Got an old VPS running CentOS 5. Looking for a new VPS.

ThePokerBank

New member
So I set up a VPS about 10 years ago with a company called ServInt. Solid service, never had any problems. They were recently bought out by a bigger company called LeaseWeb. No problems here either to be honest, but it's not the company I originally chose.

Anyway, when I got the server I had zero sysadmin skills, so combination of CentOS/WHM/CPanel worked well. In fact I didn't even know what Linux distro it was running.

I'm pretty good at (and enjoy) setting up Ubuntu servers now, but I'm nervous about touching this old server for fear of breaking it because I'm not familiar with CentOS. I basically just went to upgrade from PHP5.4 (I want 7.4), which is when I realized how old the OS was.

Upgrading from CentOS 5 (yes, 5) doesn't appear to be a simple option, so if I'm going to put the effort in to upgrade, I thought I might as well get new VPS and start from scratch with my distro of choice... Ubuntu.

So I'm in the market for a new VPS.

I'm looking for something reliable (I want to trust it completely) and US-based (current VPS is in US, and I don't want to rock the boat). Also, I slightly prefer small/medium hosts as opposed to big corporate hosting solutions. Price isn't a big deal, but that doesn't mean I want to pay top dollar for the sake of it.

My current server uses about 500GB bandwith/month, and only needs about 2GB storage. No big CPU requirements, it's just an apache webserver.

What do you recommend?
 
Last edited:
I've gone the route of updating old CentOS servers.. it's not fun. It's usually so much cleaner to just format completely and start a fresh install. So the idea of moving to a new machine is a good one. Besides, there's probably better RAM etc on a newer machine (unless your old host has been replacing DDR and SSD drives etc - most don't)

As far as who to go to, there's several listed in the marketplace here in the forums, so I'd check them out.

Myself, I use Knownhost, and have done so for over 10 years. We had hundreds of instances with them too - no complaints.

As far as your request specs, they fit those without issue - each come with DirectAdmin or cPanel/WHM if you want that.

Since they're Fully Managed, they'll do all the work for you too if you don't want to keep playing around in shell etc. I personally did everything on my end except for Kernel updates (which was automated on their end).
 
Most Linux distributions you can't really update to the next version. I didn't even do that with Windows. It much easier to backup and reinstall and then restore your backups.
 
I must agree with LittleCreek that is your best option at this moment. Unless someone has a better idea.
 
So I set up a VPS about 10 years ago with a company called ServInt. Solid service, never had any problems. They were recently bought out by a bigger company called LeaseWeb. No problems here either to be honest, but it's not the company I originally chose.

Anyway, when I got the server I had zero sysadmin skills, so combination of CentOS/WHM/CPanel worked well. In fact I didn't even know what Linux distro it was running.

I'm pretty good at (and enjoy) setting up Ubuntu servers now, but I'm nervous about touching this old server for fear of breaking it because I'm not familiar with CentOS. I basically just went to upgrade from PHP5.4 (I want 7.4), which is when I realized how old the OS was.

Upgrading from CentOS 5 (yes, 5) doesn't appear to be a simple option, so if I'm going to put the effort in to upgrade, I thought I might as well get new VPS and start from scratch with my distro of choice... Ubuntu.

So I'm in the market for a new VPS.

I'm looking for something reliable (I want to trust it completely) and US-based (current VPS is in US, and I don't want to rock the boat). Also, I slightly prefer small/medium hosts as opposed to big corporate hosting solutions. Price isn't a big deal, but that doesn't mean I want to pay top dollar for the sake of it.

My current server uses about 500GB bandwith/month, and only needs about 2GB storage. No big CPU requirements, it's just an apache webserver.

What do you recommend?

Geez, I have to say welcome back to Hosting Discussion. It's been a long, long dry spell :D I second Conor's recommendation.
 
I've got to back some of the previous answers, CentOS upgrades are never any fun and there is almost always SOMETHING that goes wrong somewhere along the line. If you don't catch it soon enough, you've got a really long day on your hands.

A fresh start with restoring any backed-up files, etc, is likely to be the simplest solution in the long run.

Best of luck and welcome back to the wonderful world of System administration and hosting! :)
 
Top