NYCPHP Meetup

[Paul Houle]

Rob Marscher wrote:
>
> Is anyone here using virtual servers?  It seems to have some nice 
> benefits in terms of being able to easily move them between physical 
> boxes and scale them up to more ram/cpu.  However, I've heard that you 
> lose some performance and am trying to figure out when it's worth it.  
> I'm talking about virtual server's at the kernel level... like Xen.
>
    A great aid to scalability.

    My personal web sites are hosted on a "virtual private server" 
account where I get to have a lot of control over my Apache,  MySQL and 
PHP installation.  For a $20 a month I can host an unlimited number of 
virtual hosts.  I've got plenty of bandwidth and CPU -- but not so much 
RAM.  The system administrators have occasionally moved my virtual 
server to a different physical server.  They can do this in a few 
minutes and there's never a hitch.

    If my site gets more traffic,  I can contact Westhost and they could 
quickly move me to a better server,  with the dedicated resources I 
need.  I can quickly provision new servers to build a cluster,  a 
dedicated e-mail server,  or staging and development servers.  If my 
traffic drops,  I can move to a cheaper hosting plan.