Recommendation for Windows VPS Server provider

[MartCactus]

Hi,

We have a client already hosted with our usual hosting company who is looking to source another Windows VPS server with another host (for reasons of continuity - doesn't want both to fail at same time).

Has anyone recommendations for a host who can provide

- Windows 2008 VPS (just need windows web edition on it)

- good backup system (eg twice daily snapshots, easy to restore etc - hopefully won't need it, but have suffered catastrophic failures in the past)

- good support. We know what we're doing so we don't ask idiotic questions, but from experience its nice to be able to call up and/or get prompt response via ticket system if required (we have this with our current host). Generally when we report something its because there genuinely is a problem.

- good pricing (though good support is more important than price alone)

- nice chaps (always prefer dealing with nice people!)

Thanks

 

[MancunianCreative]

Any particular reason for a windows one?

 

[wardey]

Checkout jelly computers (google them they are based in Rochdale). They provide a good range of virtual servers including windows 2008 R2. I have visted the data centre in Rochdale and was very impressed.

 

[NuBlue]

I've never used them myself but http://www.csnewmedia.co.uk/ always had a good reputation and used to be very active on here. They do Windows VPS servers.

and apparently they are nice people too

 

[MartCactus]

Any particular reason for a windows one?

We do asp.net

 

[MancunianCreative]

asp.net works on Linux :|

 

[Optegris]

asp.net works on Linux :|

Yes and no

It's pretty tricky to get .NET running with full functionality on Linux, certainly the latest vesions. It is designed for a Windows platform in the same way as PHP is designed for Linux although it will run on Windows...

 

[MancunianCreative]

Yes and no

It's pretty tricky to get .NET running with full functionality on Linux, certainly the latest vesions. It is designed for a Windows platform in the same way as PHP is designed for Linux although it will run on Windows...

That's true.

I just have a total disdain for anything windows

 

[stugster]

www.serverlove.com - go on, have a bash

 

[Optegris]

That's true.

I just have a total disdain for anything windows

Meh. I use to feel the same about Linux until I took the time to actually understand it

 

[webhostuk]

Hi,

We have a client already hosted with our usual hosting company who is looking to source another Windows VPS server with another host (for reasons of continuity - doesn't want both to fail at same time).

Has anyone recommendations for a host who can provide

- Windows 2008 VPS (just need windows web edition on it)

- good backup system (eg twice daily snapshots, easy to restore etc - hopefully won't need it, but have suffered catastrophic failures in the past)

- good support. We know what we're doing so we don't ask idiotic questions, but from experience its nice to be able to call up and/or get prompt response via ticket system if required (we have this with our current host). Generally when we report something its because there genuinely is a problem.

- good pricing (though good support is more important than price alone)

- nice chaps (always prefer dealing with nice people!)

Thanks

We offer fully managed windows VPS you can take a look at our windows VPS packages at : http://www.webhost.uk.net/windowsvps.html

 

[Dominic Taylor]

Our managed virtual servers start at £34/month +VAT and include Windows Web 2k (or Linux / your choice of OS), management and daily backups

 

[MartCactus]

asp.net works on Linux :|

Hmm. Complicated?

ASP.net is designed for windows.

We've worked in classic asp (still do) and PHP, but .net blows them both out of the water for performance, not sure i'd want to play about with doing that on linux to save a few pennies.

 

[MartCactus]

Yes and no

It's pretty tricky to get .NET running with full functionality on Linux, certainly the latest vesions. It is designed for a Windows platform in the same way as PHP is designed for Linux although it will run on Windows...

Actually Windows 2008 runs PHP really well, see eg

http://blogs.technet.com/b/jorke/ar...mance-increases-with-php-on-windows-2008.aspx

Though don't see point of using PHP on Windows since ASP.net is so much faster.

 

[Optegris]

Oh I agree it runs well but a server OS should be chosen based on what is going to be run on it.

ASP/.NET - Windows, PHP - Linux...

 

[TechKing]

I will suggest to go with stable Windows VPS Provider mainly in UK ..

Windows 2008 VPS (just need windows web edition on it)

- good backup system (eg twice daily snapshots, easy to restore etc - hopefully won't need it, but have suffered catastrophic failures in the past)

- good support. We know what we're doing so we don't ask idiotic questions, but from experience its nice to be able to call up and/or get prompt response via ticket system if required (we have this with our current host). Generally when we report something its because there genuinely is a problem.

- good pricing (though good support is more important than price alone)

- nice chaps (always prefer dealing with nice people!)

