What are you planning to do when your Blog can’t fit shared hosting any more?

Most blogs start out with a cheap shared hosting plan promising unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains, unlimited disk space, unlimited databases, etc. As long as you have no or minimal traffic this is probably the best solution for you blog. Cheap Shared hosting on the other hand is NOT geared for blogs where traffic starts to go up and become serious. There are aspects of the “unlimited plans” that in fact are very limited and prevents you from ever making use of whatever may be advertised as unlimited. This is what you would expect as high quality individual service, dedicated server capacity etc. cost money and really can’t be given away for a few dollars monthly fee. The concept works because tons of websites sit on these hosting plans receiving only a few hits a day. Once you start utilizing server resources you don’t fit into the business model any more and will hit the limitations on CPU consumption, database query time etc. and then your blog is in trouble! Learn what we did at tripwire magazine and how we are doing after 6 month on a Hybrid VPS from WiredTree.

tripwire magazine started up with a hosting plan on Bluehost. This was a great solution for several month and I still believe today that is was the right way start get started. I still have my cheap Bluehost account and use it to have a unique copy of tripwire magazine for testing (fx. upgrades of WordPress, new plugins etc.). Once I started to get traffic on tripwire magazine I instantly started to have minor problems like account being temporary disabled due to to high consumption of CPU, too long response times on database queries etc. I didn’t take this serious enough and didn’t plan to move out but I should have. Suddenly one day my account had got some kind of filter preventing new requests to come through if the where requests being served. The result was devastating and I could not even log into WordPress because the front end was hammered by readers visiting the blog. After talking to Bluehost support I decided it was time to move on.

This is when I got even more frustrated. Choosing a hosting provider at this stage was thousand times more difficult than the first time where I only focused on price. This time I The requirements I had was:

• Premium and fast responding support with people understanding the technical platform
• Cpanel and all the nice tools I loved at Bluehost.
• At least 1500-2000GB bandwith per month (needed some space to grow and didn’t want huge extra bills in this area after a few month)
• Dedicated but managed (meaning that I wanted to have dedicated resources, as much control as possible, no interference from others but at the same time manages operations taking care of minor problems and keeping the server running stable)
• Simple way to scale as my needs could go up further
• Reasonable low cost (below $100 per month)

I started looking through the different forums and sites hosting reviews on hosting companies and I only got more and more confused. I simply had difficulties trusting anything and got the feeling that the hosting industry is like a mine field… So I got the idea of looking into what hosting my favorite blogs where using. I did this by checking their name servers on whois and this is how I found WiredTree and a lot of other interesting options. Going back to forums looking for feedback on Wiredtree I realized I had found something worth investigating further. Ratings where simply overall surprisingly positive.

WiredTree Managed VPS

WiredTree specialize in managed VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and managed dedicated servers. With the variety of plans that WiredTree offers I was comfortable knowing that as the needs of our site continue to increase, we will be able to easily upgrade or purchase additional resources rather than changing hosts. WiredTree’s prices start at just below $50 per month, which is extremely competitive when compared to similar plans from other hosting providers. What really convinced me was the Hybrid Servers because they as the only plan I could find at that time was dedicated and had enough horse power and bandwidth to meet my requirements. I ended up choosing the Hybrid 1 plan:

• Intel Dual Xeon Harpertown
• 1 Xeon CPU Core
• 1024MB Guaranteed Memory
• 80GB RAID-10 Disk Space
• 2000GB Premium Transfer
• Fully Managed
• ServerShield Server Hardening
• 24×7 Proactive Monitoring
• 24×7 Phone and Help Desk Support
• Proactive Security Updates
• Nightly Backups
• 8 Dedicated IP Addresses
• cPanel/WHM
• Fantastico and RVSkin Available
• Virtuozzo v4 Power Panel
• Free Migration Assistance

Moving to WiredTree

After signing up my server was delivered the next day. I transferred my blog in a few hours and as I use a separate DNS service for my domains and had lowered the TTL making the switch go fast (this is critical to remember because TTL normally is 24 hours…). I had to learn setting up a few things because WiredTree hosting is delivered with Virtuozzo admin access and I needed to assign one of my 8 IP-addresses to a hosting account. Support helped me and I got through this setup fast. This is seriously powerful because you almost can act as a hosting provider but most bloggers will not need it.

WiredTree Support

I have been very impressed with WiredTree for several reasons. What they really understand is to make me feel as a valued customer even though I’m still just a very small one. I have received regular personal messages following up on me and my experience with the service. I have had 5-8 support cases over the last 6 month (really in the first week or two) and I have never experienced that it took more than an hour before we where working on fixing stuff together. And once in the process I really felt being carried through by skilled technicians. I have to admit that support at Wired Tree simply is excellent. Also I never have experienced unplanned downtime in the 6 month I used them.

Features and flexibility

I found that WiredTree offer the tools I need and more. The VPS accounts run the latest release of CentOS Linux 5 and include full root access, cPanel/WHM, Virtuozzo Power Panel, and access to Grove. cPanel is a popular administration system used by many web hosting companies. Fantastico is available to easily and quickly install all of your favorite scripts and content management systems, such as WordPress. Grove is WiredTrees administration system where you can create support tickets, order hardware upgrades, access statistics on servers, setup DNS, access billings information etc.

Scaling up when your needs grow

With WiredTree you can seamlessly upgrade between VPS and Hybrid Dedicated plans, making them an excellent option for less intensive sites which are beginning to grow, and seasonal sites which require more or less resources at different times of the year. They have what they call A La Carte Upgrade Options where you can add more memory, bandwidth etc. seamlessly. I have not yet experienced any need to adding more juice to serve the growing number of visitors at tripwire magazine but having the option with out having to move between physical servers is a great feeling!

If you’re planning to move you blog to a high quality hosting solution with good options to support your future needs I would really recommend that you take a look at WiredTree.

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