VPS for LAMP / Wordpress in US ?

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_alex

Active Member
Jan 28, 2016
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Bavaria / Germany
Hi,
for a Project targeting mainly US i'm looking for a reliable, fast and reasonable priced VPS to serve the US market.

Should be located somewhere in the middle, to keep rtt over the country balanced.
Guess i'd prefer KVM with 4 cores, min. 4Gb RAM (more is better) and min 80Gb on SSD.
Dedicated IPv4 is a must.
Looking for full root access, plain Debian minimal with no fancy control-panel.
Will do own backups, but would prefer additional backups by the host.
A real plus would be DNS for one domain also served from US.

Definitely not looking for the cheapest offer, i need it to be reliable in the first place.

Before doing research i thought someone here might either have a recommendation or even offer.

Thanks,
Alex
 

Joel

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Jan 30, 2015
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Sounds like Digital Ocean or Linode would be good outfits to consider. Both offer what you seek along with upgrade paths that are at most a reboot away.
 
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_alex

Active Member
Jan 28, 2016
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Bavaria / Germany
Thanks, will check their plans. Even if i'd maybe prefer a smaller company with similar offers.
We offer exactly this services from our own Colocation in Germany, and *really* believe we can offer more personal support/customisation options and a better understanding of our customer's needs than the bigger hosts ;)
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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I have been presently surprised at the quality of my digital ocean droplet (had at least 1 since when they started)

Probably not the highest quality choice but could use a couple to build HA maybe.
 

_alex

Active Member
Jan 28, 2016
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With digital ocean i'm a bit surprised that the locations are either east or westcoast and nothing in the middle. Don't know how much of an advance it would be to serve from a more central place like let's say Houston or Chicago ?

Building ha would be interesting, especially with an anycast dns that could resolve to the closest location. but might introduce way too much complexity into this. (wordpress also has woocommerce, so also databases would have a strong need to be in Sync, and so on ...)
 

Blinky 42

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Aug 6, 2015
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With digital ocean i'm a bit surprised that the locations are either east or westcoast and nothing in the middle. Don't know how much of an advance it would be to serve from a more central place like let's say Houston or Chicago ?
From a 10k foot view - there are not as many sites in the central USA as it isn't as important from a peering perspective as the more generic East and West coast. Power costs, overall demand and population density also contribute a lot to the placement of major faculties.

If you are trying something latency sensitive, then you will want to target providers that peer well with all the networks your end users will be on. That criteria alone is going to knock out the super cheap providers. If your end-users are in a specific market or markets, then it may be helpful to spin up sites in each, but the ongoing cost of that solution isn't trivial and should be compared with the cost of a well-connected provider.

I currently use DigitalOcean, AWS and Azure and have used GCE and Linode for virtual servers around the North America, Asia and EU. None are perfect, all are similar on pricing for something basic until you can tightly quantify your resource usage.

As an example for how peering and routing can matter more than location - From my home connection on Comcast (outside of Philladelphia), my servers in in London, Boston, Houston, Los Angeles and Toronto all have similar ping times even though the distance from home is thousands of miles different. From my well-connected colo servers in Philly the times are roughly linear with the physical distance between sites.

The services are pretty inexpensive, or even have free trials. It would be good to try out each and see what jumps out at you are good or horrid.

Now - if you are trying to build a VPS solution on top of an existing provider, that is a far more complex discussion ;)
 

_alex

Active Member
Jan 28, 2016
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Bavaria / Germany
well, i know about peering/proper routing being at least as important as physical distance. carefully selected our local location with this in mind.

basically, i want to find a host that serves users in us from a single location/vps. rtt to europe/asia doesn't matter. This brought me to the conclusion that both east and west can not be the right place. guess its ca. 80ms + ,possible routing madness' coast-to-coast ...

With routing/peerings, exchanges and relevant last-mile providers in us i have no idea, but would guess a site that directly peers with HE, Verizon or at+t or some of them plus two or three additional Big-Carriers and the usual exchanges and smaller networks shouldn't perform badly. Any ideas what carriers to look at an ASN welcome ;)

Don't think i'll have the time on this project to do a lot of measurements from different probes, what is difficult anyway. So, guess i'll give Linode from a Central dc a first try.
 

_alex

Active Member
Jan 28, 2016
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Bavaria / Germany
Have a Linode running now from Dallas, looks good so far, they run KVM on E5-2680v3.
Couldn't resist to run fio - get 8-15k iops, not very stable over runtime but with somehow reasonable latencies.
Definitely good enough to run wordpress.

Absolutely love this button in the DNS Manager:
(DNS is obviously AnyCast via Cloudflare - what is nice, too)

 
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