Virtual or Wired Tree Managed VPS

I found that Media Temple’s Grid Server service is unreliable and very slow but am hoping if I go with a dedicated virtual it will be a lot faster, more reliable and take more concurrent connections or over 1000 unique visitors a day to start with.

What’s your experience?

I’m running a site on MT’s Dedicated Virtual.  We had to leave shared services due to frequent mail server blacklist issues.  I’m generally pleased with the service.  Plesk is better for me than totally maintaining a CentOS webserver on my own, but Plesk has seriously pissed me off on more than a few occasions.    When there is a security issue or bug it can a really long time before Plesk fixes the problem (if ever ) and even longer before MT implements the update.  Plesk has a funny way of installing packages…. so if you want to update a package you often have to walk away from MT’s / Plesk’s updates and fully maintain the server yourself. 

You’d want to go in and do some tweaks to Plesk’s configuration for performance.  Many of the tweaks are outlined in MT’s KB.  Be sure to record all the tweaks you do so you can reapply them after a major Plesk update. 

Sounds like you’ve had the chance to deal with MT’s support…. so you probably know the pro’s and con’s of dealing with them.  They had some Datacenter issues ( in 2006 I think…. ) but thinks seemed to have stabilized lately.  We still keep a hot Westhost VPS backup server… but we could probably let that go now.
 
Our site performs well w/ ~1000 unique visitors /day.  I’m sure we could handle 10x the traffic no sweat.  I did run into memory issues on some cron processes we do and had to pay and extra $20/mo for an extra 128MB RAM above the “Base” 256MB.  I also pay another $20/mo for the snapshot backups.    Don’t budget for $50/mo w/ MT.

WiredTree sounds like a better deal on paper.  If I had it to do over again I’d probably try http://www.macminicolo.net/

I can’t say that I’d personally run on any hosting solution where the web, database, email, etc. servers all run on the same machine.  Is there a particular reason you are looking for VPS?  With that small amount of traffic, my first thought is EngineHosting’s load-balanced shared hosting would be more than sufficient.  Set it and forget it, as it were.

I just left behind a Media Temple (dv) Extreme after two years of use. I’m now running on Mosso.

On the upside, a MT (dv) gives you more control over the server, root access and downtime is rare. On the downside, it runs slower than Mosso and even serious customer service responses (e.g. your server hits the floor) can take 12-24 hours. Worse yet, it’s one thing to get customer service to respond, but it’s another for them to stay engaged in the conversation; they drop in and out.

Honestly, go with another VPS option. A (dv) is not worth the cost for what you get value-wise.

I can’t say that I’d personally run on any hosting solution where the web, database, email, etc. servers all run on the same machine.  Is there a particular reason you are looking for VPS?  With that small amount of traffic, my first thought is EngineHosting’s load-balanced shared hosting would be more than sufficient.  Set it and forget it, as it were.

I’ll second that emotion. I have some sites running on PairLite ($99 a year) that do up to 15,000 uniques a day; well within bandwidth and load parameters with nary a hiccup. Plenty of room for recent version of MySQL, PHP, SSH, sFTP, and other goodies. And, as it is with EngineHosting, set it and forget it. Host bells and whistles are highly overrated. Dependability, stability, security, flexibility… just like EE.

I think I can count out media temple dv now. Also they are a bit cheeky with what they say they will support. On the website it says

semi-managed

but when you talk to media temples sales they say

self-managed

- ie you get no support.

EngineHosting Load-Balanced Hosting looks ok but I wanted to get off a shared box because off how slow Media Temple shared hosting is but engine hosting could be way better. Also we are not sure if 100GB will be sufficient.

With EngineHosting if I need better performance and bandwidth going up in the plans goes up in dollars too quickly. If I need 600GB transfer EngineHosting is $320 and Wired Tree is $50.

If you want a good look at EngineHosting, I’d recommend emailing them some stats that your site currently uses.  Unique visitors, bandwidth (separate web and FTP if possible, as EH doesn’t nickel and dime for your own traffic), etc.  They should be able to tell you which plan would fit for your site in their environment.  The advantage of load-balanced shared hosting over any standard VPS system can not be understated.  If you jump from 1000 to 10,000,000 unique visitors a day, EngineHosting can immediately throw more servers on board to handle the traffic.  And you’d be hard pressed to find another host as experienced at serving the needs of php/mysql dynamic sites, much less ExpressionEngine.  Probably doesn’t remove the bias from my responses here, but I was loyal to EngineHosting long before I began my career with EllisLab.

