By ortles on

Hello,

I need to build a new website. After reading the Drupal documentation, it looks I have to use some
features of Drupal 4.7, which needs:

PHP 5 or 4.x
MySql 3.23.17 or newer . MySQL 4 is also fin, with. LOCK TABLE available

Right?

Now, I want to build the site with an European company. I have read mostly good reviews of EuroVPS.
My questions are:

1) what do you think of EuroVPS, especially as far as Linux VPS are concerned? Would it be a good choice?

2) Are the distribution they provide OK for Drupal 4.7:

Centos, Fedora Core 1 or 2, Debian 3, Suse 9?

Which one do you recommend? I'd prefer Fedora, since is the one I'm most familiar with, but anything is OK, as long
as it makes DRUPAL 4.7 work as easy as possible...

Thanks in advance for any feedback,

O.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

gateone’s picture

gateone commented

I haven't yet tried EuroVPS nor did I ever hear of them before here in Europe. There is one little thing that discomforts me about them: on their website they state the are "The European Hosting Authority"... What does that mean? We have a deregulated open market here in Europe just like in the United States of America, so why do they call themselves an "Authority" like they were state governed (which they are not being a Dutch company)...

So this is one thing that bothers me about them - again: I have NO experience with them so maybe I could be wrong and they are fabulous guys.

As far as their offerings are concerned: there is nothing wrong with that. The only thing is: if you spend the money for a Virtual Private Server (and EuroVPS has some quite high prices for that, too), why not spend it on a true dedicated server instead of a virtualized instance of a server? Server virtualization might have developed into a very serious business by now and might technically be very advanced; still, it seems more comforting to me personally to know that the server I pay for is in fact a true piece of hardware and functioning like such!

Concerning the systems offered: I have not played yet with Centos (though I hear good of them), the same applies for Debian 3 (which certainly is a brilliant system!), I can however tell of my experiences with Fedora Core and Suse. Now they offer Fedora Core 1 and 2... taking into account that Fedora just realesed version 5 of their system, this looks a bit outdated really. Though: I can really recommend Fedora if you are trying to set up the server yourself including all services on it and administering those through a mere SSH shell (this but requires experienced Linux system administration knowledge). You might be better off with Suse 9 as this is usually bundled with an graphic administration panel (usually Plesk around here).

Still, I would recommend using either 1&1 (wich you might now from the U.S.), or Germany based HostEurope or Strato and chose a dedicated server hosting with Suse and Plesk (if you are not sooo Linux system administration experienced) and you will be best off!

1&1 by the way is market leader here in Europe. Their dedicated servers are very good quality and are hosted centrally in Germany. They really offer the best price-performance ratio.

Try going for Suse/Plesk as system and system administration tool, I guess you are best off with that combo .

Steve.

ortles’s picture

ortles commented

Thanks for your comment. I am looking for a 100% European provider for the reasons explained in my other answer (which may be summed as "making a statement").

With respect the providers you mentioned:

nothing against HostEurope and Strato, but they have no English pages I can read to evaluate their business.
Sorry, I forgot to mention I can only read Italian and English...
1and1: isn't it just a subsidiary of an USA company?

About the distribution:

I have no problem to use ssh or the command line. I have been working daily on Linux in that way for years.
I run fedora at home because at work I *have* to use some proprietary SW which are only certified on
Red Hat Enterprise, so Fedora looks more familiar. However, I'm not a distro fanatic. But:

* I have found I have to use some features only available in Drupal 4.7 (which may have reached 1.0 the day I'll actually start building some sites).
* Yes, I have no problem to work at the prompt and I will, but I want to spend that time to build extra scripts and stuff which I'll need on those sites, not the Drupal infrastructure.

So I will just go with whatever distribution makes installing that version and its PHP/MySql dependencies as quick and painless as possible. What would that distro be?

Thanks again,

O.

gateone’s picture

gateone commented

Hi, just a quick comment on 1&1:

this is originally a German company that expanded globally. Their original name here in Germany was "Pureserver" (the old domain pureserver.de still works and brings you on the German 1&1 site), a company run by "Schlund & Partner". Over time, the got bigger and bigger, and eventually the then owner Schlund & Partner spilt its business into a "do it yourself" type of hosting company which got known as 1&1 and a "full service hoster" which kept the name "Schlund & Partner".

After a while, all these brands got "a roof", which was called "United Internet". Its major brands today are AdLINK, GMX, 1&1, Schlund + Partner, Sedo, twenty4help and Alturo.

In Germany 1&1 is a major competitor also in broadband DSL, in fact, 1&1 is number two after Deutsche Telekom (which you might now in the U.S. too by their Mobile Phone subsiduary "T-Mobile".

I understand that you might be a bit lost as the providers I stated are all German language only. The reason for recommending them still is that hosting from Germany is a) a strategically central location throughout Europe, and b) the hosting market it most dense in Germany with the most advanced product offerings.

