adrianchew
Tue 10th Sep '02, 2:42am
http://www.remarkablehosting.com
I went with the Private Server Advanced offering.
This is my first ever VPS experience... so some thoughts about Ensim based VPS. First of all, you get hit with a bunch of control panels... 4 CPs (Appliance, Reseller, Site, User) on the VPS and a 5th CP external to the VPS (to reboot the VPS) and Remarkable's DNSPro (allows you to Web manage DNS entries in their DNS servers).
Ensim's VPS technology seems to present you the "look/feel" of a dedicated server, but with notable exceptions - you CANNOT touch the kernel, and modifying/upgrading certain stuffs can cause problems. I chose to leave it as it is, not upgrade PHP/mySQL (although both should be possible). I can't get PHP Accelerator or Zend Optimizer to run on the Ensim PHP implementation, but my performance results with ApacheBench proved the VPS was better than my P3/800 Linux box at home even, performance-wise.
Took me a while to figure out how the sites/etc work... you go in at the Appliance CP to setup your site, then you use the Site CP to manage the site... SSH as a site admin and you are chrooted with very few tools, SSH in as the appliance admin and su to root, you can blow up the whole VPS if you want to. :D
Sub-domains requires a 'hack' sort of - I got the support to put it in but once I had settings, its easy to apply the RewriteRule for sub-domains. Note its not as flexible (eg. cgi-bin for sub-domains don't work)... or you can setup a sub-domain as a seperate site (note, use one or the other method only).
Remarkable has customizations to the Ensim CP that they added when I requested for DNSPro to be added - the customizations add an SSH web client, and Webalizer, in addition to the DNSPro link.
The SSH client will work for appliance admin login but not site admin login (you need SSH version 2 for site admin logins - PUTTY does it right if you set it up to use version 2). I had to create the webstats directory before Webalizer cron job ran right, and I had to fix the link in the customization menu to get to my webstats to display via the site admin CP screen. :p
Amazingly enough, the best place to read up about Ensim is probably the Rackshack support forum - hehe... that's where I sourced info when I got stuck. Cpanel was a lot kinder to me - but thankfully I had the necessary Linux experience to ease the move up.
Another thing - 128MB isn't going to cut it - you need 256MB to run anything but static hosting really... 128MB means you'll likely be swapping.
Overall - Remarkable gets a nice thumbs up - it isn't "perfection" but plenty enough for me to get an upgrade from shared hosting without shelling out $200-300/month. :cool:
I considered Rackshack dedicated for a while but some of the horror stories scared me away from them. :eek:
I went with the Private Server Advanced offering.
This is my first ever VPS experience... so some thoughts about Ensim based VPS. First of all, you get hit with a bunch of control panels... 4 CPs (Appliance, Reseller, Site, User) on the VPS and a 5th CP external to the VPS (to reboot the VPS) and Remarkable's DNSPro (allows you to Web manage DNS entries in their DNS servers).
Ensim's VPS technology seems to present you the "look/feel" of a dedicated server, but with notable exceptions - you CANNOT touch the kernel, and modifying/upgrading certain stuffs can cause problems. I chose to leave it as it is, not upgrade PHP/mySQL (although both should be possible). I can't get PHP Accelerator or Zend Optimizer to run on the Ensim PHP implementation, but my performance results with ApacheBench proved the VPS was better than my P3/800 Linux box at home even, performance-wise.
Took me a while to figure out how the sites/etc work... you go in at the Appliance CP to setup your site, then you use the Site CP to manage the site... SSH as a site admin and you are chrooted with very few tools, SSH in as the appliance admin and su to root, you can blow up the whole VPS if you want to. :D
Sub-domains requires a 'hack' sort of - I got the support to put it in but once I had settings, its easy to apply the RewriteRule for sub-domains. Note its not as flexible (eg. cgi-bin for sub-domains don't work)... or you can setup a sub-domain as a seperate site (note, use one or the other method only).
Remarkable has customizations to the Ensim CP that they added when I requested for DNSPro to be added - the customizations add an SSH web client, and Webalizer, in addition to the DNSPro link.
The SSH client will work for appliance admin login but not site admin login (you need SSH version 2 for site admin logins - PUTTY does it right if you set it up to use version 2). I had to create the webstats directory before Webalizer cron job ran right, and I had to fix the link in the customization menu to get to my webstats to display via the site admin CP screen. :p
Amazingly enough, the best place to read up about Ensim is probably the Rackshack support forum - hehe... that's where I sourced info when I got stuck. Cpanel was a lot kinder to me - but thankfully I had the necessary Linux experience to ease the move up.
Another thing - 128MB isn't going to cut it - you need 256MB to run anything but static hosting really... 128MB means you'll likely be swapping.
Overall - Remarkable gets a nice thumbs up - it isn't "perfection" but plenty enough for me to get an upgrade from shared hosting without shelling out $200-300/month. :cool:
I considered Rackshack dedicated for a while but some of the horror stories scared me away from them. :eek: