Criteria for Selecting a Good VPS Web Hosting Provider (Part II)
[Continued from previous page » Criteria for Selecting a Good VPS Web Hosting Provider - Part I]
• NIGHTLY BACKUPS: I was unwilling to sacrifice this feature. Some hosts (like Lunarpages) charge extra for "Additional Backup Space" .. at the offensive rate of » $20/month for 10 gigs (not including a $25 set-up fee).
Lunarpages gives you 1-GB of back-up space as a standard feature. Tell me: what good is 1 measly GB when their VPS accounts come with 20 gigs of disk space?
Moreover, they charge an extra $10/month for 24/7 monitoring. (I hate being nickel-n-dimed.) As you might imagine, our last few months with Lunarpages left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
• EXTRA IP ADDRESSES: While not something I need right away, WiredTree's standard 4 IP addresses tells me they aren't cheap or skimpy. No nickel-n-diming here.
• RAID-10. To be honest, I would've preferred a server with low-latency SCSI drives, but their SATA drives will work okay.
RAID-10 = RAID-1 (which provides redundancy for data security) + RAID-0 (which provides striping for improved data transfer rates).
VPS Web Servers with SATA-based RAID-10 Disk Storage
Lack of a SCSI-based storage system was my only disappointment with the hosting package offered by WiredTree .. cuz I know firsthand what a difference (!) SCSI drives can make (in terms of responsiveness).
RAID-0 improves sustained transfer rates (STRs), but does nothing to improve seek/access times, which is what servers need most .. cuz the read/write heads (found on hard drives) are continually jumping around, searching for, locating and retrieving files stored on different parts of the disk, as visitors to the sites hosted on your hardware node continue to request web pages and other files.
Rarely will a server need to sustain a long file transfer from disk storage. Shuttling big files, such as audio or video, is really where RAID-0 shines. HTML, CSS and Javascript files however, tend to be small (usually less than 25-KB). Heck, even web graphics are usually small (heavily-compressed) files.
The page you're reading now, for example, is 15-KB. So Web servers rarely utilize the benefits of by RAID-0 (known as "striping") to its full potential. Files smaller than 16-KB are normally not striped at all (depending on the server's RAID configuration settings).
Also consider that SATA drives are much less expensive than SCSI drives. Likewise RAID controllers tend to cost less than SCSI controllers. This is why you see so many (non-enterprise) web servers configured with SATA drives, even tho SCSI drives (with their blazing-fast seek/access times) perform better in a server environment.
If your server is outfitted with an SATA disk-storage subsystem, RAID-10 is as good as it gets. You get both redundancy + speed*.
[* Again, the term "speed" used here refers to improved transfer rates, not seek/access times, which is the time it takes for the read/write heads to locate the data, once the command is given/received. Once located, the data-transfer can begin, which is where STRs come in.]
On the next page, we'll continue our discussion of factors that affect the decision of which VPS web hosting provider to choose by comparing the two major Control Panels » cPanel vs Plesk.