I've gave UNIXy ® | Fully Managed Dedicated Servers | Fully Managed VPS Hosting a try a few months ago based on a recommendation in another thread here, and have not had a single serious issue. Support is fast as fuck and the owner/techs KNOW wtf they're doing. (search WHT and see) If it stays as is, they have a customer for life.
Since When Did Liquidweb Go To Shit?
- Thread starter matt3
- Start date
@matt3
The Smart servers thing of Liquidweb is a big loss.
A pure VPS plan, not smart crap, is cheaper and scale better. Here in Europe, Leaseweb and Hetzner have VPS for 10 euros / month.
Anyway, glad u solved your prob.
@dangregory
Centos 4 does not have to do with SEO.
As far for the future, you need a dedicated, a powerfull one. I recommend u just use VPS as they are more secure and flexible and at later times, when u r financially stable, get a dedicated and a technician for part time server management. A skilled technician can help u with sites too.
As far as your current sites, you can host them on Centos 6 VPS, but they need small modifications. I dont know your setup, but usually old software needs small fixes to work on new OS.
For example, I recently changed server from Centos 5 to centos 6. A joomla install, version 1.5.3 had issues of not working menus and components. I upgraded joomla and everytning worked perfect.
Hope I helped.
The Smart servers thing of Liquidweb is a big loss.
A pure VPS plan, not smart crap, is cheaper and scale better. Here in Europe, Leaseweb and Hetzner have VPS for 10 euros / month.
Anyway, glad u solved your prob.
@dangregory
Centos 4 does not have to do with SEO.
As far for the future, you need a dedicated, a powerfull one. I recommend u just use VPS as they are more secure and flexible and at later times, when u r financially stable, get a dedicated and a technician for part time server management. A skilled technician can help u with sites too.
As far as your current sites, you can host them on Centos 6 VPS, but they need small modifications. I dont know your setup, but usually old software needs small fixes to work on new OS.
For example, I recently changed server from Centos 5 to centos 6. A joomla install, version 1.5.3 had issues of not working menus and components. I upgraded joomla and everytning worked perfect.
Hope I helped.
Kingsolomon,
Thanks for the info, cool!
I guess I'm just totally naive about service providers being able to force a server change like they are doing -- I understand it's because the older version of Centos isn't going to be supported anymore, which is not their fault, but then what is going on at other hosting providers? I also have hosting at godaddy, bluehost and hostgator and I think some of them use Centos, but I haven't received any forced update/server change info from those hosting providers.
Thanks for the info, cool!
I guess I'm just totally naive about service providers being able to force a server change like they are doing -- I understand it's because the older version of Centos isn't going to be supported anymore, which is not their fault, but then what is going on at other hosting providers? I also have hosting at godaddy, bluehost and hostgator and I think some of them use Centos, but I haven't received any forced update/server change info from those hosting providers.
"I'm not a geek, so what is this shit with Centos 4 or whatever no longer being supported and now anybody whose server had that on it through Liquidweb has to upgrade to a new server? Can you explain this in non-geek terms?"
The product that CentOS 4 is based upon, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, is being End Of Lifed (EOL'ed). Red Hat will no longer be providing any sort of bug fixes* or security updates* to RHEL 4 which means that CentOS 4 will no longer receive any sort of updates which is (or at least should be) a problem to anyone doing anything remotely serious on a web accessible server.
To make an analogy this would be equivalent to Microsoft ending support for Windows Server 2003. Any server running Server 2k3 would stop receiving updates and it would only be a matter of time before you ran into security problems. Beyond that, if the hosting company ran into a problem they could not solve, they would no longer be able to escalate the issue to Microsoft which is not an attractive situation for any web hosting company. Further still, most hardware vendors would no longer provide support for an EOL'd operating system which is just as bad.
The thing that is a bummer is that RHEL/CentOS is not designed to be able to do an in place upgrade. You can't just run a command and update to the next major version of the software (in this case CentOS 5). You have to perform a migration which, as far as I know, is not something LiquidWeb (or any other hosting company) would help you with as your data and code is your responsibility. Beyond that, RHEL/CentOS changed quite a bit between version 4 and version 5. Namely, PHP went from version 4 to version 5 and IS NOT backwards compatible (i.e. PHP 4 code won't necessarily run on PHP 5). Getting your code running on RHEL/CentOS 5 is something you need to test before performing your migration.
If you (or anyone else) had any questions about this hit me up and I'll see if I can set you straight.
*Astute readers might note that Redhat offers an extended life cycle. It is important to note that it is up to Redhat's discretion to determine what is or is not a critical security vulnerability. It has been my experience that the extended life cycle (i.e. with RHEL 3) was not sufficiently updated to be able to reliably pass a PCI DSS scan.... food for thought.
The product that CentOS 4 is based upon, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, is being End Of Lifed (EOL'ed). Red Hat will no longer be providing any sort of bug fixes* or security updates* to RHEL 4 which means that CentOS 4 will no longer receive any sort of updates which is (or at least should be) a problem to anyone doing anything remotely serious on a web accessible server.