Basically this also has as a result that among the big players 1&1, Strato and HostEurope, there is literally no big difference, just slight difference in details.

Generally however, I'd like to point out that hosting in Germany could also be "done" by hosting with major hosters in the U.S. as the German and the U.S. Internet are tightly linked by several direct large scale connections and that in terms of speed of packet response you will not find much difference if you are hosting with 1&1 and accessing from within Europe, or with U.S. based MediaTemple (which I can also highly recommend) and accessing from within Europe.

The only reason for hosting in Europe would be ethical and or locally inspired reasons - "soft factors" - or if you plan on doing a lot of video streaming and need fast responses, in which case you could still benefit from an edge server service like Akamai...

For the distro that is most painless... well, this is also a bit personal tastes here. SuSE in combination with Plesk will propably get you running and up the fastest, also with Plesk you'll get a comfy and secure user interface to administer your server.

If you are a purist and want to start from scratch, I can strongly recommend Fedora Core (ideally version 4 or 5, although FC3 will also do the work).

chrisd’s picture

chrisd commented

For me, NeoTrace puts this provider in Athens, Greece ? Unless their IP location info is out of date, they are in Athens.
Location: ATHINAI (38.017N, 23.833E)

The last host/server providers are:
17-telia.net
18-http://www.attikh.net Could be a reseller of telia.net or collocates with telia.net ?
19-EUROVPS.COM Could be a reseller of attikh.net or collocates with attikh.net?

Not sure you would gain that much versus US host, if hosting in Greece from Sweden.

Also EUROVPS does Adult Hosting, this is not good. Some potential reasons:
- Dirty IPs: Their IPs might be (are most likely) on many black lists (email, search engines, major ISPs/Countries, child control software...etc...). This could impact your site promotion, accessibility and reputation.

- porn sites rely mostly on a lot of cheap bandwidth (quantity versus quality). This is could impact your site performance.

- Hosting companies advertising porn are rare, they might have lots of porn clients...making the 2 previous issues real serious problems.

Unless you are doing porn (and even then), I would stay away from a company that appear heavy in porn and IRC. "Dirty Ips" is a real issue nowadays.

Peace,
Chris
Tech. articles with a WAMP+IIS+Drupal focus

Take a break: Guide to France

ortles’s picture

ortles commented

Not sure you would gain that much versus US host, if hosting in Greece from Sweden.

It is not a technical reason. I am looking for a 100% EU-only company, with an EU data-center, for
the reasons explained here:
http://drupal.org/node/46707#comment-90072

(from my initial comment to my second one)

Also EUROVPS does Adult Hosting, this is not good. Some potential reasons:
- Dirty IPs: Their IPs might be (are most likely) on many black lists...
- porn sites rely mostly on a lot of cheap bandwidth (quantity versus quality). This is could impact your site performance.

Honestly, in other forums I have found only positive comments on EuroVPS performances and services.
The first reason, however, could be a serious problem. Some of the sites I want to build are about
parenting and schools, so their reputation could be impacted by neighbour porn websites (whose
webmasters may say the same about me, of course :-) ...).

Thanks for remembering this side of the problem to me. OK, so what is a good Drupal 4.7 friendly, 100% EU
VPS provider with an English website?

Thanks
O.

willmoy’s picture

willmoy commented

www.bytemark.co.uk/r/debian
(note: link includes referer details, so that bytemark donate money to the Debian project if people sign up, as detailed at http://www.bytemark.co.uk/hosting/prices/referral.html).

I am running several drupal sites off my VPS there, I find their service excellent, because you have real control over your VPS (you can wipe the whole thing and replace the disk image with a distro of your choice through a menu system if you screw up, for example) and because they have some really useful freebies that other companies would charge extra for (decent, separate, backup space; a monitoring system that can send emails or texts based on tests of your choice e.g. to warn you if your site goes down or is defaced).

Their prices are good, their service reliable and they have an honest and straightforward relationship with their customers, not that I have needed to contact them very much. It's a UK company and my server is based in the UK, although you can opt for a US-based server if you want.

ortles’s picture

ortles commented

Thanks. Very interesting! I'm printing out their offers right now. Just a couple of questions:

is the Debian version they run OK with Drupal 4.7? Or, is there a specific "drupal 4.7 on debian install guide"?

what about adult hosting? Do they have the same "issue" as EuroVPS, see message above?

Thanks again,

O.

willmoy’s picture

willmoy commented

Their Debian is the latest stable, i.e. Sarge, but they also do various other linuxes, i think.

AFAIK, they don't host adult stuff, but ask them if you want to be sure.

chrisd’s picture

chrisd commented

Not sure if your site will target the US market. If it does, the following could be an issue.

