Upgrade from "VPS 2.0" to "Community" VPS

Some time in late November 2009, I noticed that my VPS 2.0 server had gone down, taking all my sites offline. This was caused by Webfusion's migration from a data centre in Germany to a new location in the UK. Apparently there had been some problems with the new Dell hardware that the VPS machines had been moved to. The server stayed down for several days and I decided that since my sites were offline anyway it would be a good time to upgrade to Server 2008, which Webfusion had recently started offering as part of a new range of VPS options. I chose their bottom-end "Community" VPS, which provides more RAM and disk space than the old VPS, and for £5 less per month.

More Resources

To compare the resources allocated to my two VPS servers, I opened the Parallels Power Panel for each one. For a Webfusion VPS, you'll find the Power Panel at https://your_VPS_IP_address:4643. Note that for this site it is normal to see a warning in your browser relating to an invalid SSL certificate, which you should be able to ignore.

Power Panel shows total hard drive for the old VPS as 7.32 GB, with 512 MB of guaranteed RAM. The new VPS gets 26 GB of hard drive space and 1 GB of guaranteed RAM. Before I've made any changes to the server there are 711.3 MB of RAM free and 25.35 GB of unused disk space. (Note that free RAM had dropped to 710.2 MB when I refreshed a while later, and again to 705.5 MB when I checked again shortly afterwards - I'll be checking this again, but the next time I checked the free RAM had increased again and seems stable). The CPU is idle at 0.00 % usage.

Initial Checks

I made a few further checks before I continued to login via Remote Desktop, including several pings from my current location in South West England - typical response times are in the 50 - 60 millisecond range and seem to match the response times of the old server, which is to be expected, since they are located in the same data centre.

The system properties show the "Windows edition" as Windows Server Enterprise, Service Pack 1. The processor is an Intel Xeon CPU, E5520 @ 2.27 GHz (2 processors). There's also 1.00 GB of RAM, which corresponds to the Parallels Power Panel info. Since I started my Remote Desktop session and opened My Computer, looking back at the Power Panel, the free RAM has dropped to around 500 MB. I think this is due to my Windows session since I just logged in, and the Windows Server Initial Configuration Tasks window alone is using around 73 MB of RAM.

The Plesk page for the server is online as expected - this can be found at https://your_VPS_IP_address:8443. However as part of my efforts to reduce the RAM usage of the VPS, I'll be trying to uninstall Plesk from the system and use Remote Desktop instead for all my admin tasks.

It could be worth noting that there are traces of Microsoft SQL Server in the program files directories and the registry, which may cause problems when I attempt to install SQL Server 2008 Express. I will provide more details on this in a later post.