To make an analogy this would be equivalent to Microsoft ending support for Windows Server 2003. Any server running Server 2k3 would stop receiving updates and it would only be a matter of time before you ran into security problems. Beyond that, if the hosting company ran into a problem they could not solve, they would no longer be able to escalate the issue to Microsoft which is not an attractive situation for any web hosting company. Further still, most hardware vendors would no longer provide support for an EOL'd operating system which is just as bad.
The thing that is a bummer is that RHEL/CentOS is not designed to be able to do an in place upgrade. You can't just run a command and update to the next major version of the software (in this case CentOS 5). You have to perform a migration which, as far as I know, is not something LiquidWeb (or any other hosting company) would help you with as your data and code is your responsibility. Beyond that, RHEL/CentOS changed quite a bit between version 4 and version 5. Namely, PHP went from version 4 to version 5 and IS NOT backwards compatible (i.e. PHP 4 code won't necessarily run on PHP 5). Getting your code running on RHEL/CentOS 5 is something you need to test before performing your migration.
If you (or anyone else) had any questions about this hit me up and I'll see if I can set you straight.
*Astute readers might note that Redhat offers an extended life cycle. It is important to note that it is up to Redhat's discretion to determine what is or is not a critical security vulnerability. It has been my experience that the extended life cycle (i.e. with RHEL 3) was not sufficiently updated to be able to reliably pass a PCI DSS scan.... food for thought.
I'm on Storm myself and was thinking about making the switch to Beyond. How are their prices compared to Storm?
same here i have a dedicated box and am getting really simple php errors that need fixin that are taking way too long to fix. fuck man all this talk about switching hosts makes me uneasy the migration process of all of those domains can be a real bitch. not to mention new IPs etc.
Thank you for this even more in depth explanation, although again, I don't know nothin' about servers!
I guess I'm just wondering from a stupid, simple standpoint, what is the most stable ground for me to be building my sites on, server-wise, and is this type of problem where the underlying server system is end of lifed and no longer useful for security reasons a common thing people run into? Because all my years online this has never happened to me before, but maybe this is just an unusual situation in the world of servers?
Liquidweb is basically just offering me the ability to put my stuff on a new VPS server, so I'm going to have to migrate everything somewhere anyway, including all old data and stuff.
I'm just wondering if I will run into similar problems at other hosting providers or if Liquidweb is unusual because apparently they had so many people using Centos 4? Is this going to happen to me again in another year, for example -- I've only had my VPS with Liquidweb for a year and i guess they were using Centos 4 this whole time. If this is old software, that seems weird, why was a new VPS put on a server running old stuff?
Anyway, these are just my rambling thoughts. Point is, I dont' want to fucking have to migrate all my sites every year at ANY host unless it's for a HAPPY reason, like, I'm making so much dough that I need a dedicated server and my own server admin.
This is not at all unusual and is happening because the way Redhat engineered their operating system. It is not designed to be upgraded "in place" and this is happening at most (if not all) major hosting companies. If you really don't want to have to worry about this type of stuff, I would recommend a shared hosting account. Otherwise, if you have a good reason to have a VPS, I would recommend going to CentOS 6 (which will be EOL'd March 2017) or making the jump over to Ubuntu which, as far as I know, allows you to do "in place" upgrades.
There are a couple of ways you might consider performing your migration. One would be to migrate all or your data to another VPS or a server at home. Then have Liquidweb blow away your existing VPS and re-kick it as a CentOS6/Ubuntu VPS which should, in theory, let you keep your old IPs (but confirm this with Liquidweb). Then you can move your data back over and reconfigure everything. If they are like most other VPS/Cloud providers, they should let you perform a full image backup so you shouldn't be too scared about blowing away your data (but make sure you dump any databases into a flat file before you create a backup VPS image this just to be safe).
Migrating sucks but it's part of it. You need to stay on a relevant and secure OS. Honestly, if I was you I'd be concerned if LiquidWeb just let me stay on an OS that stopped receieving updates. I know you wish you were migrating for a better reason, but I can promise you this is better than migrating because your VPS was root level compromised.
There are a couple of ways you might consider performing your migration. One would be to migrate all or your data to another VPS or a server at home. Then have Liquidweb blow away your existing VPS and re-kick it as a CentOS6/Ubuntu VPS which should, in theory, let you keep your old IPs (but confirm this with Liquidweb). Then you can move your data back over and reconfigure everything. If they are like most other VPS/Cloud providers, they should let you perform a full image backup so you shouldn't be too scared about blowing away your data (but make sure you dump any databases into a flat file before you create a backup VPS image this just to be safe).
Migrating sucks but it's part of it. You need to stay on a relevant and secure OS. Honestly, if I was you I'd be concerned if LiquidWeb just let me stay on an OS that stopped receieving updates. I know you wish you were migrating for a better reason, but I can promise you this is better than migrating because your VPS was root level compromised.
When I setup a storm on demand box earlier in the year, the "lastest" centos version available was centos 4. Which pissed me off and forced me to use unofficial repos to get the LAMP stack versions that I needed, thus basically defeating the whole idea behind centos.
I really like liquid web and switching to them has helped me lower costs and scale up and down quicker, but i've been hearing a ton of shit from lots of people i work with over the last two weeks about problems they are having right now.
I really like liquid web and switching to them has helped me lower costs and scale up and down quicker, but i've been hearing a ton of shit from lots of people i work with over the last two weeks about problems they are having right now.