Forum Moderators: bakedjake
Some time ago I signed up for a Virtual Dedicated Server based on User Mode Linux. (My provider is <snip> and user mode linux info is at [user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net ]).
My basic idea was to have cheap root access, and that's what I got. It's been perfect for hosting several small, low-traffic sites for personal projects and friends; for running a mail server (qmail) that doesn't get too much load (also for just a few friends); and for having a test area for small sites I work on that require special configurations.
Then a friend and I put up a little thing called <snip> and it started to get popular. (It's a global poll about the US election.)
Unfortunately the server started crapping out pretty regularly. This wasn't a big surprise, though it was quite annoying that Postgres would die before the server itself would. It seemed that getting 10-30K hits per day was too much for the setup, but as it was only the equivalent of 64MB RAM and an equally small percentage of CPU, I wasn't shocked. It was a pain to have to log into the admin console and go through several extra steps to reboot the machine (the auto-reboot didn't work, maybe due to the load). But again, it seemed more or less realistic and we figured we'd move the site somewhere else over the next week or so.
Then a couple days ago it crashed *and* the admin console stopped working. At which point, of course, I contacted support. JVDS is not good at their support forums but when you need urgent support they get back to you very fast and in person.
After talking to the data center people, the JVDS guy said that the load on my virtual server was basically maxing out CPU on the box itself, and asked me politely to take down whatever was causing it. Fortunately that was already my plan.
Now I've got the site on a real box on DSL, and it's doing fine, thought it took several stressful hours to get it moved in a hurry.
So that's the cautionary tale. User mode Linux setups are great testbeds and so on, but if your site is starting to get a lot of traffic - particularly if it's a CGI/database-driven site (ours is, though very simple) - then you should plan to move to a real server ASAP and not wait, since the VDS is not going to handle the load in the same way a true dedicated server would.
In fact, if it's a site you even <i>want</i> to have a lot of traffic on, you should have a contingency plan in place before you put it up on a VDS.
Doing so will save you a lot of headache and others as well - I can only assume our site's traffic was making others on the box miserable.
[edited by: bakedjake at 1:54 am (utc) on Sep. 15, 2004]
[edit reason] urls snipped - no specifics please [/edit]
