[fshagan]

So, after a grueling experience at brand x with a shared reseller account, I verified that I probably need a VPS. MDD seems to have a reasonable deal, with the Basic VPS. Sure, you don't get 50GB of disk space and pay $6 a month, but I was looking at the memory as much as anything. And the fact that it is fully managed, set up as I like it, etc.

So I pulled the trigger this morning and my new Basic VPS is being provisioned today. I'm a veteran of shared reseller accounts, having done this since 2003, but this will be my first VPS. Any words of advice for a VPS newbie?

[Big Dan]

Howdy Hagan,

Having just downgraded from a VPS with another provider to a reseller account with MDD, my biggest piece of advice is don't access the VPS as root unless you have good reason to do so and know exactly what you're doing. Mike's pretty good about managing things. I assume the MDD team also manages the VPSes as they do the shared accounts so there should be no reason to poke around as root.

Welcome to MDD.

-Dan

[frankacter]

I think you'll be very happy with the VPS offering at MDD.

Dan is exactly right, treat it as a shared hosting from the perspective that you should mostly live in CPanel or FTP for the majority of anything you do. If you need to expand past that, Mike and team are amazing about the quality and speed of the support/service they provide.

Ask questions, however, as to how they solve the issue and you'll pick up tips and tricks over time to help you learn more.

Love to have you report back after a month or two to report on your progress and results.

[stocktrader]

If you are looking for higher performance but want hands-off, then why not choose semi-dedicated?

[fshagan]

Thanks for the comments!

I like to have control, at least that's what my wife tells me, but I can appreciate that the wrong move logged in as root can be a disaster. I've been careful with it, mainly sticking to WHM/Cpanel. It has nearly everything I need for day-to-day operations.

I did transfer all my accounts by making a complete Cpanel backup on the old server, having it FTP the files to an account on my new VPS, logging in as root and moving the backup file to /home, then restoring the account within WHM. It went really well, but without root access, I would have had to rely on Support to transfer them over (they would have, but I had some coordination with customers to take care of, so I liked doing it myself).

I'm a reseller with a small number of clients, and I was able to move them with a minimum of disruption. The semi-dedicated hosting didn't provide the tools I need to host the 30 sites I manage, with more on the way. If I ever jettison the hosting business, I'll put my personal sites on a VPS or something like the Semi-Dedicated.

So far support has been great here, and the VPS is handling the sites really well. None of my customers has complained, although one has some php scripts he needs to update because of "that function is deprecated" errors. I know I can turn off the error reporting, but after deprecation comes elimination, and I'd rather he do the upgrade now rather than waiting.

[Adam]

A VPS would not be good for me... I would probably ****** around with root "just out of curiosity" and mess everything up

[MikeDVB]

Adam, on 02 March 2011 - 04:57 PM, said:

A VPS would not be good for me... I would probably ****** around with root "just out of curiosity" and mess everything up

Just because it's available doesn't mean you should touch it

We've seen people do an OS reload on their VPS (which wipes all data out, and even warns as such) that got upset with us that their data was gone. Thankfully we were able to pull it out of the backup system.