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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
I'm going to use this thread as a my home for an ongoing review of wholesaleinternet.com
Before Signing Up
I've been stalking wholesaleinternet for a few months now, mainly because they are the closest datacenter to my house with reasonable prices. In fact, they seem to actually be one of the few datacenters that price their servers at a level that will make them a profit, while still beating everyone else out there.
Before actually signing up with them I wanted to test their datacenter, mainly ping times, etc... So instead of getting a dedicated server with them, I went through a few other companies who colo with them.
Over the past three months there was only one issue, a bad switch. However, they had it fixed as fast as they could and kept everyone updated via WHT.
So after that I decided it was time to get a server with them.
Initial Contact
Aaron (the owner) was quick to respond to my emails and has always been very helpful. He worked with me on a custom setup, which is quite frankly, the best deal I have ever received on a server, ever.
The Setup
They work fast. I had them install CentOS with partitioning for OpenVZ and RAID1... There was only a couple of hours between the time I paid and the time my server was online.
The server is exactly what I ordered (in fact, it's more than I ordered), which is rare for me. Maybe I just have bad luck, but I seem to get misconfigured servers from other datacenters and it takes hours/days to get it fixed.
I was at the planet for the last several years and decided to make the switch based on reviews on this forum and talking with their reps.
First off, Mike with the sales live chat was VERY helpful and answered all of my questions.
Answered questions about power, # of uplinks, average hardware replacement time etc. All were satisfactory to me.
In the end we went with the Celeron 352/2 GB ram/80GB SATA for 64.99 a month. I will be saving 25 a month off my dedicated server over the planet. A killer deal! Plus we have double the ram now. I couldn't convince my partner to go the X2 4000+ route for 10 more a month . We really don't need the power.
Initial impressions of the client panel are good (rokstar or something). Now for them to turn the power on .. 15 minutes and counting..
I searched around for hours and found ones close but not quite what I wanted for close to the same price. I finally placed my order at around 4:00pm CDT and had the forms filled out and faxed in by 4:30pm CDT
Yesterday I got no contact except for a reply from billing confirming they received my forms(in reply to an email I sent them).
This morning I had an email from billing stating they couldn't read my handwriting on my credit auth form(I have bad handwriting). I resent the form with the information typed in. I found out later that this delayed the setup of my server. (Hour 53 now)
I will say their Live Chat was not very helpful nor was phone support, nor my account manager. I got no response from my account manager, and live chat kept telling me to conatct my account manager and phone support directed me to email sales@iweb.com instead of jeanluc@iweb.com. In desperation I started scouring google and came across WHT and saw some of Martin(atchooo)'s response to other customers problem and was impressed, so I followed the link to his blog and found his (creative) email address. I sent him an email detailing the issues I was having. Within 10-20 minute he had responded letting me know he would look into it, about 10 minute after that I got this response ....
While talking to as many people as I could find and comparing prices I decided to go with webnx.
I am currently hosted with iweb but my current p4 is getting slaughtered by my users so I needed to upgrade.
First result was I clicked live chat and asked to talk to support to help me pick out my server, I talked to dan for probbly 3 hrs discussing options and different setups that we could do.
I decided on : Dual opteron 254 ( 2 processors 2 cores (one processor is faster then our current setup)) 2x 146gb 10k rpm scsi drives (mirrored) 4gb ram
I am just waiting on my bill now but if this impression I received from the company based on Dan then I am sure I will be happy, I will post next week with setup time, and then next month on uptime.
I recently picked up an account with Downtown Host to host my dad's site and wanted to start a thread that I will update as time goes by. I know there's a "honeymoon period" with most hosts and sometimes, like my wife (LOL.. kidding *hides*), things change as things progress..but I have been very impressed.
So, to get things started...
Ordering Process
Easy as it usually is these days. Although the space isn't really needed, I picked up their Bronze plan for 6 months and it worked out to be about $50 USD thanks to a handy coupon. This is the first time I have ever had enough preliminary confidence in a host to go for 6 months up front (outside of getting a ridiculous deal) and I hope to not to be disappointed and regret the decision.
