Vultr for production server

B1g4

I have matched credits on Vultr from their current offer and I'm low on budget. I plan to start my forum site soon and plan on using my credits on Vultr, till i get increased traction and traffic on my site, when I'd move my site to a more popular VPS provider like Ramnode or Linode.

Are there limitations on Vultr that I need to be aware of? I plan to deploy initially to a 1GB droplet and as my no. of users increase, I plan to upgrade to a 2GB plan and use a 1GB droplet for a replicated mysql slave, to run cron jobs to query alert criteria matches and send email to those users.

My audience is in Asia and figured Vultr's Tokyo datacenter would provide decent latency.

Would like to hear your opinion (and experience) hosting a production site on Vultr.

perennate

Well, as long as you keep in mind that CPU is shared, and remember to keep backups of your website, there shouldn't be any issues.

B1g4

@perennate - Thanks.

Should I be bothered about DDoS protection? I read contradictory reports of Vultr providing DDoS protection for some of their DCs.

perennate

B1g4 said: Should I be bothered about DDoS protection? I read contradictory reports of Vultr providing DDoS protection for some of their DCs.

If you're low on budget you won't get DDoS protection in Asia.

udk

Very stable for me, not a second of downtime in the months I've been using them. I'd say go for it.

sonontse

Only thing I would caution you about is that for Tokyo the bandwidth is only 100GB on their lowest offering, unlike the US and EU location which provide 1000GB bandwidth. Overage might be a problem for you if your forum is popular. Other than that, Vultr support has been top notch and new features popup every other week. Their crew is also very responsive to your suggestions that you post on their forums.

hostnoob

If you're just starting a forum, you don't need 1GB RAM. 768MB will be more than enough

udk

Vultr + Cloudflare might alleviate the bandwidth problem. 100GB is still a decent amount though unless you're hosting loads of images.

redo

sonontse said: Vultr support has been top notch

It is strange that I cannot find how to open a ticket to them for support on vultr.com. Could you pleas e give me a hint?

perennate

recycleddomain said: It is strange that I cannot find how to open a ticket to them for support on vultr.com. Could you pleas e give me a hint?

You should be able to make a free account via Sign Up.

sonontse

@recycleddomain said:
It is strange that I cannot find how to open a ticket to them for support on vultr.com. Could you pleas e give me a hint?

Login to their panel. Click on Support on top. Then click on the blue 'Open Ticket' on the left side of the screen.

redo

It may be because I didn't pay anything yet ;-)

Giordano

I would not put anything you would consider Mission Critical on something that doesn't explicitly advertise DDoS protection IF that was a major concern of yours. Then again if you're just hosting a webserver you can pretty effectively keep that under wraps with Cloudflare.

Vultr specifically I believe started off advertising to some degree DDoS protection in their primary locations but, I can't seem to find that anymore and a Vultr employee stated they do not offer it (https://discuss.vultr.com/discussion/29/ddos-protection/p1)

It's a great provider however just clearing that up.

jvnadr

hostnoob said: If you're just starting a forum, you don't need 1GB RAM. 768MB will be more than enough

And again, it depends of the traffic. If you have some hundreds of viewers per day, then, even a 512MB would be enough or if you just have some dozens, if you give the db a fine tuning, even a 256 vps would do the job.

Also, if you use CF for the static content, then, you will keep the traffic and load lower. If it is just a forum, you will not see big differences if you chose location in Asia or in the US.

Give us some more details: what kind of forum will be? Discuss? Images and videos? File downloading? How many visitors do you expect in the next months?

praveen

vultr is stable and good, only limitation i had is that default smtp port is not enabled by default. You will need to fill a authorization form and provide your credit card details along with your Govt issued ID proof to get it enabled :{

linuxthefish

Setup cloudflare for web and mandrill for mail to get around the SMTP restriction.

B1g4

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone for your suggestions. I've added details of the application I'm planning to host on Vultr.

@jvnadr said:
Give us some more details: what kind of forum will be? Discuss? Images and videos? File downloading? How many visitors do you expect in the next months?

The forum will be discussion forum, with only images posted on the original topic. The users posting comments won't be able to attach any images, as in most typical forum sites. However, there'll be some images, especially product images of the discussion and the user avatars that need to be served using a CDN (Cloudfare as suggested here). Members won't get to download any files.

Expected userbase/traffic would be:

Month 1: 1K users
Month 2-3: 5K users
Month 3-6: 20K+ users

Daily new topics ( atleast 30-40). Average posts per topic: 10
Topic lifecycle on average: 7 days

I've built the site on Wordpress/bbPress to start with. The reason I'd like to get low-latency is that soon, I'll have a mobile app for it, which would require a low-latency for multiple REST API calls. If bbPress can't handle the load after a few months, I'll consider custom building the forum using Python, Ruby, NodeJs etc when the site starts to crawl.

