It's now been a little over a half a year since I made the move from my own dedicated, hosted, physical server to Vultr using a hosted VM for all of my personal sites. I have nothing but good things to say about Vultr, and not because I get anything special from them but it just works very well for me.
I thought I'd share some thoughts on the experience since a number of people ask me of where to host their sites.
Hesitant and Pleasantly Surprised
I was a little hesitant to move off my physical box because as I was originally looking for a VM solution the pricing for Virtual Hosts actually was worse for the same level of performance of even that ancient old box I had been running. Vultr was the only service at the time that was competive in price to performance. With hosted VMs you never know though - over time things can get slower as you get a noisy neighbor or the VM gets moved to a new machine etc.
I've seen none of that and the hosting has been rock solid for this half a year. Performance is excellent and most importantly it's very steady. There are no slow stretches and there has been no down time. There are excellent tools for remotely restarting/stopping and even logging on to a Web based startup terminal that lets you literally maintain the VM install as if your were there. In fact this is a bonus over my old physical box which I had to 'kick start' a few times over the years which required calling somebody at the host and have them physically restart the box. Now I can log on to the console. I had to do this once last week during a Windows update that stalled out and it's much better I get to fix this than some tech that knows nothing about my machine setup!
Before settling on Vultr, I spent quite a bit trying a number of different services and I ended up settling on Vultr because they provided by the most bang for the buck in terms of performance for the price. Not only is their VM pricing better than most providers, their VM specs actually performed much better than the VM specs with other services (especially Azure which was nothing but slow).
I'm running all of my personal sites on a single box basically and I use the following configuration:
This 8gig of memory, 4 core, 100gb disk works well to host 5 Web Connection sites, and 12 other .NET Web sites including my blog, this message board, my Web store, various samples (some of which get hammered by robots and bad actors so they are actually quite busy). There are a couple of small customer apps, and one of Sylvia's sites I built for her. There are also a number of internal apps and services for bug tracking and software registrations etc. The box runs a local SQL Server, MongoDb for a couple of other apps and it's barely using any CPU. The high usage you see in the screen shot has to be the related to the dashboard panel as remoting into the box generally shows it running below 10% of CPU even during peak times of the day. IOW, the virtual hardware lives up to the VM specs that it's supposed to emulate.
All of this costs me a $56 a month which is ridiculously cheap compared to many other providers.
I priced out a similar setup on AWS and Azure and it was approaching $300 for similar setups. Things would be a lot easier if FoxPro wasn't in the mix because I could work with just App Services instead of a full VM, but still given this setup I'm very happy with this VM setup given the performance it provides which blows away what you get with low level services from Azure or AWS that would be anywhere in the same performance ballpark.
Ironically when I set up that box originally I planned on upgrading to the next level up which is 6 Cores, 16gb memory and 200gb of disk which runs $96/month. However, I sticking with the lower level setup because it provides plenty of horsepower to run my work load.
The only possible reason to upgrade would be the the disk space which is getting a bit tight (80gb used with 3-4gb daily backups), but for now it'll do. I have to keep an eye on disk space and make sure I regularly clean out log files, backup and temp folders - I run a few scheduled tasks that take of that for me once day.
I do wish Vultr had more control over individual components. It would be really nice to have the current setup but be able to either add a second disk (for backup) or bump up the disk size. 120gb or 150gb would go a long way for a more comfortable amount of disk space for me. Instead when the time comes that I can't get around the 100gb limit I'll have to upgrade to the next higher VM level which nearly doubles the pricing (but it does add quite a bit more hardware).
Backups
On my old box I used to have 3 drives one of which was dedicated for backups. With Vultr you pretty much are stuck with a single disk - the only options you get are creating a separate dedicated machine with additional space. I was considering setting up the cheapest $5/month Linux box for file storage, but that seemed like a big hassle.