DTH does use a phone call fraud verification system on new orders which I appreciate. I think it shows that they are proactive in sorting out bad purchases and is one of the nicer fraud-detection interfaces I have come across. I believe Wirenine is the only other host I have used that employs a similar system.
Jorge (Jedito on WHT) was very helpful in the ordering process which, again, I appreciate and was pro-active in helping me getting me on board quickly even going so far as to drop me a line welcoming me aboard.
Initial Transfer, Etc.
Once again, very easy. There were a few hiccups that were issues on the previous host's side in terms of creating cPanel back ups so things could get moved over. Both techs were extremely helpful and kept me updated throughout the process, notifying me of even the slightest issue (again, none on their side) in getting files moved over for two domains, some of which included add-on domains.
One of the sites I moved over included a wordpress blog that was previous its own account under a reseller plan so I had a question regarding the process of switching over the MySQL database information to ensure the blog worked off the tip. Again, DTH was very helpful and gave me instructions on what I needed to do to make sure there was no interruption in serving the blog. They certainly didn't have to help me with the changes so it was really nice of them to do so.
Performance
In a word - fast. Once the nameservers switched over for the main site (cincihost-dot-com), I entered the address and *bam*. No lagged delays with larger-sized images, they just popped up. Previously, the page loaded somewhat "in order". Not anymore. I hit "Enter" and it was there. Nice.
cPanel loads fast and in checking the server load here and there, it is always below 1.00.
Support
As I have alluded to above, support is fantastic. The first ticket I submitted took a bit to be responded to which was worrying. Who knows what happened, but it was responded to, oddly, shortly after I mentioned it to someone. From that point, support has been lightning fast. As I think happens a lot of times, I have submitted a few tickets in order to get everything set up and going and they have all been responded to or updated within 15 to 20 minutes. I recently submitted a ticket to have my cPanel theme changed (it default to a RVSkin which I do not like) and it was resolved in, literally, one minute. Fastest support I have ever experienced.
Summation
Really the only thing I didn't like was that cPanel loads the green RVSkin which seems cartoony to me and I much prefer the original x3 theme. This was quickly changed so no biggie.
Everything else has been absolutely fantastic as you can probably surmise.
I look forward to being hosted with DTH and have a good feeling that my father and I will be with them for a long time to come.
Thanks to Jorge, Sebastian and everyone at Downtown Host!
I've been building a new services over the last two month and needed a server to host it. I've initially ordered a server at an other provider (which will be getting a very bad review shortly) but after three weeks I still didn't get the server.
While desperately browsing these forums looking for a replacement I noticed a few posts by a server.lu staff member, I've heard some good things about them in the past so I decided to send them a pm with the question if they could deliver a server with the specs I needed. Within 5 minutes I got a response (it was past 00:00 at that point, talk about service). And I think it was about 30 minutes later my server was up and running.
And as an added bonus it was a quad-core instead of the dual-core advertised. What the other provider failed to do in 3 weeks server.lu had done in a matter of minutes.
To see if that was just a lucky coincidence I ordered a 2nd server yesterday and again it was setup with a few minutes.
Server.lu is off to a very good start, my 2 month review will tell you if they can keep it up.
I will be posting a month review after my 1st months of service. But for now, here is my initial review of Wiredtree.com
This is under my domain of aps-enterprises.co.uk which you can tell is on the Wiredtree network. OK here goes.
Placed my order on Saturday 21st as Level3hostings main site went off line and I got a really bad feeling that my VPS would go down too, a feeling which proved all too true.
After a little while, I got the Fraud check phonecall. Although I couldnt hear them, James Webb could hear me, that was quite amusing....
Sunday 22nd, got my VPS Setup. Usually they said it would take a lot quicker to get setup, but they did have a network maintainence for about 3hrs. I was stil happy.
