Althought im an Internet Marketer at heart, there is other things that create a good internet marketing strategy and one of those is webhosting. If you choose a shit or cheap webhost and you are driving traffic either via paid sources or natural sources and your webhost goes down, your potentially going to lose sales, this means your income is going to go down and if your married (unlike me) your wife will bash you up the side of the head. (Again, Thankfully im not married.)

So choosing a webhost/hosting environment is very important. As you probably would have read in my About Me Section I am a retired tech head. But still a techie at heart. As part of my technical passion, I manage all the linux/unix web servers which we host several of our business on. We have previously used a VPS on a cloud configuration environment and it has worked quite well, but there is little to no control we can have over the hardware configuration of the VPS’s hardware node.

We decided it would be more cost effective, time effective and resource effective to move 4-5 VPS’s to a dedicated server. Now I am still a very big believer in Virtual Servers as they make life, backups and catastrophes very easy to handle (i.e. if the hardware node goes down, you simply copy a backup of the VPS to another hardware node and power it on. Thats downtime of an hour or so rather than a few hours or even days.) so this has lead me to start to research the best possible Virtual Server software.

Back one step, so we bought a nice new, shinny dedicated server (with a second one of same specs to follow with DRBD and HeartBeat HA clustering) with 8Gb of DDR3 ECC ram, 3 x 250GB SATAII HDD’s (in mdadm software RAID5) and 2 x 2.0Ghz Xeon Quad Core CPU’s (This gives us 8 cores and 16Ghz of CPU power). I then installed VMWare Server (The free version) to see how the performace was, I build a Virtual Server and started it. It performed slower than our old VPS with our old hosts. I was appauled. I then did some googling and found out that VMWare just sucks.

I then started to look at Virtuozzo, OpenVZ and Xen. The first I installed was Xen and apart from around 20 hours of frustration initially with the anaconda installer which CentOS 5.4 uses to install the OS, I found out that I could create a VPS (Thanks to David from www.Stacklet.com for all your help. Massive Kudos) from the command line in under 2mins from one command using ALTRoot and his awesome script which I will keep nameless.

So after David solved around 20 hours of my work in under 1 hour, I now saw him as a god. I turned on the newly created VPS and saw that the host node was using 0.01 and 0.10 1min average using the “top” command. This was while the VPS node was re-compiling apache with some addons. The VPS node had a 1min load average of 1.56, which just astounded me that the host node had such little resource usage. This confirmed my already dominate suspicion that VMWare sucks and Xen was the visualization software we are going to use on our new VPS Host Node.

I have since found a really interesting article from Crucial an Aussie based hosting provider that sheads some really detailed light onto the OpenVZ vs Xen questions I had initially and I am still very glad I made the switch from VMWare. Here it is: http://www.crucial.com.au/blog/2009/11/12/xen-vs-openvz-which-is-better/