In terms of performance – Is unmanaged VPS better than a managed one – for WP sites?

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I am looking into optimizing my WP blogs, and one thing that comes out is that several of the most acclaimed solutions people are offering (Such as eaccelerator and Nginx), are only available if I had an unmanaged account.

According to other reasons you might detail, which is better (performance wise) for managing a WP site?

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(that is assuming you don’t have experience in unmanaged solution but was willing to learn)

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  1. @Tal,

    In terms of performance an unmanaged VPS will be better than a managed one. A Managed VPS will almost always come with CPanel which is great for shared hosting and for hosting companies to easily manage your VPS for you.

    You can still install any of the Opcode caching tools (APC, eAccelerator, XCache, MemCached) on a managed VPS with CPanel but you would have problems getting Nginx to work.

    Performance Issues with a CPanel Managed VPS

    • Un needed services and processes (TailWatch, entropychat, exim, imap, ipaliasis, named, spamd, syslogd, etc…)
    • The Cpanel UI uses up valuable resources
    • Your stuck with Apache as the only server option
    • Only options for running PHP are dso, cgi, or fcgid (no mod_fastcgi)

    Issues with Managing your own VPS

    • Security (Your will be responsible for the security of the VPS
    • Learning Curve
    • No support to fix something you screw up or overlook
    • Mail servers and FTP servers are difficult to get working
    • You will be doing everything via command line/SSH

    Resources to Help You

    If you do decide to go the unmanaged route there are a lot of great resources to guide you through every step of setting up your VPS

    The Bottom Line

    With unmanaged, you get a blank partition on a hard drive, a power cord and a network cable, maybe a wiki, some docs a forum, and Google. If your comfortable with this then go for it. You will learn so much by setting up your own server environment.

  2. Chris_O’s answer seems to indicate the “managed” hosting product is generally poorly managed.

    But isn’t the point of managed hosting to get exactly what you want by paying a professional to do the labor? We can’t assume VPS hosting professionals are generally incompetent and/or unwilling to offer anything but Cpanel.

    Of course a paid professional can do the job better than a newbie, ceteris paribus. But where are you shopping for managed hosting? How much are you willing to pay? How honest is the sysadmin? Etc.

    So managed hosting should be “better for performance” if the sysadmin knows his/her craft and you know what to ask for.

    I have no affiliation with this company (random example) but does this sound like they’re asking you to use Cpanel? From Atlantic.net’s “Managed Hosting” page:

    “You tell us your vision and goals and
    we will work with you to develop a
    Dedicated Hosting solution
    specifically to meet your needs.” “Let our Cloud Engineers help you design, install, manage and monitor a private cloud infrastructure designed specifically for your needs.” Etc.

    No mention of VPS on that particular page, but they offer it.

    Also you might want professional help with your WordPress database.

    Percona is the largest independent
    MySQL support and consulting company,
    with a global 24×7 staff of over 40
    people, serving 900+ customers in 50+
    countries since 2006.