7.16am GMT time, my VPS with LEVEL3HOSTING went down *thank god for backups!! hooray I learnt my lesson*
The VPS I ordered is a good spec and any support tickets I had to raise, all were answered and resolved in an average of 15mins!! Yep! 15mins. I used to pay an external company each month, and they resolved stuff in 24hrs. How cool are they?
So anyway, VPS is great, Uptime has been 100% one can only expect. And Support is by far, one of the best I have seen.
Only been in business with them for my 5th day, so far they will be keeping me as a customer and if I have to upgrade (which I know one day I will), then I will be ordering any upgrades through them.
This is only my initial review and I will post a 1 month one too.
Which I reckon will be a positive one, just like this one is.
Thank you Wiredtree for making my life easier for my hosting business. As they say you do get what you paid for, and believe me the services I have had from some people that saying is very true, however you guys.... I think your prices are cheap for the amount of work you actually do.
Keep it up, and I hope this review makes a few customers for you.
I signed up with FutureHosting for a managed Linux VPS. I'm about a week into going "live" with the nameservers switched over and am very happy! I was going to wait a month before posting but these guys have been so patient and thorough with the tickets I've submitted I wanted to give my initial thoughts
Overall 9.5/10 Great Host. Very patient and thorough support. Very Good response time. Surprisingly low pricing. I highly recommend for your VPS. Very Good response time on Support BUT no phone support
Signup 9/10 Signup was straightforward. I think they have a higher volume than normal with their promotion. It took a bit of time to set up the VPS (under 10-12 hours) but I'll take a few hours' delay if I'm getting a good product/support for months/years.
Speed 10/10 They publish their speedtests here [url]I just downloaded a couple test files (5-20MB each) from my VPS and I get to about 1.1 MB/sec. At that point it may be a limit from my ISP (FYI speedtest.net gives my download 14000 kbps = 1.7MB/s). No issues on speed! : Support : Overall: 9/10 Speed: 9/10 Thoroughness: 10/10 'Other': 8/10 Very good response. For NORMAL PRIORITY issues, within 5-30 minutes I get a response that someone's attending to it and soon thereafter I have a resolution. Some tickets have taken longer but they haven't been critical issues so it's really okay. You can prioritize your tickets as CRITICAL or SERVER DOWN and I'm sure they're even faster.
They have gone back and forth with me and been patient with my questions (I've never administered a VPS before) and I GREATLY appreciate that. I've had many tickets with them and other hosts may have just said "this is really not an issue with the VPS" and left me to learn it myself-- FutureHosting has been very helpful.
Sometimes (probably due to my own vagueness/lack of knowledge), my actual request/issue is unclear. I think this is where phone support would be very helpful; it's not currently offered. (and this is why Other gets an 8/10)
Reliability 10/10 I've had no downtime so far! My nameservers/DNS switch took longer than expected but that has nothing to do with FH.
Pricing 10/10 With their DoubleRAM/Bandwidth+30% off OR 50% deals, Pricing is great I think. Others had recommended WiredTree to me given their lightning quick response times. I'm sure they're amazing but they were also almost double the price. FutureHosting has had very good support at a great value IMHO
I'm not sure how you 'validate' my domain/review but just let me know and I'll PM you the information on my domain.
This is an initial review of WebNX.com. I was hosting my personal sites on a reseller account at Eleven2 which had started feeling kinda slow, so I was in the hunt for a low cost dedicated or a mid range VPS.
After scouring a lot of places for quotes, I finally came across WebNX's thread on WHT on the 17th of March.
The specs looked to be amazing, and their Value level VPS would fit right into my budget, and match my requirements. I fired an email to sales, and went on to their site to see live support online.
I spoke to their rep on live chat, and I was given a signup link in minutes (it was 11PM PST), and I was told that my VPS would be setup in a few hours.
And as expected, I had the root logins for the server, and HyperVM within 4 hours.
I logged into SSH, and ran cat /proc/cpuinfo and I was really amazed to see that the server really had 16 cores
I then moved my cpanel backups from my old host, and the speeds were really good.
