For those of you keeping up, I have been having server problems.  I finally have my server working properly, and along the way I have learned much about godaddy’s Virtual Dedicated Servers.  I am about to enlighten you as to what I’ve learned.

1.  The shortfalls of Godaddy Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS also known as VPS).
2. What was tried and why it failed (FreeBSD)

Section 1 – The shortfalls of Godaddy Virtual Dedicated Servers.

Godaddy’s VDS (The basic cheap package) claims to have everything you need to get your server up and running.  For the most part that is true.  My experience has been with Centos 5 and RHEL 7.  Being cheap that I am, I went with the free simple control panel.

So I ended up with about 12 domains (long story), Most of them see no traffic and never got set up, so I figure I’ll just throw a page up there and forward the traffic here.  I set up my website, hooked the forwards, and went to bed.  The next day I wake up, point IE to my website, and see a page cannot be found.  Hmm…  Turns out I can’t connect to it to service it either.  I had to log into Godaddy’s control panel and “Request a power cycle”.  A power cycle takes “Between 5 and 30 minutes” to complete but usually had my server back up and running within 10 minutes.

After doing this 3 times a week, suffering with a server that had the stability of an epileptic at a night club, I got pissed.  I gave Godaddy a call.  Godaddy told me that my server was using more than the 256 Megs of memory I purchased with my server, and that my best solution would be to upgrade.  What the hell, I thought the point of using linux to run a server was because it was small and lean and didn’t need a whole lot of memory to run, And this asshole tells me that my server is using more memory than in necessary to run 1 website that sees 25 hits a day?  The basic server I purchased to run 1 website (which is what it was designed for and was marketed as being capable of running so much more) was not even able to do that? This was unacceptable.

I started digging and my investigation revealed that my nice lean linux machine was using more than 200 Megs of ram to run the free “Simple Control Panel”.  The hell was Godaddy thinking. (I found a lot of information from http://www.colinmcnamara.com/why-godaddy-linux-virtual-dedicated-hosting-sucks-how-to-fix-it/ , gotta give credit where it’s due). 

Turns out that the control panel is coded in the memory hungry java. Saying Java is better because its cross platform compatible is like saying anal sex is better because its cross gender compatible.  So following the instructions in Colin’s blog, I was able to ssh into my server, Turn off Simple Control panel as well as tomcat, And all my problems went away.  For a little while.  I’m told tomcat is part of the problem, and very few people will ever need to use it (and you will hopefully know who you are), but when I reprovisioned my server to RHEL 7, Tomcat was available but not turned on so if your Linux ssh throws you an error when you try to disable it, you can probably safely ignore it.

You can do it with these commands (Colin’s blog goes into way more detail):
Log in to your favorite ssh software.  I use putty available at: http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty.exe because its small, quick, free, and its probably the only one you will ever need.  This is also the software Colin recommends in his blog, but I have been using it for years.  If you need better directions see Colin’s Blog, its easier than retyping everthing here.  I don’t recommend using the simple control panel ssh because it may crash on you when you disable simple control panel.  Not sure, haven’t tested that theory, but you never know.  Run the following commands (Ignore parenthesis):
su - root (puts you into super user mode aka the “root” user)
/etc/init.d/turbopanel stop (stops simple control panel)
/etc/init.d/tomcat55 stop (stops tomcat)
chkconfig turbopanel off (disables turbopanel from starting with the server)
chkconfig tomcat55 off (same thing but for tomcat).

Colin’s guide goes into installing a program called memhog that will clean up the memory used by turbopanel, but in theory a server restart will do the same.  The memhog method means you won’t have to restart your server.  If you want to install it type this into your ssh window:

yum install numactl (Installs memhog)
memhog 200m (runs memhog to clear up unused memory)

The reason Colin recommends installing memhog, its small, doesn’t stay running, and Colin says you can simply turn on Simple control panel when you need to use it.  The only caveat to this is that simple control panel will fill up your memory again.  Then you need to run memhog again.  I recommend a different solution.  Webmin.  Webmin is a different front end that doesn’t hog all your memory, and will allow you to administer your website quite easily.  With your ssh open (and still logged in), type:

rpm -i http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin-1.510-1.noarch.rpm

If you highlight the command, and hit copy, and right click on your Putty screen, putty will paste the command in there.  That small paragraph is 1 command.  RPM will install webmin, and fire it up.  The only difference is that when you need to log into your server, you change your port to 10000, instead of 9999.  For example 97.74.x.x:10000 instead of 97.74.x.x:9999 (which shows up when you log into simple control panel).

So now godaddy will stop crashing.  Excellent.  A few weeks later, my email stopped working, and it turned out that somehow my sendmail program had been deleted.  Maybe I got hacked, who knows.  So after spending 3 days trying to restore my email server, I gave up.  Apparently the email server files are included with Linux, but god help you if you lose them.

So I decided that since Godaddy’s server was sad to begin with, I would try something new and better: BSD.  BSD is unix, and is supposedly bulletproof.  It’s set it and forget it software.  I’m told installing it is a walk in the park.  I was also told configuring it was like trying to break out of prison with a toothpick: Once you have a hole in the wall you’re home free, but getting that hole there is gonna be a bitch.

This leads me to Section 2: What I tried and Why it failed.