Surely though If you go from 1000 to even 100,000 visitors a day you are going to hit your bandwidth limit.

Surely though If you go from 1000 to even 100,000 visitors a day you are going to hit your bandwidth limit.

I’d like to know what kind of marketing you’d be using to be able to go from 1,000 to 100,000 visitors a day. Put that in a jar and put me down to order a case.

Other factors enter into to the equation, too—number of hits per visitor, number of SQL queries per hit, number of pages, hits per page, etc.

I had a site that started to get close to the monthly bandwidth limit on an inexpensive host set up, and so I offloaded basic site images/graphics to Amazon S3. The bandwidth usage dropped by over half, and the number of hits dropped by 75%.

I had a site that started to get close to the monthly bandwidth limit on an inexpensive host set up, and so I offloaded basic site images/graphics to Amazon S3. The bandwidth usage dropped by over half, and the number of hits dropped by 75%.

Was this an EE site?

Was this an EE site?

Yes.

I’ve recently done the same thing with a few other sites, especially those on more inexpensive hosts with definite service limits (no one really believes you can get unlimited bandwidth for $4.99 a month, right?).

A web page can be served with dozens of “hits” per page request (not to mention the DB hits); the HTML file, the CSS file. favicon file, each graphic element, photos, javascripts, etc. Likewise, the number of hits to a site’s server can be reduced substantially with a little Amazon S3 thrown into the mix. For example, a single, modest sized EE page with three javascripts, two CSS files, and a dozen graphic elements can count for a couple dozen “hits.” Two dozen server “hits” can be reduced to a couple of hits, which improves performance. Effective EE caching can help out elsewhere.

Unless you’re dealing with your own multiple, load-balanced servers and essentially unlimited bandwidth, it pays to organize those elements accordingly.

Surely though If you go from 1000 to even 100,000 visitors a day you are going to hit your bandwidth limit.

That would be the case with any plan, whether they are measuring bandwidth, artificial “cpu points” or otherwise.  The question is: would you rather hit your bandwidth limit on a VPS and have a site that crawls or is inaccessible, or would you like to smoothly and seamlessly handle that traffic spike hoping that it leads to permanent growth you can sustain?  100,000 eyes getting their first impression of your site: how does it run?  You can’t beat properly configured load balancing for handling unpredicted or underestimated traffic events.

Surely though If you go from 1000 to even 100,000 visitors a day you are going to hit your bandwidth limit.

Planning for and managing the server side for a site that gets 10,000 visitors a day vs. a site that gets 100,000 visitors a day is the real issue.

Many sites would love to have even 10,000 visitors a day and many good shared hosts can handle that kind of load with no problem. However, when that 10,000-visitor-a-day site grows substantially, then the hardware scenario must change accordingly.

For sites in between, and prone to spikes in traffic, but not a consistent order of magnitude increase, a load balanced shared server is the way to go. The monthly cost can be nominal for normal traffic, yet there’s headroom to handle spikes and some growth. Once that growth exceeds certain levels, a change in hardware/bandwidth/etc. becomes imperative. It’s the nature of change.

To answer the original question, I like HostMySite they are solid and there support is tight, they get the job done.  I use them for a few various projects and their VPS seems faster then my beefy dedicated.  Then again I never had my high traffic site on one of their VPS machines.

The question is: would you rather hit your bandwidth limit on a VPS and have a site that crawls or is inaccessible, or would you like to smoothly and seamlessly handle that traffic spike

I am trying to understand this. How can a load balanced shared server outperform a managed VPS? Surely having dedicated resources like 250MB RAM is going to outperform a shared server. When you say “load balanced” – if I get a massive spike of traffic on a shared server am I going to be auto-magically allocated more than say that 250MB RAM for the ‘short’ period of high traffic? Do you get what ever resource is free on that server & doesn’t your site run slow if another site on the same server is getting hit hard?

Also say my concurrent users or hits are spread out and not hammering the server at once but data transfer is high wouldn’t it be sensible to go for a plan with a higher data transfer limit?