Even though the server is unmanaged, their support rep helped me to move a file that was around 5GB in size, that was constantly failing during cPanel's remote SCP backup feature. They went to the extent of downloading the file for me and uploading it so that I could restore it.
It has only been 4 days, but I am extremely overjoyed with the level of service I've received so far. Infact, I feel like I'm cheating them by paying them so less ($15 for the first month, and $59.99/mo after that)
I've been through many many hosts and server providers in the past few years, and this is the only second review I've ever written on WHT. (The previous one was more than a year ago).
I've been with the host (dmehosting.com) for just 1 month now but I decided to give an initial review as I am pretty impressed with their support.
All the websites went offline and the HTTPD would not start even after manual reboot, but they provided extended support and did a complete rebuild of PHP configuration file.
Initially, when I saw their prices frankly I was not expecting or relying on great service (usually the case for low price) but I was quite surprised that they balanced it pretty well.
I would recommend them for anyone looking for very cheap servers with good support.
Got a great deal on a simple server for a side project. Paying $59.99 a month for the server which makes it very affordable for medium-size projects. General:
* Setup Fee: Free * Celeron 1.7 GHz CPU * 512 MB RAM (upgradeable to 2GB) * 60 GB IDE Hard Drive * 500 GB Monthly Transfer * 5 IP addresses* * Premium Set-Up Options
The sign-up was quick and easy and I was sent an authorization email. I authorized and was able to immediately log into my account.
I processed the order a bit late at night so the next morning I received a call on my cell from my personal tech rep saying the server was already up and running (they said it would take three day, more like 8 hours)
He offered any assistance to help me get up and running and gave me a direct line to his phone in case of anything. Then he emailed his contact info and an introduction to my e-mail as I requested.
So far I am very pleased with the setup and the individualized attention, although I may not require it, it is very comforting to know it is there.
First impressions mean a lot to me and Aplus.net's first impression is stellar to say the least.
Hope this helps, I will be posting a review a bit down the line on how it progresses.
I another thread recently I done a 5 year review for another provider hover circumstance changed and I took on a couple of Gigenet servers ( relatively high end)
Sales were extremely efficient working with me to achieve what I needed at a price I was comfortable with, replies were fast and concise so I ended up with 2 new machines and backup service.
Normally I don't need a lot of support and for the first few weeks nothing bar rDNS set ups - However I ran into some serious post migration issues over the past few days that had me stumped, support has been some of the best I have ever received both in speed and efficiency -
Anyway I sincerely hope I will be coming back to this thread in 5 years time to update it.
After considering and comparing VPS offers from Future Hosting, Knownhost, Wiredtree, and Liquidweb, I went ahead and ordered from Future Hosting.
I'll post my initial impressions, and try to update the thread over time.
I currently have a VPS at Godaddy, plus shared hosting at Godaddy, 1and1, and Namecheap.
My objectives were to get away from Godaddy VPS, set up with a 'better' provider, and consolidate sites.
I am fairly technically adept, though not an expert. My requirements are for hosting appx. 25 sites currently, with perhaps another 15-25 to be added over the next 12 months.
Most are low volume, a few are low-to-mid volume. Nothing fancy, primarily informational sites and affiliate sales sites (WP and Xsitepro), and some direct ecommerce.
I focused on the 4 providers mentioned above based on recommendations and reviews here and elsewhere. My main concerns are reliability and price.
After comparing plans and the specials listed on the 'Webhosting Offers' board, I settled on Future Hostings "Titanium" managed VPS offer. The special offer they listed was for 50% off lifetime cost.
Through live chat, I spoke with Nick to ask some specific questions. He was patient and helpful each of the 3-4 times I came back with questions.
One question I asked was how long it would take to get provisioned. He quoted me at under 12 hours - this was also mentioned on the "Offers" thread, specifically for the current special.
The "unspecial" price was $84.95 for 1Gb RAM, 650Gb bandwidth, and 50Gb disk space, with cPanel. I added Fantastico for $3.95. After the coupon code, I'll be paying $46.42 / month.
