Tweaking GoDaddy Hosting
So I signed up for a GoDaddy virtual dedicated server this week. I’ve already got a real dedicated server at ev1servers.net plus my main domains hosted at a managed server. But I have one site that has a ton of traffic and it was weighing down my other sites. So I thought I’d offload it onto a GoDaddy server that boasts a 500GB/month transfer rate for only about $30 a month.
All is well now, but I had a ton of trouble getting it to work. I’m pretty good at configuring and securing Linux servers. You have to be. It is almost like a survival technique for someone like me.
But a few weird differences at GoDaddy’s service threw me for a loop. The first was DNS. Instead of having a GoDaddy DNS server that I should point the domain to, they expected me to set up my own DNS at my virtual dedicated server. Very different than how I thought it should be, and it wasn’t obvious from their online docs. I actually decided to pay for a dynamic DNS elsewhere for $10/month instead.
But even with that figured out, I couldn’t get the server to work. It seems like the DNS wasn’t resolving, but in fact nslookup and dig showed that is was. I eventually determined that the server was overloaded. But it shouldn’t have been. The sites gets a lot fo traffic, but not that much.
Finally, I got some advice from a friend (Steve Loyola at Best Web Buys) about tweaking the MaxClients setting in the httpd config. Sure enough, GoDaddy’s default is set insanely low (like, 5). 150 is a better number. Sure enough, that did the trick.
It just goes to show that no matter how much you know, there is more to learn. Especially when it comes to servers.
I’m surprised that no one has come up with a hosting service that takes care of all of this. I thought maybe GoDaddy was trying to do that. If someone created something like Ensim, cPanel/ or Plesk, but was easier to use, it would really be worth something.