For me in Denver Colorado, Bytemark is at 26 hops (your site would be at 27+ hops) that's a lot.
EuroVPS was "only" at 20 hops (your site would be at 21+ hops).

As a reference http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ is 19 hops for me.

Cheers,
Chris
Tech. articles with a WAMP+IIS+Drupal focus

Take a break: Guide to France

EuroVPS’s picture

EuroVPS commented

Gentlemen:

I found this thread via a Google search, and thought it appropriate to respond to some of the points made, as it was interesting to us to see your discussions.

>>>>The only thing is: if you spend the money for a Virtual Private Server (and EuroVPS has some quite high prices for that, too), why not spend it on a true dedicated server instead of a virtualized instance of a server?

Our VPS servers are typically provisioned 10 to a box, on IBM xSeries 365, 366, and Dell PowerEdge 2850 & 6850 machines. Take a look at the pricing on this equipment, and compare the daily backups, full support, and higher performance of our VPS offerings with a low budget AMD or Intel P4 server typically priced at 110.00 EUR.

>> Centos (though I hear good of them),

CentOS is a 100% identical clone of RedHat Enterprise Linux AS. All RPM's work vice versa between RHEL and CentOS. The only difference end users experience is savings of 349 EUR per year for licensing fees due to RedHat Software.

>> You might be better off with Suse 9 as this is usually bundled with an graphic administration panel (usually Plesk around here).

Any RedHat, (CentOS) or Suse server can be bundled with Plesk.

>>> The last host/server providers are:
17-telia.net
18-http://www.attikh.net Could be a reseller of telia.net or collocates with telia.net ?
19-EUROVPS.COM Could be a reseller of attikh.net or collocates with attikh.net?

We are ATTIKH GROUP LLC. We have our equipment in 2 private cages, one in SBP and one in ESY datacenters in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We are not resellers of any provider, nor is EuroVPS a 'reseller'.

>>> Also EUROVPS does Adult Hosting, this is not good. Some potential reasons:
- Dirty IPs: Their IPs might be (are most likely) on many black lists (email, search engines, major ISPs/Countries, child control software...etc...). This could impact your site promotion, accessibility and reputation.

- porn sites rely mostly on a lot of cheap bandwidth (quantity versus quality). This is could impact your site performance.

- Hosting companies advertising porn are rare, they might have lots of porn clients...making the 2 previous issues real serious problems.

Unless you are doing porn (and even then), I would stay away from a company that appear heavy in porn and IRC. "Dirty Ips" is a
>>>>real issue nowadays.

Agreed 100.00%. This is why EuroVPS provides adult hosting on separate hardware, and completely different IP space. It is impossible for you to receive 'dirty IP's' and speculating as such is wrong on many counts. I believe it will be difficult to find a dedicated provider in The Netherlands, which does not allow adult content.

>>> Unless you are doing porn (and even then), I would stay away from a company that appear heavy in porn and IRC. "Dirty Ips" is a real issue nowadays

Again, contact all the colo and dedicated providers in The Netherlands, I don't know of any that do not host adult content.

It was great reading your comments, although I hope I clarified some key points here.

Regards,
VL/EuroVPS
Attikh Group LLC

-----------------------------------------------------------
EuroVPS: HSPcomplete Virtuozzo Provider
Providing Plesk, HSPcomplete, DirectAdmin, and cPanel Servers / VPS & Dedicated
IBM xSeries Powered NL Virtuozzo VPS's & Dedicated http://www.eurovps.com

gateone’s picture

gateone commented

Hi EuroVPS,

now, this is the very first time I see that a company - especially a hosting company - participates in a conversation like this.

I think, corporations and businesses like Adobe and Microsoft, but also 1&1 / United Internet, Tiscali, AT&T, etc., you name them, as well as anybody doing business today should

a) follow discussions on their products, services and ultimately, their true perception "out there", and
b) should participate in the conversation like you did.

This shows a great will and dedication to UNDERSTAND the customer. As you wrote, and this is a good example to demonstrate, certainly any modern Linux system could run Plesk, and if it is a RPM based system, this is especially true. The reason I favoured the SuSE / Plesk combo in this threat was simply that this is the most commonplace you'll find bundled and offered by web hosters.

Thanks also for the info on CentOS! As I am a big fan of Fedora Core, I have never really looked so much into it's "big brother", RedHat Linux (or alternatives and derivates from it). My only "sneak look" around the sholder was Ubuntu Linux, which I also think is a brilliant distro.

Now that I have someone who might be able to teach us a bit on Virtuozzo, a virtualization system for Linux Servers from the makers of Plesk, how does a Virtual Private Server compare to a truely Dedicated Server? What are the performance considerations in choosing a virtualized server over a true and honest real hardware? Where should you go for VPS, and where should you better choose Dedicated?

At least to me, these seem a little hard to really compare as long as I haven't yet tried out a Virtual Private Server myself...

Steve