the be honest, I am not looking for speed, I am looking for consistency and reliability. I need to be able to go on vacation and know the server will not stop working for no particular reason, or that someone else would effect my performance.
The previous provider used a technology called solusVM, it allows them to over sell resources, and there is no way to 100% dedicate resources to a client.
I am now on a new provider using open vz (zen) . This allows you to dedicate resources, so regardless of how busy your neighbours are, the speed remains the same. I have dedicated memory and CPU. what even better, I paid extra and am on a SSD San, meaning all solid state drives.
The biggest issue tends to be what we call IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second, pronounced eye-ops). On a traditional SCSI/SATA raid, writing or reading a file from disk can take seconds on a busy server. My current isp it instant
The best benchmark I could use was one of my online store clients, each click used to take about 2 seconds, now it is instantaneous.
Also added to the new sever is offsite frequent backups, so if the blog ever gets hacked, we can roll back to a previous version in seconds. Using a nifty technology called R1Soft.
Only been a weekend, but loving the new server. I hope you guys are no noticing any performance issues, from what I can see in the logs, everything is chugging along perfectly.!
Derek