Second hand VPS Server Detection
VPS is more and more popular choice by webmaster for its unbeatable advantages over other hosting solutions. But how do you know if your server is brand new or secondhand product? Because more and more cheap VPS server service provided, it's necessary to identify what kind of server products we received.
Normally, a decent and high performance server always comes high costs because it's big investment to prepare all hardwares and virtualization platform. How is cheap vps server offered? it's either because of overselling on host server or simply secondhand products that're used by other clients before, they just load a new OS to offer you service. We have collected a list solutions to check what kind of server you work with.
Hardware specification
Most VPS server providers announce to have Raid 10 configured for host server to ensure the best security and performance. How do we know? We can do hdparm check over server disk I/O as below
hdparm install: yum install hdparm
Disk check: hdparm -t /dev/sda(your server disk device, it can be /dev/xvda or /dev/sda1 etc)
If it's Raid 10 disk, the reading speed should be above 100 MB/sec. If you can't get this speed, either your server is experiencing some problems or simply not Raid 10.
Http Load Testing
It's important to know how many concurrent connections your website can handle. There're lots of tools to use which is explained in website stress testing tools article. For simple and quick testing out, we highly suggest use webbench, a light weight but pretty powerful tool under linux. It can simulate 30000 requests to your site and report your server abilities.
download: http://home.tiscali.cz/~cz210552/webbench.html
Usage: webbench -c connections -t time URL
for example:
webbench -c 5000 -t 120 http://www.yoursite.com/
It will tell us the requests per second and data ammount. If you have multiple servers on hand, you can easily compare the http load abilities using this tool.
Overall Score testing
We highly suggest use UnixBench to get your VPS overall performance testing. The purpose of UnixBench is to provide a basic indicator of the performance of a Unix-like system. It will test your server overall performance based CPU, RAM, Hard disk and OS then provide a total score.
UnixBench documentation and downloads: https://code.google.com/p/byte-unixbench/
After above tests, you should have a basic understanding of your vps server configuration then determine if you should continue with the service. If you have ordered a enterprise vps server for business applications, it's necessary to do these tests because you're going to put your business there. Many server providers sell their space multiple times by the same configuration. That's the secret how they can still profitable via low price. If you do above tests on your hosting server, you will understand what kind products you received.
