Review: 2 Months with HostMySite VPS

After months of issues with HostMySite's shared hosting and issues related to their inability to not rekick my server 15 times a day I moved 2 of my sites to their lower end VPS hosting package. I looked long and hard for alternative solutions, but it was hard to compete with their prices and to be honest they have had the best customer service sales and support wise I've ever experienced with a hosting provider. The test sites include this blog and a new application that I will be doing a seperate press release on in the coming weeks. Mango Blog has it's own framework and my new venture is a decent size MachII ColdSpring application.

Considering HostMySite just rolls out images of only 3 seperate completly non customizable VPS package, I was completly suprised by how absolutly poor and pathetic the initial setup of my site was. My VPS has limited HD space and only 512 megs of memory. MSSQL, ColdFusion+IIS were setup as if they were running on seperate boxes with tons of memory. Simply starting up my blog site took so much memory that if something crashed, there wasn't enough left for either ColdFusion or IIS to even start back up.

I also suffered from major IIS stability issues; for some reason a secondary IIS site (the one for my new app) kept crashing. It would throw no errors and would partially work, but the root folder of my site would for some reason go to a different IIS site, which got me a 404 due to my blogs cflocation.

Last night was the first time in 2 months I've been completly happy with my VPS and some of it involved doing things that HostMySite wasn't too keen on.

Tune MSSQL memory usage
Tune ColdFusion JVM args
Disable mail server website (Google Hosts all of my company's mail services)
Disable SmartStats completly
Disable IIS Admin, Windows FTP and IIS www
Install Cerbus FTP (half the mem usage of iis admin and ftp)
Install Apache with a VERY trimmed down and tuned out config file

I know Apache on Windows has it's own issues and HMS tech support apparently has religious issues with it, but the new setup breaths so much better and as of now I currently have 178ish megs of free physically memory which is huge considering I only have 512 to begin with. Prior to 100% of all these changes, I was lucky to have 5-20 free megs...

So at the end of the day, after tutoring and HMS staying late after school I give them an adjusted grade of A- after their initial grade of a C. I plan on reaching out to them in the coming days to inform them how piss poor their default roll-out is, but I'm guessing nothing will be done any time soon... I know that a VPS is already geared towards the knowledgable, but with 15 minutes they could at least configuer IIS, MSSQL and CF8 JVM args to something that doesn't fall over and die.

Anyone else using HMS VPS? What have your experiences been?

Comments

ike wrote on 09/02/08 12:11 PM

Thanks for the warning. I've had very mixed feelings since I started on HMS... but then that's all because of the fact that they offered me free hosting because the framework is a community project and because it's their stock shared hosting account for CF (the small one). I'm not inclined to think (though I could be wrong) that they'd be willing to upgrade me to a larger plan, much less a VPS for free. And given that I can't seem to keep a job due to my autism, I can't really justify paying for it myself... So I'm incredibly grateful for the free help. At the same time I'm continually frustrated by the fact that a site that never takes more than a few seconds (i.e. under absolute worst case scenario, 5 seconds) to load on my notebook at home frequently produces timeouts and 500 errors on the shared server. I suspect of course that the shared server I'm on is somewhat overloaded, as is frequently the case with shared hosting in general. Most of the time the public site works okay, but I worry that the occasional error will give visitors the impression that the framework isn't stable when I don't believe that's the case. I've also not had problems running the DataFaucet ORM against MySQL on my notebook in the past (I don't have it installed currently), but had too many problems to use it on their server. Although that may have also been because of security measures, since the ORM uses the serviceFactory to get access to database connections and metadata. So for the time being I've overridden my ORM methods with flat cfquery calls because while I'd love to have a SQL Server database on there I can't really justify the expense while I'm not working. Still, I had been mulling over thoughts of paying to upgrade to their VPS. Thanks for the warning about their image. I may need this info if I ever find myself able to upgrade.

shimju wrote on 09/02/08 12:28 PM

Iam experiencing same issues with their VPS. Its time for them to upsize RAM to atleast 1 GB for basic VPS.

Stewart wrote on 09/04/08 2:19 PM

We have over 20 vps and dedicated servers hosted at HMS, before and definitely after the merger their support has been very sub-par. It takes many support calls, and you have to hold their hands all the way through the setup before anything gets accomplished, even simple firewall changes get screwed up, requiring several days to fix. Sometimes tickets can go for months without a resolution. They do have a good network though and once you get past the initial f'ups of their un-knowledgeable support staff then things work very well.

Doug wrote on 09/23/09 11:13 PM

Just out of curiosity, what jvm settings did you use for CF8 on your vps?

Russell Brown wrote on 09/23/09 11:22 PM

Current Arguments. They could still use tweaking, but my server has been running well enough to keep forgetting too...

java.args=-server -Xms50m -Xmx175m -Dsun.io.useCanonCaches=false -XX:MaxPermSize=100m -XX:+UseParallelGC

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