Fivebean.com VPS - Initial Experience, Planned Ongoing Review

Fivebean.com VPS -

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Although the domain was registered in 4/15/08, I could find next to nothing on WHT or the ‘net in general in the way of reviews on FiveBean. Saw a lot of specials and things they have been running off and on at different venues and boards, but couldn’t find a review to save my life. I did search pretty thoroughly. No web cache on web.archive.org either.

So, I’ll be the first to post one (that I know of), with a special they are offering, it’s very affordable, if the service turns out to be good enough, then I have another node at a great price J. The more, the merrier. Win / Win 4 all.
(FiveBean also offers shared hosting, so not exclusively a VPS provider.)

Hardware nodes –
From their site:
“VPS Nodes are built with Intel Core2 Quad Processors, Premium SATA Disks and RAID Protection powered by CentOS 5.x and MoxieVM. Each VPS server is backed up daily and we provide 2 full backups to our customers.”

Although I never rely on provider’s backups, it’s good to see them offered as standard. Could come in handy.

They offer 5 plans; I ordered the middle-of-the road “Starter”. All VPSs appear to be OpenVZ based.

Ordered Plan -
512M / 1G burst
40G HDD
450G BW
1 IP
CentOS 5 for initial load

Initial order, small issue -
Placed order at about midnight, got my welcome email at 7:40 AM.
One issue was, I did not receive any emails from their ordering system, other than the PayPal-originating receipt. The emails were listed under the Client Area, so I still had access to read. Since I own and admin my own mail servers, I checked logs -
Emails from ordering system were sent from a non-FQDN domain.
From SMTP logfile:
RECEIVED: MAIL FROM:<fivebean@kona> SIZE=3560
Mail server rejected because of the incomplete domain.
This appeared to be an issue with the sign-up process only. All support ticket replies came from a FQDN. I described this problem in a support ticket, curios to see if they really do look @ and fix. Maybe on my second order?
Everything initially ordered during the process was delivered, with no follow-ups required to correct anything. That's a little rare, from my experiences.


They offer online chat support, but have not caught it online as of yet, although I haven’t checked before 9PM on any given day, so not a fair eval on that aspect. FWIW.

- On to the goodies -

Control panel -
Apparently, FiveBean previously used HyperVM, but has since disabled and rolled out their own self-spun VM manager, "moxieVM". It's a simple, yet effective, web interface that allows me to do everything I need to, and everything works. That's always a good plus!
moxieVM control panel contains the following:
VPS list facility / user profile control / pass reset
VPS Controls -- Reboot / Start / Stop / Rebuild OS / Set Reverse DNS
Report (simple) shows -- OS currently installed / Monthly BW Usage total / Current Memory Usage / Action Log of previous control commands

Noteworthy - when you select "reboot / start / stop" there is no confirmation, action is queued and executed immediately. Good info to know.

Rebuilds -
FiveBean offers 13 OS rebuild option w/ 6 Flavors - Ubuntu / Suse / Slackware / Fedora / Debian / CentOS, 32/64bit in most.
Reload of OS (From CentOS 5 to Fedora 10) took about 4 minutes. Note - keep your original root login password! On OS reload, the pass is reset to the original you receive in your VPS welcome email, NOT whatever you have currently changed it to. I can see this being an issue if it’s been a while since you have reloaded and end up digging out the old email. A little different than HyperVM.

Network -
Ping times are consistently 15-16ms from/to Austin, 21ms from/to Atlanta, 12-18ms from/to Kansas City, MO. Traceroute to node (69.162.118.226) puts them behind Limestone Networks in Dallas, Tx.
One thing I can report, their network seems to be very peppy. I've had a hard time hitting anything from / to the VPS with more than 20ms. I haven't seen a 30ms yet. From anywhere. An I have VPSs from coast to coast.

VPS / Initial Order-
Hostname was set properly right off the bat, both initially and on OS reloads.
Reverse DNS PTR self-set worked without having to put in a ticket, a first for sure! I just entered the rDNS PTR I required, waited about an hour, and it was set and propagated, ready to go. No muss, no fuss.
Although I haven't put any load on the system, the CLI is responding very fast, and pings / traces / nslookups are very quick (as stated above).
The only issue at all so far was the aforementioned order response email non-FQDN flurb. But, stuff happens. Small beans (pun intended).

AUP
No porn, excessive violence, hate, deception, illegal
IRC that causes no disturbances is allowed. I really prefer non-IRC networks, but they have a long lecture about it in the AUP, so it appears they watch activity pretty close.

Nuts n Bolts -

Benchmark
(benchmark is on newly loaded system, minimal install FC 10, no load)
------------------
INDEX VALUES
TEST BASELINE RESULT INDEX

Dhrystone 2 using register variables 376783.7 11243614.3 298.4
Double-Precision Whetstone 83.1 1239.4 149.1
Execl Throughput 188.3 5574.6 296.0
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 2672.0 127493.0 477.1
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 1077.0 48517.0 450.5
File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 15382.0 803836.0 522.6
Pipe-based Context Switching 15448.6 509724.8 329.9
Pipe Throughput 111814.6 1790127.7 160.1
Process Creation 569.3 16151.2 283.7
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) 44.8 1055.8 235.7
System Call Overhead 114433.5 1246883.8 109.0

=========
FINAL SCORE 270.6

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Conclusions – so far, so good. I’m actually pretty impressed with everything I’ve seen up to this point. I’m planning on putting the server under load as a backend node of a busy website’s load balancer. I’ll post follow ups as we go along.