My preference has been with the virtual private server in the dedicated vs. VPS debate, however sometimes I do wish I am on a dedicated server, where the resources are shared with no one but myself alone. Here is the evidence I have taken from one of my VPS a few weeks ago.

SliceHost has never failed to introduce unique features that impress me. They gave you console access via Ajaxterm, which allows you to rescue badly configured server over nothing but HTTPS. They have also recently introduced “Rescue Mode” for their VPS — another feature that you wish you never would need to use, but is super useful when you need it. It shuts down your VPS, reboots in a separate partition, and enables you to mount your VPS partition as /dev/sda1 for 90 minutes.

Being able to run PHP scripts and applications is probably one of the most obvious feature in shared web hosting today, but the actual process to make it fast and secure at the same time might not be that trivial.

I am actually writing this post in response to this thread at WHT, where web hosts discussed ways to fight back against those 200Gb oversold plans that are populating the shared hosting industry today. That thread went off-topic half way through when Matt Heaton of BlueHost and Kevin Martin of Pair Networks had a not-so-friendly discussion on whether to run PHP as CGI or as mod_php on servers.

Got a friend who has his personal website hosted on HostGator. I went there the other day, typed in an URL that points to a file that does not exist. Instead of Apache’s default plain vanilla 404 not found page, I got the following rendered inside my browser.