Instead I ended up putting some of my MSDN account Azure credits to use and backing up my data to the local drive then pushing the backups into Azure Blob Storage (cold storage) every night, which costs next to nothing. Azure blob storage for the 10 gigs I use works out to something like 50 cents a month 😃
I have 3 rolling backups that I send up each night, plus one weekly backup which actually saved my ass just the other day as I accidentally nuked all the Web Connection blog posts when I decided to update the Web Connection samples to the recent v7.0 release. Oops. I was able to pull down the last backup (a 4gb 7zip file, and quickly pull out just the blog data and restore it in a hurry).
Homebrew
If all of this sounds decidedly homebrew you're probably right. This isn't exactly DevOps style handling, but when I work with customers I often get to see how they work with complex automation of deployment and system management services and it's ironic that THAT actually ends up causing all sorts of problems on its own.
My setup is basically the same as I have been doing for the last 20 years except now it's running on a cloud hosted VM. While I wouldn't mind moving to more modern processes in the cloud for most of this personal stuff I'm doing, the cost of doing so and the additional complexity is simply not worth it and I surely would end up spending significantly more money on one of the big services for a worse level of performance. For me at least after a lot of deliberation and consideration this is by far the best choice on how to run my apps.
Summary
Circling back to Vultr - the experience has been great and I couldn't be happier about the move by now. I was not sure what to expect and the move was definitely one way since the old box I was running on was starting to have hardware issues. Having a VM that is snapshotted frequently is a surefire way to ensure even if the VM stops running tomorrow, I can be back up and running in a few hours max.
Anyway if you want to check out Vultr - I can highly recommend them based on this experience.
Disclaimer: The following is a referral link, that gives you a $50 credit on Vultr and it pays back $25 to me, if you end up signing up for an account and bill for at least a full month.
I totally agree with you, Rick. I've been using Vultr for about 3 1/2 years now and have had only one significant outage period. It was for about 28 hours as I recall which could be catastrophic for some. They did some hardware upgrades that went horribly wrong. I would venture to say it was a fluke that they took steps to ensure wouldn't happen again. It's been smooth sailing since.
Speaking of having additional drive space, I've also found that to be the only downside with them. Have you looked at adding Block Storage? I've seen the option but never fully investigated.
Anyway, I just wanted to echo your positive experience with Vultr!
Took a look at block storage and yes it looks like that will work once they get that going properly. Right now it looks like it's experimental and only work with New Jersey hosted servers.
But by the looks of it you can attach block storage as a volume and then format it as a Windows drive.
This should work for overflow storage like backups, and large storage files like images etc. But wonder what performance will be like - it'll be in the same data center but likely not on the same box, so like local network access, rather than local drive speeds.
Keeping an eye on it. Pricing looks good - $1 per 10gb of storage is fair enough.
+++ Rick ---
Since I've also had the same questions about Block Storage, I opened a ticket asking about it. I explained that the achille's heal for Vultr is the lack of a configurable storage option for servers. I received the following response (in a timely 15-minutes!):
Unfortunately, we don't have any concrete ETA on when block storage might become available outside our NY/NJ data center.
In terms of performance, block storage does not match the local SSD throughput. The backend for block storage uses a redundant network storage cluster, which requires transfer over the network and multiple distributed writes generated for each incoming change. Naturally, this tends to be notably slower than single writes to a local disk.
We appreciate that some customers could use more storage space and consider this in new product development. (Storage instances were one past solution, but demand for a smaller amount of fast SSD I/O was much greater than for a larger amount of slower HDD I/O, so that product is in decline and may be discontinued entirely.)
Hopefully, they'll decide to offer larger/configurable primary storage options in the near future.
Yeah that's pretty much what I figured. Surprised they haven't rolled it out elsewhere though since this is likely a popular feature given their limited storage space in the lower tiers. For me adding 20gig would help a ton towards removing my backups and some other low access storage...
The other option is to set up tiny Linux image and use that for file storage, which comes out to about the same amount, but you wouldn't get direct Windows file system support (I don't think).
+++ Rick ---
Hi Rick,
Wondering if Vultr is still your recommended hosting service?
I think I'm getting close to giving up my own self hosting, my upstream service provider retired and now I'm not sure who I will be dealing with that purchased his customer list.
Besides all of my personal sites, I'm wondering if hosting a mail server as one of the applications would work on a VM machine hosted by Vultr along with several static sites and a few WC apps?
