When should you upgrade a VPS slice?
Posted on March 30th, 2017
You can upgrade or downgrade vps slices from the InterServer customer control panel itself. Let’s discuss some situations when you should upgrade a VPS Slice.
If you own a VPS from us then you may already know what is a VPS Slice. For those who don’t know, check the description below.
What is a VPS Slice?
In simple terms, it’s a bundle of system resources. It includes CPU, memory, disk space, and bandwidth.
1 VPS Slice = 1 Core CPU, 1GB Memory, 25GB Disk Space and 25GB bandwidth
More Details : https://www.interserver.net/vps
1) If you need more Disk Space
You can check the disk usage by going to “my computer” in a Windows VPS and by running “df -h” command in a Linux VPS.
A sample output of “df -h” command is given below.
[root@mail ~]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/ploop27056p1 74G 30G 40G 43% / devtmpfs 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /dev tmpfs 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 1.5G 280K 1.5G 1% /run tmpfs 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs 308M 0 308M 0% /run/user/0 tmpfs 308M 0 308M 0% /run/user/1001 tmpfs 308M 0 308M 0% /run/user/1004
If you see your disk usage over 90%, then you should consider adding additional slices to upgrade the disk space.
2) If you need more RAM
In Windows you can check the RAM usage by going to the “Performance” tab in “Task Manager”. For a linux vps, you can run the command “free -m” to display the used and available RAM space.
A sample output of “free -m” command is given below.
[root@mail ~]# free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 3072 549 1126 14 1396 2368 Swap: 3072 104 2967
If the available free RAM space is low then this will cause issues with your server and applications. Your website and applications will struggle to process and output data. This can sometimes result in downtime. You can avoid all of that by adding more slices to upgrade the vps’ RAM.
3) If you need more CPU processing power
For some applications you may also need more CPU processing power to ensure maximum output and performance. In Windows you can check the CPU usage by going to the “Performance” tab in “Task Manager”. For a linux vps, you can check this using top or the iostat command. Check the following link to learn how to use “iostat”
https://www.interserver.net/tips/kb/linux-iostat-command
4) If your application or website is very slow
If you notice your application or website running very slow then you may contact our support team for a server review. In most situations doing some server tweaks will resolve the issues. If that is not the case and poor server performance is due to resource shortage, our technical staffs will advise for an upgrade. You can also check the following link to know how a slow website can hurt your business.
https://www.interserver.net/blog/how-a-slow-website-can-slow-down-your-business
5) Web traffic is increasing
If web traffic to your website is increasing , then make sure you have enough vps resources to support that. More traffic means more resource usage. Adding another slice won’t be a bad idea. If you are interested to learn how to increase your website traffic, you can check the following link.
https://www.interserver.net/blog/five-tips-to-drive-traffic-to-your-website
6) User Beancounters showing fail counts
Note : This is related to OpenVZ vps. If your vps is running on any other virtualization, you may ignore this.
The User Beancounters are inevitable parameters of containers. They are as important because they will affect the server performance if the limit is reached. I suggest you check the following link to learn more about User Beancounters.
https://www.interserver.net/tips/kb/user-beancounters-ubc-parameters/
Upgrading the vps with an additional slice will increase the User Beancounters limits.
For your reference, I’m pasting a sample output of “cat /proc/user_beancounters” below.
# cat /proc/user_beancounters Version: 2.5 uid resource held maxheld barrier limit failcnt 123: kmemsize 836919 1005343 2752512 2936012 0 lockedpages 0 0 32 32 0 privvmpages 4587 7289 49152 53575 0 shmpages 39 39 8192 8192 0 dummy 0 0 0 0 0 numproc 20 26 65 65 0 physpages 2267 2399 0 2147483647 0 vmguarpages 0 0 6144 2147483647 0 oomguarpages 2267 2399 6144 2147483647 0 numtcpsock 3 3 80 80 0 numflock 3 4 100 110 0 numpty 1 1 16 16 0 numsiginfo 0 1 256 256 0 tcpsndbuf 0 0 319488 524288 0 tcprcvbuf 0 0 319488 524288 0 othersockbuf 6684 7888 132096 336896 0 dgramrcvbuf 0 8372 132096 132096 0 numothersock 8 10 80 80 0 dcachesize 87672 92168 1048576 1097728 0 numfile 238 306 2048 2048 0 dummy 0 0 0 0 0 dummy 0 0 0 0 0 dummy 0 0 0 0 0 numiptent 10 16 128 128 0
You can always upgrade the VPS Slices from your InterServer customer control panel itself. If you are having any trouble doing so or if you need any assistance, please our support department.