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.

 

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