I will refer hostdime vps (much better support and service)
http://www.hostdime.co.uk/web-hosting/vps/windows/
VPS starts with £30.00 monthly(managed).
or mnchost.com -->just send one mail at [email protected] .
VPS start with £26.00 monthly(managed) + .£75 Google adwords credit free.

 

[That Guy]

Another vote for Vidahost

Can't go wrong in my opinion, great hosting company to deal with!

Good Luck with your search.

 

[webgeek]

I have to run a lot of windoze apps and thus have linux boxes for website hosting and windoze boxes for a virtual desktop.

Having tried several, the burstnet.eu box is cheap and cheerful for some purposes (at 9.99 Pounds per month). For the heavy lifting windows environment, I got a meaty box from turnkey (where they have a 50% off offer on the webhostingtalk forums).

Both of the above have had great uptime, minimal complications, and just work.

 

[TotallySport]

we run asp.net on vidahost, no idea about there back up, not there yet, but will be soon

 

[Rudi]

Oh I agree it runs well but a server OS should be chosen based on what is going to be run on it.

ASP/.NET - Windows, PHP - Linux...

Ridiculous, I run exclusively Windows Servers for the past few years (apart from one) and PHP over FCGI/IIS7.5 with WinCache installed outperforms anything that Apache could ever do.

This argument is completely invalid.

 

[stugster]

Ridiculous, I run exclusively Windows Servers for the past few years (apart from one) and PHP over FCGI/IIS7.5 with WinCache installed outperforms anything that Apache could ever do.

You do realise the stupidity that just came from that sentence, yeh?

 

[Rudi]

You do realise the stupidity that just came from that sentence, yeh?

Stupidity how? You seriously think that Apache can outperform IIS 7.5 in most configurations? Me running exclusively Windows Servers are my own, I'm being forced to manage 1 *nix server for a client at the moment as it hosts a Perl application.

Please read my first sentence more like:

I run exclusively Windows Servers for the past few years (unfortunately have to manage 1 linux server which is painful)

 

[stugster]

Actually no. Again, you're being misguided by personal feelings in regards to the situation. I happen to be on the fence, because I don't actually know either way.

What I would like though, is for your sweeping statements in your argument to be backed up by something more than just opinion.

 

[stugster]

P.S. the stupidity was in reference to you running only Windows servers for the past few years (with exception of one) and yet claiming you know that Apache will always be outperformed. How can you know that if all you run is Windows?

 

[Rudi]

Fair enough, I ran 2 websites that both 1; Got HTTP Flooded / DoSed on a daily basis and 2; By default handled about 3000 dynamic req/min.

Without setting up a hardware firewall (I eventually did this with 3 rate limiting OpenBSD boxes in front of the main servers) the best way to deal with it was to configure the actual web serving infrastructure as best as possible, but it simply couldn't handle on the hardware that we had. As an experiment I had switched one of our servers over to WS2k3 to see if it did any better, it was more stable in that the whole machine wouldn't lock up from Kernel messages of TCP Denial of Service messages nor would IIS spin out of control trying to serve all of the requests like Apache would. However, it still couldn't handle the load. As WS2k8 was new at the time we as a company were obviously pretty reluctant to switch to such a new technology, however again, as a test I did so and the results were amazing. It didn't choke under pressure and kept serving as many requests as it could. Of course, some requests were dropped and some went unserved or threw up a 503 Service Unavailable, however the server remained stable! The load was reasonable as it could actually handle the network traffic that was incoming, unlike Linux.

This has just gotten better with IIS 7.5, I've never seen it cripple any of the servers and they're all running at pretty high load.

It's not so much a personal opinion as something that I've had to put to the test, I used to be a *nix guy and the infrastructure was RedHat / OpenBSD based for the most part, but when you're forced to actually put them to the test in a unique situation it's hard to look back.

I'm 100% certain that somebody will have a way where Apache does outperform IIS 7.5, however the amount of pressure I can put these servers under when serving PHP applications, and the amazing speed differences I have witnessed using WinCache (APC/ZO didn't come close the last time I used it) is great and I won't be looking back any time soon. That said, I do keep trying out new flavours of linux (CentOS 6.2 was most recent), but of course Apache is still the bottleneck. Nginx, on the other hand, well that's a beaut to configure and blazing fast for any static resources, but I'm sure you knew that already.

-----

With regards to your update on the stupidity side of things, I was once a *nix guy and know very much how to make it perform well, see above.

