I just signed up with KnownHost yesterday, and bought one of their VPS hosting plans. I got the VS2 plan which is $40 a month ($35 + $5 for cPanel). It comes with 768 MB of RAM, 40 GB of space, and 2GB of bandwidth. Compare that with WiredTree (which I also have), where a similar plan costs $69 a month.
Setup time for my VPS account was about 3 hrs. You also get 2 private nameservers, so you can have nameservers like ns1.mysite.com and ns2.mysite.com. If you are a web hosting reseller, this makes your hosting company look more professional and hides the fact that you are actually a reseller.
My main purpose for using this KnownHost account was to transfer over one of my WordPress blogs. I did run into a few issues getting my account running smoothly, so I’m going to document some of the steps I had to take below. Fortunately, KnownHost support has been really good so far. I’ve sent 5 or 6 support tickets already, and they’ve all been answered within 15 minutes.
Getting Started with KnownHost
When your KnownHost account is setup, you should receive a welcome email with your Login information. You’ll get your private nameserver info, your cPanel WHM login info (if you added cPanel) and your Parallels Power Panel login info.
To get your cPanel working the first thing you should do is login to WHM. First create a package for yourself (Packages >> Add Packages). Then create a new account for yourself (Account Functions >> Create a New Account). In there, just put in your domain details, username, password, and the package you created.
For some reason, after doing this, I still had some problems logging into my cPanel. When I went to the url, I would get this message:
Internal Server Error
500
Could not fetch uid or gid for : root
It took me awhile to figure this out. It seems like my browser (Chrome) had cached something and was trying to login to cPanel as root. I eventually switched over to Firefox, and was able to login to my cPanel that way.
After getting my WordPress transferred over, I encountered one other issue. I was using the W3 Total Cache plugin on my site, and it was no longer working. Every time I tried to install it again, it would complain that it couldn’t create a folder it needed. I checked my permissions, and they looked fine.
I contacted KnownHost support about this issue. It turns out by default, PHP is running as a DSO on my server, and the WordPress plugins are running as the apache user. This is why they were having these permission issues. To resolve this issue, they had to enable suPHP on my server, which enables PHP scripts to run under the ownership of the account user. To check if suPHP is running on your server, you can login to WHM and go to Main >>> Service COnfiguration >> Configure PHP and SuExec >> PHP 5 Handler.
Anyway, I’m not sure that these are KnownHost specific issues, so I hope this info will help others. It was a good opportunity to test out the KnownHost support response times, and I have to say I’m pretty happy with them so far. I just switched over from another web hosting company where support requests were answered in hours, if not days. So sub 15 minute response times is pretty good.
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