The "Bad Neighbor" Effect is Real
It’s 2:00 AM. Your Nagios alerts are firing. Your client’s e-commerce store—running Magento or a heavy osCommerce installation—is timing out. You check the logs. Nothing. The traffic is normal. The code hasn't changed.
So, what happened?
Someone else on your physical server just launched a spam campaign or a poorly coded PHP script that is devouring the CPU. This is the reality of shared hosting. You are fighting for resources in a chroot jail with hundreds of other users, and the operating system’s scheduler can only do so much. If you are serious about uptime, you cannot rely on the charity of strangers residing on the same hard drive platter.
Understanding the Architecture: OpenVZ vs. Xen
Not all upgrades are created equal. When you move from shared hosting, you usually land on a Virtual Private Server (VPS). But in 2010, the virtualization technology matters immensely.
Many budget providers use OpenVZ. It creates containers on a shared Linux kernel. It’s efficient for them, but dangerous for you. If the host kernel crashes, everyone goes down. Worse, resources are often "burst" resources. You might think you have 512MB of RAM, but it’s borrowed.
At CoolVDS, we strictly use Xen paravirtualization.
Xen provides true isolation. You get your own kernel. You get dedicated RAM that cannot be stolen by a neighbor. When we allocate a slice of our RAID-10 SAS arrays to you, that I/O throughput is yours.
The War Story: The MySQL Bottle Neck
I recently migrated a client from a popular "unlimited" shared host to a CoolVDS Xen node. Their site was suffering from the dreaded MySQL server has gone away error during peak hours.
On the shared host, we had no access to my.cnf. We were stuck with the host's generic settings, optimized for density, not performance. The key_buffer was tiny.
Once we had root access on the VPS, we optimized MySQL 5.1 specifically for their workload:
[mysqld]
# Optimized for 2GB RAM VPS
key_buffer_size = 256M
query_cache_size = 64M
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 512M
table_open_cache = 1024The result? Page load times dropped from 4.5 seconds to 0.8 seconds. Sales conversions increased immediately. You cannot achieve this tuning without root access.
Latency and Law: Why Norway Matters
If your customers are in Oslo, Bergen, or Trondheim, hosting in Texas is a mistake. The speed of light is a hard limit. A packet round-trip (RTT) across the Atlantic takes ~120ms. Hosting locally in Oslo, peered directly at NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange), drops that to under 10ms.
Furthermore, we have the Personopplysningsloven (Personal Data Act) to consider. While Safe Harbor exists for US transfers, local data storage simplifies compliance with the Datatilsynet requirements. Keeping your customer data on Norwegian soil isn't just about speed; it's about risk management.
Pro Tip: Usepingandtracerouteto verify your provider's network topology. If your traffic routes through London to get from Oslo to Stavanger, you need a better provider. CoolVDS routes stay local.
The Security Advantage
On a shared host, one compromised WordPress install can sometimes threaten the whole directory structure if permissions aren't locked down tight (777 is not a solution, folks). On a VPS, you configure your own iptables firewall.
You can—and should—implement aggressive rules to block SSH brute force attacks, something you can't do on a managed shared cPanel account:
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 -j DROPConclusion: Take the Control Back
Shared hosting is a sandbox. It’s fine for a personal blog or a test site. But if you are running a business in 2010, you need deterministic performance. You need to know that 512MB of RAM is actually 512MB of RAM.
Don't let low I/O kill your SEO rankings. Deploy a test Xen instance on CoolVDS today. We offer high-speed SAS storage, direct NIX peering, and the root access you deserve.