@praveen
vultr is stable and good, only limitation i had is that default smtp port is not enabled by default.

Apparently Vultr is enabling SMTP by default these days according to their forum. I would need the SMTP feature as the forum allows members to subscribe to topic threads and receive email notifications.

Brad

@B1g4 said:
Apparently Vultr is enabling SMTP by default these days according to their forum. I would need the SMTP feature as the forum allows members to subscribe to topic threads and receive email notifications.

As suggested, you could use Mandrill (http://mandrill.com). It is a lot easier to setup and your first 12,000 emails of the month are free,

XNQ

I still believe RamNode is the best for production servers. I'm hosting a forum which receives just over 1million pageviews/month with around 500k unique visitors, on a 256mb box ($2/mo).
http://i.imgur.com/jfnf7B3.png

As long as you spend time tweaking MySQL and Nginx, you'll be fine.
And as you've based your site of Wordpress, don't install every other plugin you see.. it'll slow down real fast.

Just my 2c.

bookstack

@XNQ said:
I still believe RamNode is the best for production servers. I'm hosting a forum which receives just over 1million pageviews/month with around 500k unique visitors, on a 256mb box ($2/mo).
http://i.imgur.com/jfnf7B3.png

As long as you spend time tweaking MySQL and Nginx, you'll be fine.
And as you've based your site of Wordpress, don't install every other plugin you see.. it'll slow down real fast.

Just my 2c.

Are you using Debian min 32bit? You process memory footprint is significant smaller than mine, for example:

Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used    Program

100.0 KiB +  13.5 KiB = 113.5 KiB   collectdmon
152.0 KiB +  27.0 KiB = 179.0 KiB   fcgiwrap
212.0 KiB +  18.5 KiB = 230.5 KiB   polipo
216.0 KiB +  80.0 KiB = 296.0 KiB   upstart-socket-bridge
268.0 KiB + 101.0 KiB = 369.0 KiB   upstart-udev-bridge
344.0 KiB +  54.0 KiB = 398.0 KiB   cron
532.0 KiB +  34.0 KiB = 566.0 KiB   dbus-daemon
464.0 KiB + 340.5 KiB = 804.5 KiB   udevd (3)
680.0 KiB + 142.5 KiB = 822.5 KiB   sudo
884.0 KiB + 116.5 KiB =   1.0 MiB   gam_server
940.0 KiB +  82.0 KiB =   1.0 MiB   tmux
  1.0 MiB + 137.5 KiB =   1.2 MiB   init
  2.3 MiB + 239.5 KiB =   2.5 MiB   collectd
  1.2 MiB +   2.0 MiB =   3.2 MiB   sshd (3)
  4.8 MiB +   1.2 MiB =   6.0 MiB   zsh4 (2)
  6.5 MiB + 632.0 KiB =   7.1 MiB   fail2ban-server
  5.8 MiB +   1.8 MiB =   7.5 MiB   nginx (5)
 15.6 MiB +   1.1 MiB =  16.7 MiB   salt-minion
 54.2 MiB + 236.5 KiB =  54.4 MiB   mysqld
 14.9 MiB +  73.3 MiB =  88.2 MiB   uwsgi (3)
158.1 MiB +   5.2 MiB = 163.3 MiB   php5-fpm (7)
251.2 MiB +   4.3 MiB = 255.5 MiB   nodejs (2)
---------------------------------
                        611.3 MiB
=================================

XNQ

@bookstack said:

Yup. Debian 32bit minimal.

udk

@bookstack Which script did you use there?

hostnoob

@jvnadr said:
Give us some more details: what kind of forum will be? Discuss? Images and videos? File downloading? How many visitors do you expect in the next months?

Oh no doubt, I look after a forum which has had 1,600 people on at once and it ran fine on 512MB barely even reached 400)

768MB is the smallest plan Vultr do however

bookstack

@udk said:
bookstack Which script did you use there?

ps_mem.py

vonlulzweg

@bookstack said:
ps_mem.py

thanks. great script

jvnadr

@hostnoob Ah, I don't have vultr. I have DO and IWstack. DO has 512 minimum while prometeus has even smaller plans! All work fine for me

Master_Bo

@B1g4 said:
Apparently Vultr is enabling SMTP by default these days according to their forum. I would need the SMTP feature as the forum allows members to subscribe to topic threads and receive email notifications.

Never get involved into sending mass automated emails , as forum could, from Web server itself.

You were told about Mandrill. Other good options are PostMarkApp and Amazon SES. If you buy a Sendy license, the latter could also provide you with most cost-efficient mailing lists capability to date.

I could provide you details if you get interested. But never, NEVER send email in large quantities directly from your Web server. False spam complaints are easy to post, but can be quite hard to overcome for their target.