What VPS hosting customers want

For the past three weeks, I’ve been ripping my hair out from frustration. Personal and family problems have been crushing, my work was affected and I had to cut back to part-time so I wouldn’t be dragging down my whole team and people I care about and to top it all off, I’ve been trying to get a couple simple sites set up with a new web host.

That last part about the web host is what this rant is about.

I have a simple shared hosting plan and the site you’re reading right now is hosted on that plan. I also use it to park a handful of other inactive domain names, etc. But for the new sites, the ones I plan on blowing out into businesses of their own, I want those hosted on VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting so that when the traffic and visitors start to grow, I have dedicated resources to serve up content to them without the costs of a dedicated server. I also want the VPS because they can easily scale into one or more dedicate servers seamlessly, without me having to manually fuck around with moving a site under load.

So in the past week alone, I’ve signed up for two VPS plans from two different companies. The first was going great. I set it all up with the main site running WordPress as my blogging platform/CMS, and then the problems started. Every time I tried to edit a template file in the WP admin, I had to log in to the server using an FTP program and change the permissions of that file to 777. No other permissions would work, except to make the files world writeable, and that’s not very secure.

Then I installed my core set of plugins that I use on all my blogs, and most of them wouldn’t function at all. Updating them, I had to enter the server name and password in the WP admin or nothing would happen. Then, once activated, any file or folder they interacted with had to have permissions set to 777, world writable. THEN, after all that, any plugin that had to interact with an outside server, like the plugin I use to send an update to Twitter whenever I publish a post, did nothing. I also found out that the site’s xmlrpc function wouldn’t ping update services like pingomatic or google’s blogsearch, etc.

Support tickets? Don’t get me started. I ended up more confused than before.

So I sign up for VPS number two. Slick admin panel, very intuitive, super-nice and helpful contact at the company, among about a dozen other plusses… but after setting up a site on there and feeling like I could finally settle in for a night of writing, I crack my knuckles, wiggle my fingers and check to see that all the pages worked…

404. Every page, every post, everything – 404.

That’s how I discovered that the mod_rewrite module was not installed – a minor thing, surely?

Nope. No mod_rewrite, because mod_rewrite is an Apache server module and the server I was on was using Lighttpd.

Ok, so there has to be a way to make this server software act like Apache and allow my WordPress install to rewrite the URLs, right? Wrong, not without digging deep into the bowels of the lighttpd.conf file and having to do whatever the fuck it is that some blogger found during a google search said would work but judging by the comments on his post only a handful of people could make it work and even then it was buggy. *sigh*

I`ll stop right there, because If you haven`t already gotten the message… I SHOULD HAVE SPENT THE PAST 10 DAYS WRITING FORWARD FACING CONTENT THAT GENERATES PAGEVIEWS AND REVENUE, Not “Trying this or that an maybe it`ll work.”

So anyone looking at this now who knows how to fix all the problems I had above and have the server purring like a kitten inside of 20 minutes, laugh all you want – but there are millions of people out there who know a hell of a lot less than I do about servers and whateverthefuck.conf files, and some of them want or need a VPS server to host their sites on.

I don`t know what their needs are and to tell you the truth, I don`t really care. But here`s what I want from a hosting company:

1. A VPS hosting plan on a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.) that`s already optimized to run WordPress – meaning – it just fucking works and runs smoothly if the site gets traffic spikes.

2. I want to sign up and pay <$50 per month, on a month to month basis, using fucking PAYPAL – Fuck you snobs and your credit card only plans.

3. I want a minimum of 512mb dedicated RAM burstable to at least double that. I want 40+ gigs of hard drive space and 500+ gigs of 100mbps bandwidth.

4. I never want to see another .conf file for as long as I live. That`s the host`s problem, not mine and once I`ve configured one or more WordPress blogs on the VPS, once a week is enough to have to log into the hosting control panel – like, to dump log files or check error logs, server stats, etc. Simple shit like that.

5. I want to be able to upgrade to more resources or a more robust VPS or dedicated server by clicking a few icons, maybe entering a few things in a form if necessary and then paying more. Don`t take this the wrong way, but I do NOT want to have to talk to you or fucking email you.

6. And I want to do all that without ever having to submit a support ticket or email again, but you have to be available 24/7 if I need you.

Ok, so number six is a bit of a stretch, but you get my drift.

I know a few tech guys and even a couple people who ran hosting companies in the past and if they read this, they`ll be saying “OOOhh, lookey at this guy! Who the fuck does he think he is, demanding all that from a web host… What a fuckin ass!”

But listen up, web hosts – all of the above is doable and you know it.

I`m a customer.

I`m stupid when it comes to tech and server crap.

But I`m begging you to take my money and all I want is to not have to deal with you, .conf or your fucking support staff. Make it easy to get what I want.

MAKE THAT HAPPEN FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME FOR CHRIST`S SAKE.