I have to tell you all I have gotten very little sleep over the past 4 days, as I had a VPS setup for me. In the End I am very glad I made the switch from shared to VPS. My pages load very fast! Compared to the $12/month Shared hosting account I was on before. Below are what I learned in my experience. The HostMySite Staff did their best to help me, even though at times I am sure they were fustrated with me calling every hour to see if anyone has gotten to my tickets. These things might help others in the future when they setup their VPS. Keep in mind I was rather new at using IIS. If you are looking to run a high traffic website off the Base Windows VPS, the following information may be very valuable to you. The HMS staff might think about putting some of these in the Support section especially the DB connector for mysql.


1. MySQL + SmarterStats, + SmarterMail + IIS do not fit on a single base VPS play ( 256 Meg )
2. Its better to use an external shared DB MySQL account rather than try to run your own MySQL Server from the VPS
3. If you are working with asp.net always use the Connector/Net driver, DO NOT USE OBDC 3.51.
4. w3wp.exe is very resource hungry!!! Make sure it has plenty of ram available. Mine can hit 200 MB at times.
5. Virtual SMTP Server does not start itself if you restart IIS. You must manually restart it. Else you might find your Server generated emails pilling up in the Que.
6. If you are logged into the VPS, Hostmysite staff can't login.
7. Asp.net 1.1 and asp.net 2.0 must have seperate Application Pools.
8. Do not create seperate Application pools for every website running, it just wastes Memory.
9. SmarterStats, SmarterMail, and your Website can run off the same asp.net 2.0 App Pool.
10. Set your Application Pools to Recycle every 24 hours at a time of day when most of your visitors are sleeping. This will keep things moving fast.
11. Remember to give the NETWORK SERVICE user full rights to your website.
12. Remember to give the IUSER user only read rights to your website.
13. the MySQL shared DB server has a limit of 50 concurrent connections per DB user. if you get Servers errors saying can't connection, this means you might be running out of connections. The Solution is to have more DB users added to your DB. Then modify your connection string to rotate which user it will connect as.

finally If I knew what I know now, I would have setup a VPS a long time ago.

Having your own VPS is awesome. I feel like a cave man that invented fire, and now I figuring out how to manage it. Here is something I figured out that might be helpful to everyone running on a base VPS that wants to free up as much memory as possible.

First I am going to assume most of you are running the same type of setup I am. Your IIS probably looks like this
Web Sites
Your Website
SmarterStats
SmarterMail

Originally I said to combine all your logical sites into one application pool. This is fine, but as a result lots of memory is held up and never recycled to the system. A better idea would be to setup a seperate Application Pool for each logical site. Then change the recycle properties custom to each. My Application pools are configured like this.

My Website - Set to recycle every 24 hours at 5am
SmarterStats - Set to shutdown after 2 minuts of innactivity
SmarterMail - Set to shutdown after 2 minutes of innactivity

The reason for this is that the Application Pool for SmarterMail can easily be over 70 Megs
SmarterStats easily over 40 Megs. Since I only check my email a few times a day, and I only check my Stats once or twice per day. There is no need to keep these instances of W3Wp.exe hoggin up all my ram. If you are looking to free up some memory on your system this works great!

Running mysql on my win vps + no problems. I wish that MS SQL was not installed however it is taking up resources an I am not using it.

Are you on the Base VPS plan? Why don't you just uninstall MSSQL? I did it with no problems.
I not only had to move MySQL off my VPS, but I also had to set my Worker Processes to shutdown immediately when I am done with email and stats. My website alone ( 1 site ) can easily consume about 170 Megs of Ram. I found that MySQL performs better on a shared server, as I don't have 4 gigs of ram for it to play with on the VPS

A little note to everyone on the Base VPS. If you think you have 384 Megs ram. ( because talk manager says so ) think again. You only have 256. the extra 128 is the swap file. I have learned the hard way that swap files suck!!! Keep your memory usuage under 256, else you will notice everything getting corrupt!

I'll be bookmarking this for future reference.

Thanks for your efforts in posting this for the benefit of everyone at HostMySite!

Hi whitesites,

Can you tell me a bit more about ~ how many page views you're getting a day/month? You said in your OP that you're running a high traffic site, and I'm wondering what I can generally expect when I move my sites over.

Also, I agree with nathacof - thanks for posting this info!

~James

An average day gets this on our site desirousparty.com
1500 - 2200 visitors (1100-1800 unique )
15000 - 21000 page views ( does not include AJAX calls, and admin pages )
including the AJAX and admin ( 200k - 300k ) daily
Honestly I think the VPS could handle much much more.
The key is to limit the W3Wp.exe service.
If you only have 256 megs of ram, make sure that your worker process does not go over this limit ( even though there is an additional 128 swap file ).
Every Time you use your swap file its like playing russian rolette with your server.
It will almost always result in your logs becoming corrupt and file permissions getting corrupt as well. Its very easy to configure this limit, even though most of the guys at HMS don't think to suggest this. For example if your VPS without the work processor included consumes about 100 Megs, I would limit your worker process to 140 megs, giving 10 megs of safety. Anytime your worker processor trys to go over this limit, it will automatically recycle.

Also keep in mind the way I am running our site is we have
1 base VPS plan ( to host the websites )
1 linux shared plan ( to host smarterstats, smartermail, and MySQL )
If you are planning on trying to run all this on your VPS I suggest you upgrade to a 512 Meg VPS, and even then if your MySQL DB is large this might not be enough.
We are running only two sites ( desirousparty.com and desiroustravel.com ) the travel site we do not run email or stats for. If you need to run multiple sites I recommend the 512 VPS plan, as you get the 50 site license , for mail and stats. Else you could always install the smarterstats locally ( on your home computer ), and set it up to retrive your IIS logs via FTP ( very simple ), this will insure your stats stay as live as possible ( updated hourly ), else if you use the Shared plan for stats they can be a large delay in the updates. I am going to make this base VPS last for as long as possbile. HMS does colocation starting around $120/month or so for a 1u rack server. I have already bought one off Ebay for $1100, and now I am just waiting for windows server 2008 to come out before I get ready to ship it out to HMS for colocation.

Just a little update on My VPS experience. Something to keep in mind is that the IIS logs can take up to 100 Megs / day if not over. So its good to have the server automatically delete your Logs after they have been imported into smarter stats. Else your website will stop working as you will go over your allocated 5GB of disk space. Also if you are running just one website, and want stats, install smarterstats on your local machine, and then have it import the logs from you VPS via FTP.

Here's one from me:

Check your FTP logs (if you've got FTP enabled).

I found a number of attempts at individuals trying to login with the Administrator account over FTP. After looking into it, and contacting HMS support, I ended up disabling the account; I wasn't using it, they weren't, and it had ??? for a password.

Per the advice elsewhere, I looked into just installing SmarterStats locally, on my own computer, but ended up going with a different log parsing utility (LogParser). Combined with Analytics, I'm pretty happy, and have disabled SmarterStats. I definitely have to agree with the O.P. - there's just not enough resources to run SmarterStats/Mail on the Base VPS.

~James

I checked my logs and you were right. Someone was trying to login to the Administrators account. When I called HMS they said that user already had its FTP access restricted so it wouldn't matter. They could try to login with that all day and nothing would happen.
Here is the IP and date they tried on my VPS

9/13.2007 38.112.4.210
9/08/2007 80.40.126.37
8/22/2007 217.64.100.162
8/11/2007 61.78.56.125
6/16/2007 210.125.31.69
6/14/2006 200.186.94.53