I decided on a company called Knownhost. So far, so good. Actually so far, so great.

I chose them for a few reasons (in order):

1. Seemed to have good support
2. True root access in a true VPS environment
3. Good price
4. Plesk control panel (although you can pick from many others)
5. Ready to go servers (no installation of other software required)

I’m a big fan of the Web Hosting Talk forums. I cruised those for a few days reading various posts about VPS hosters. Knownhost personal have a pretty good presence on those forums. They answer various questions about tech and linux stuff, rarely (if ever) pushing their own company. I liked what I was reading.

They are a young company. I vaguely remember that they formed in 2005, although I could be wrong. In the age of come-and-go hosting companies, I was not fond of this fact. In an email to support, a gentlemen by the name of Jay responded “We are a new brand but have been in the industry for over 15 yrs …” I took a gamble and signed up with them knowing I could exercise the 30 day money back guarentee if need be.

Now check this out: I signed up around 9pm pacific time. I received a phone call roughly 10 minutes later from Knownhost with a question about my credit card (I put in the wrong billing address). I was impressed. We got the address corrected and I was up and running shortly. Some people may think that sounds weird for a hoster to call past 9pm … but I say it’s smart as I was obviously up and had just placed the order.

Over the months I’ve had a technical question or two and they’ve always answered them promptly and politely. I usually get a response in under 30 minutes. Nice!

From a technical standpoint, everything has been running very smoothly. I have yet to experience any down time in the roughly year and a half I’ve used them. To be clear, that’s ZERO (0) down time.

I would confidently recommend them to others seeking a quality VPS.

Via the anonymous blogger over at www.swart.org.za/wordpress (seriously, I couldn’t find any identifying info on the site) I now know how to remove the hideous Virtuozzo ad that appears on the login page of Plesk.

Quoting swart.org.za:

To disable the promo, edit the lanuage (sic) file, located here:

/usr/local/psa/admin/plib/locales/en-US/messages_en-US.php

Search for the following string:

virtuozzo__promotion

To clarify a few things:

1. That’s two underscores (__) in “virtuozzo__promotion”
2. You’ll be setting the value of “virtuozzo__promotion_top” to empty single quotes. So the final line would look like this:
   'ui__promotion/virtuozzo__promotion_top' => '',

While in there, I discovered you can change the “Login to Plesk 8.2.1″ (or whatever your version is) text that appears on the login page from this same file. I’m speaking of the text that appears above the login boxes, near the icon of the keys. Search for “login_up__login_label_plesk” and change the value to whatever text you like. The final product looks like this on my server:

Bye bye ugly SWSoft promo text! Thank you mysterious stranger at swart.org.za!

/usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog

-Joel

Edit your /etc/xinet.d/smtp_psa (and smtps_psa for secure connetions I assume). Under “server_args” insert “-Rt0″ after the equals sign.

Before:

server_args = /var/qmail/bin/relaylock /var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd /var/qmail/bin/smtp_auth /var/qmail/bin/true /var/qmail/bin/cmd5checkpw /var/qmail/bin/true

After:

server_args = -Rt0 /var/qmail/bin/relaylock /var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd /var/qmail/bin/smtp_auth /var/qmail/bin/true /var/qmail/bin/cmd5checkpw /var/qmail/bin/true

Restart xinetd via /etc/init.d/xinetd restart and you’re done! Test it out, your SMTP should be much faster.

BTW, here’s the fix for increasing Plesk‘s default Courier-IMAP connections. I was receiving the following error in Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 on XP:

Unable to connect to your IMAP server. You may have exceeded the maximum number of connections to this server. If so, use the Advanced IMAP Server Settings dialog to reduce the number of cached connections.

If you need to make changes to Apache’s httpd.include file on Plesk, your changes will get overwritten. This was driving me mad as I needed to make changes globally, not just on a per-domain vhost.conf basis as is recommended by Plesk. I sent an email to the support department of my hoster, Knownhost, asking where the “raw version” of the httpd.include file was — meaning where was the data for which Plesk was overwritting my changes? My logic was that if I could find where Plesk was pulling this data to overwrite httpd.include, I could modify it to my liking. Andrew from Knownhost told me that the data that overwrites the Plesk config files is hardcoded into the websrvmng binary (this is a utility Plesk uses). Also, Plesk data is strewn about in various databases. Ugh! But, he did offer insight into how to get what I wanted.

The trick is to put your changes in the httpd.conf file which will take precedence over httpd.include (be sure to put it before the httpd.include directive). Well, that was simple. Thanks Andrew and Knownhost!

NOTE: I wrote this post months ago and forgot to post it. In that time I’ve upgraded to Plesk 8.0.1 and I’m really liking it. The above information still applies to Plesk 8, except they’ve moved and renamed httpd.include. No matter, as that file will just be overwritten anyway.

The reason I decided against them is that I found a post on their forum saying that they have no package management for their VPS servers whatsoever. Ugh. I’m too much of a novice to not have an RPM or apt-get app. Also, WestHost does not provide root access. They have “near-root” but that sounds like “kinda pregnant” and “sort-of dead” to me. Oh, and WestHost’s “backup” is simply you clicking a button on their Web control panel and downloading the tarball it gives you. I’m not impressed.

I was looking at unixshell again which I mentioned in a previous post. After reading their history a bit, I saw that they are a spinoff of TekTonic.net which is a more user-friendly and supported VPS product. I’m currently sending emails back and forth with them to see if they are a viable solution. I’m intrigued because they have:

• True root access in a true VPS environment
• Awesome snap-shot stuff, rebooting takes seconds
• They backup every day and keep the last 7 days worth of backups. Restores are free
• DirectAdmin . I’m not super familiar with it, but anything would be better than ugly-ass cPanel.
• Virtuozzo seems like a cool VPS product. You can perform a manual backup of your VPS whenever you want which is nice.

To be continued…

So what about VPS hosts? There are a million of them. Here’s a just a few:

• ProHosters
  Seemed like a good company. Reliable and whatnot, but I found better prices elsewhere.
• unixshell
  Great feature list. Ability to install a different distro at the push of a button! Wow. Also you can take a “snapshot” image of your VPS and restore it in minutes. That’s nice if an upgrade goes awry. But they’re very hands-off and I have the feeling you’re on your own. I’m not there yet … maybe in a couple years.
• BurstNet
  Looked good, but they’re in Pennsylvania. I also hate cPanel as it’s ugly as hell.
• midPhase
  I wanted to sign up with these guys to test them out, but when you click order a page telling you “we’re not accepting orders due to high demand” pops up. That’s not good. I mean, better they not over sell it, but still.
  * Note: I’ve read way too many negative reports for these guys, so I’ve nixed them from the pool.
• WestHost
  This one is the most promising. They’re, you guessed it, on the west side of the country (Utah) and they are a good size. An employee told me “40+” which isn’t too small or too big for my tastes. They have good prices and I’ve read mostly good things about their service and support.

The features I desire the most are:

• Fair price
• Mid-sized company
• On the West coast
• Good support

WestHost seems to provide those things for me. I looked at local Portland hosters and they are just too small to compete price-wise. Seattle faired a little better, but not much. I spoke via “Live Chat” to a couple people at WestHost last night and they were nice and helpful. They have a 30-day money back guarantee so I think I’ll give them a try.

Can anyone out there give me some advice?