Cheap + Reliable Hosting for New Drupal User

Thank you for replying, Ivan. For what it's worth, I agree with nearly everything you said. Sustainable is still the best, most affordable green host I know of and it's clear that you're doing some things very well.

the last two incidents of SSH being turned off were February and June.

Ivan, the most recent incident -- the one that I mention above as a recent example -- was in July. The times in February and June are similar but separate events, and I wonder why your timeline is so different from mine. It doesn't fill me with a sense of confidence.

Drupal development and shell access go hand in hand, and saying "SSH isn't our main feature" is like saying that a hood release isn't a car's main feature. It would make more sense to provide better support for the customers that use it.

Is it really too difficult for your tech support guys to keep a log of which accounts previously had shell access and re-enable it afterwards? I checked just now and found that shell access has been disabled for two other accounts.

Ivan, as a disinterested third party (and potential customer) i’d have to say that i am not very impressed by your response. It was not a “public airing of a misunderstanding” as much as it was your failure to reliably provide a service you advertise. Whether or not shell access is your main feature is irrelevant. Either you offer the service or you don’t. If you do, customers have the right to expect that it will be (reliably) available to them.

I also found mildly offensive your implication (in the first paragraph) that the alleged “misunderstanding” was Christefano’s fault. I would have been impressed had you acknowledged having had technical problems, which presumably you have fixed, and had taken responsibility for the “misunderstanding.” You reiterated this implication in the third paragraph when you said: “it really hurt me to hear his perception that…” Sounds like a jilted woman in a relationship gone bad. You should have left out the commentary and simply stated that your help-desk does not use boilerplate answers. Better still, you should have taken it as constructive criticism, and seen it as an opportunity to improve your customer support, because if Christefano had this impression, others probably do too.

The old business maxim that “the customer is always right” is not only a code of conduct in responding to customers, it is also a credo for businesses to live by to improve the quality (and popularity) of their operations. Even when you firmly believe your customer is wrong, there is always something to learn (and an opportunity for improvement) when you look at your operation from your customer’s perspective. The smart businessman will eschew debating with his (or her) customers, instead concentrating on what caused the customer to feel the way he or she did. Right or wrong, your customer’s perception was formed for a reason.

Be all that as it may, as a Unix admin, i can see no technical reason why you should be having this problem with shell access. If i were one of your customers, and i kept losing shell access, i would be upset too. And the problem would probably be annoying enough i would think about taking my business elsewhere.

Which is not to say i don’t have an appreciation for the difficulties of offering shell access in a shared environment. Unfortunately, some people will abuse shell access. And then there are the weak password issues. I think if i were an IHP, the only way i would offer SSH is by turning off name/password challenge and only allow public-key pair authentication. At least that would solve some of the security issues.

Thanks for the comparisons. I hadn't heard of VPSLink before and their rates look reasonable.

If it's just for a few Drupal sites, I think that virtualizing Leopard Server is overkill. If the price is right, though... Do you know what Media Temple is charging?

We run OS X Server on the development server in our office (and it is a pleasure, as you say) but for Drupal sites we just use barebones VPS accounts from Rimu or Slicehost and then install Webmin and Virtualmin (these are comparable to cPanel and WHM, respectively). Anything "barebones" will take time to set up, but US$20 a month is hard to beat and the install script is a big time saver since it installs everything Drupal needs.

Upon further research, it seems the performance advantage of OpenVZ is not the whole story. While raw benchmarks put OpenVZ quite a bit faster than Xen, that could be secondary to other factors. It turns out OpenVZ VPS slices are often oversold, particularly in terms of RAM, whereas Xen cannot be. Xen also better isolates your slice from other slices on the server. What this means, in short, is that with OpenVZ other slices running on the same server can hog the resources and slow down your slice. While Xen may be intrinsically less efficient using the hardware resources, it delivers more consistent performance for your environment.

The other major difference is in memory management. Xen offers each slice their own private swap space (i.e. virtual memory). So if you exceed your slice’s RAM allotment, virtual memory kicks in. A little bit of VM is fine, but too much can quickly slow down a Xen slice to a crawl. On the other hand, an OpenVZ slice can borrow RAM from another slice (i.e. the burstable RAM) when it exceeds its guaranteed RAM allotment. But if it exceeds the burstable limit, OpenVZ starts killing off processes (somewhat indiscriminately), which can create instability in your slice. If several other slices are exceeding their guaranteed RAM allotments, this will impact the performance and stability of your slice.

So while Xen is less efficient in using hardware resources, it may prove the better choice for those renting VPS slices. OpenVZ is more like shared hosting, except that you get full root access and the ability to install your own software. Xen – with its greater isolation – is more like a dedicated server, albeit a slow one. It is a good bet that cheap OpenVZ (or Virtuozzo, the commercial version of OpenVZ) VPS’s are likely oversold, just like a cheap hosting account almost certainly is.

I think i’ll start out with a Xen based VPS because of the more isolated environment. It’s more like a dedicated server, which is what i’m after, but at a fraction of the cost. I want to feel isolated from my neighbors on the server box, and “in control of my own destiny.” And for Drupal sites, it may very well prove to be true that Xen is the better choice. YMMV.