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EDIT: And just to make it a bit clearer if what I said above isn't - I can and do fully recognise that different people and different situations can completely work for one another, so whether it's linux or Windows Servers being ran they can both be configured to be efficient, but depending on the workload one is always going to be better than the other.

What I was responding to in this thread is how he said that PHP should only be ran on Linux, like it didn't perform well on Windows. That point is completely invalid.

Anyway.... To stop the thread hijacking now let's try not to respond too much as it's irrelevant to the discussion, I was just pointing something out!

 

[stugster]

Interesting that your experience actually looks like lack of experience in a linux environment.

Everything you've mentioned above clearly demonstrates your lack of ability to correctly configure a linux server for high availability and throughput.

Then you go on to say "I'm 100% certain that somebody will have a way where Apache does outperform IIS 7.5". Bl**dy hell, that's a massive change from "outperforms anything that Apache could ever do."

So which side is it? Can Apache out perform it, or can't it?

The fact you've not mentioned any of the popular methodologies of defending against high throughput during DDoS (tarpit for example) shows you've just made a personal opinion up, and haven't actually benchmarked the two scenarios in a proper environment under proper conditions.

You've further discredited yourself by comparing a corporate paid-for service like Windows 2008 with CentOS, a community solution based on a corporate paid-for service that's usually around a year behind the RHEL releases.

You also say that you experienced issues with kernel panic on linux. Why not just disable it?

You say you were once a nix guy and know how to make it perform well, except from your previous post, you've not outlined anything you've done to make it perform well.

P.S. I noticed you did mention RedHat in passing, but no reference to which version, yet you're happy to quote the latest IIS release from Microsoft.

 

[stugster]

Anyway.... To stop the thread hijacking now let's try not to respond too much as it's irrelevant to the discussion, I was just pointing something out!

Fair enough. Even if it was a point with no merit

I have no idea who you are. You might be the next Bill Gates or Linux Torvalds for all I know. But, when a massive claim is made that suggests one technology completely outperforms another, I'm only interested if the claims are substantiated with proven and reproducible research.

If you've just got an opinion on the matter, fine. Make sure you point out that in your experience, that's how things have come to light. But don't make a sweeping statement that can't be backed up with evidence.

 

[Rudi]

Once I get to the office I will drop you a PM with some hopefull reproducible-enough results for you. This thread isn't really the place for such a discussion.

 

[Optegris]

Ridiculous, I run exclusively Windows Servers for the past few years (apart from one) and PHP over FCGI/IIS7.5 with WinCache installed outperforms anything that Apache could ever do.

This argument is completely invalid.

Thanks for the insight but the world is made up of opinions, yours being one of them, doesn't make them right.

Also I would prefer to have discussions on here that don't involve sweeping generalisations and having posts labelled as false. There are plenty of forums for that, give WHT a try, I'm sure you will feel right at home

 

[Rudi]

Thanks for the insight but the world is made up of opinions, yours being one of them, doesn't make them right.

Also I would prefer to have discussions on here that don't involve sweeping generalisations and having posts labelled as false. There are plenty of forums for that, give WHT a try, I'm sure you will feel right at home

If we're still on this subject, why is it that you suggest Linux over Windows for PHP hosting?

EDIT: I'm just curious, but please PM me.

 

[Optegris]

I'm not about to get into an argument with you, you have your views and I have mine. As you already stated the thread was going OT, however I don't particularly enjoy being slated publicly or privately so I felt the need to respond.

I would suggest we end this discussion here regarding which platform is best in our own opinion as it's not relevant to the original question asked by the OP.

 

[ManWithBagOverHisHead]

Re the PHP on Windows - I can confirm that it flies!

We used to host our PHP apps on Linux, but one of our customers had a windows 2008 box due to running another app that required it, so we put the PHP on there. I couldn't believe the performance they got. We didn't have to do any tweaking at all... bog standard 2008 install, install PHP, install app. We've since moved all but one of our servers over to Windows 2008.

I was a asp.net fan (still am) but I put the performance on that down to the fact that it was compiled and that it allowed multithreading (which PHP doesn't last time I looked). asp.net is still significantly faster than PHP, but I've never seen a Linux/Apache combo run PHP anywhere near the speeds we see on IIS7.5 (never saw such speeds on IIS6, so must be something MS did with IIS7.5)

Also, haven't seen much difference using Perl... so must be that MS have optimized specifically for PHP.

In the end people will probably make up their own minds without trying both Linux and Windows, which is a shame.