Best...
Yes I still use and like Vultr.
Anything that you're running on your actual hardware you should be able to run on a VPS machine. It's just a Windows instance...
+++ Rick ---
Hey Harvey,
Just an FWIW about my recent VULTR hosting experience price increase and subsequent upgrade.
Starting in June, their hosting prices took a jump due to Microsoft changing their Windows licensing prices to a per vCPU basis. The net effect was to pretty much double my monthly hosting charges.
So, I decided to downgrade from a 4-to-2 vCPU setup which dropped my hosting cost back to close what it was previously. My thinking was that I didn't really need the extra raw performance of the 4-vCPU server. After comparing the available options, I discovered the new High Performance option for only a few bucks more. (2vCPU/4G/100G High Perf for $52 vs 2vCPU/4G/80G Reg Perf for $48). The extra cost was nicely offset by an extra 25% storage of which I was in desperate need.
I also took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest Windows 2022 and all of my software (SQL Server, VS, etc.).
Now, what I found post-upgrade is that the new server is noticeably FASTER than the old one! So for those of you who have been bitten by the recent price increase, you might consider evaluating changing your instance config.
HTH
Another option I'm considering is creating my own ISO and applying my own purchased Windows license. I think that would pay off over a few months and let you use larger instances without Vultr charging you.
To be honest I have not found the actual reference to the price increases from Microsoft or why they would switch this licensing as they supposedly have and why it would be different on a VPS vs a physical server. The server licensing is a byzantine maze...
+++ Rick ---
Interesting. I wondered if it was a genuine increase or MS's side or more a VULTR marketing ploy to increase prices. Either way, I was going to be paying more.
The custom ISO sounds like an interesting approach. Seems like it would definitely be worth the hassle for a larger vCPU config.
Yeah there's some setup involved for the a custom ISO - you have to crossload the VPS driver that Vultr uses which means you have to merge two ISOs. There are instructions on the site that explain this and other than the time it takes to do that it's straight forward. You also have to host the ISO somewhere so Vultr can read it (they don't let you upload it presumably to avoid the storage load).
I've not done it yet because it seems my pricing hasn't actually gone up yet... but probably will regardless sometime this year as I'd like to use Server 2022 (2016 now).
I just took another look and I still can't find the right way to do server license pricing, or anything that's specific to VPS hosted VMs. I also don't see why that would be different than hosting a physical box and with a server standard license running ~$200 this would pay off relatively quickly and you have piece of mind for future.
+++ Rick ---
If you have time to create a step-by-step video of how to create a Vultr account, install Windows and IIS with SSH and SSL and then deploy Web Connect for development and production... just a suggestion that might create referral credits ($$) for you.
I have now watched several YouTube videos about how to setup an account and get started but for the most part they play music in the background and don't give the rich instructions your typical videos offer.
😃
Really? You can't figure out how to press a few buttons to create a virtual machine and then basically use Remote Desktop to set up Windows?
There's a very detailed white paper that goes through the step by step process of setting up a new machine for Web Connection here:
There's base info in that article regarding setting up the Virtual Machine:
+++ Rick ---
THANK YOU Rick for the detailed information in this post! One more question: In the Windows Server environment Do you find that running VFP/WebConnection is measurably or noticeably SLOWER on a VIRTUAL MACHINE rather than running as the primary process on a DEDICATED Windows Server?
Not a good question as that's very subjective. What are we comparing? Different machines, vs. different VPS's etc. Ultimately you have to try out the provider to compare... VPS set up in 15 minutes, so you can set up one do some testing - if it's no good cancel and close out the account, and it won't cost much.
In my experience the big boy VPSs (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud) have been very slow except in high end configurations. Vultr for me was significantly faster in small configurations and somewhat better performaing than my old ca. 2012 Xeon quad core machine with the 4 core setup.
+++ Rick ---
I noticed you did not mention their wonderful API. I have been using vultr since YOU first mentioned it years ago. I use their api to spin up new images, take snapshots, and best of all access the server via their simple 'view console' link. I do all this inside WWWC without any issue. Took less than an hour to put together what I mentioned.