I put in the order at 10:04am. Registration was activated at 10:50am. Cpanel, Virtuozzo, firewall, etc. installed
I have several unmanaged Xen-based VPSes with a company that I've for the most part been very pleased with for the past couple years. I recently got an email from them saying that the physical server my VPS was on needed some components replaced and that the VPS would be "briefly unavailable" on a Saturday morning to do so.
Now, my definition of "briefly unavailable" is a few minutes, maybe 5 minutes max. I assumed that they would migrate the VPSes to a backup physical server while they fixed the other one, then migrate them back afterwards. In fact, I thought that Xen was capable of doing this in real-time with no downtime.
But the VPS was down for over an hour, so they obviously just shut down the box with the VPSes running. Because of the nature of my website, that particular Saturday was very inconvenient for me to have extended downtime. I was rather upset and contacted them to let them know, but they seemed rather indifferent and suggested that I look into upgrading to their redundant/failover services.
So my question is, am I being unreasonable to expect that *planned* downtime be limited to a couple minutes, or is it normal for companies to just take the servers down while they perform the maintenance? I thought that real-time migration to a different server was one of the benefits of virtual servers and I was surprised that they didn't take advantage of it.
I had decided to transfer 1 server into Hivelocity. It was a low $200s server with Hivelocities Platinum magagement plan. I was attracted to the pricing and the options available to configure my server how I wanted. I also liked the fact that they are somewhat local to where I live.
I had placed the server order with Drew. The server was delivered to me in 4 days, I was not in any rush so I did not mind. We started the migration process and went with out a problem until we went live. According to the tech the hard drive cable was bad and was replaced within 2 hours. These things happen and I still was not upset.
I was thinking to take advantage of the annual pricing offered and bring over the other servers until one morning I get flooded with phone calls chats and emails. I immediately try to log in the server to no avail so I contact Hivelocity. I was then told to contact the abuse department, well the abuse department does not take phone calls so then I was to told to log in a ticket.
What had happened was 1 of the hundreds of accounts hosted on the server recieved a copywright complaint and the server would not go back online until deleted and a ticket respond. I always comply with any complaint however I would appreciate at least a few hours to resolve, rather them an immediate disconnection. When you sell shared hosting you will always have a few accounts that are bad. No hosting company is immune to this. The server went back online 2 hours later.
Similar scenarios happened 2 more times with excessive down time in the first month that I was with them. Needless to say after talking several times with the GM Steve, I learned that he promises you one thing and either does another thing or does nothing as promised. For ex: will call you or will give a few hours to resolve any future complaints.
To compile further worries I learned that Hivelocity was terminating servers with out allowing transfer, including one host that was in business over 10 years. I do not know the non-bias details of those scenarios but I do know those things do not happent at the Planet, Softlayer or any other major datacenter, otherwise it would have been posted all over the net as was with Hivelocity.
In closing, my impression of the place was that their servers are ok, the bandwith is a bit spotty, the techs are ok, albeit one being a smart ass, the GM is a great speaker and the abuse guy is trigger happy. I do love the Hivelocity banners though.
It's too bad as I thought I had found a company that can save me alot of money however it ended costing me much more with loosing good clients.
We bought a VU200 VPS two days ago since we want to have a server in a stable environment mainly for our web site and email. We run a small Information Security consulting firm in the Silicon Valley.
Our experience with Zone.net has been a total disaster!
Zone.net installed a very bare CentOS 4; when we tried to use yum to install Dovecot IMAP we got a series of errors due to some missing libraries! Not a good sign. We contacted customer support and after they complained that this is an unmanaged server (like it is our fault they don't know how to install a stable system) they eventually agreed to install imap for us. If they installed a solid system in the first place we wouldn't have this problem . After we received an email from them saying that imap was installed, we login into the system and sure enough imap was not intalled! What a joke.
We then decided to reinstall the VPS from the Virtuozzo panel, since we figured out that these people at Zone.net are incompetents. The new installed system was even more bare: no yum , no imap, nothing. We called support again and ask to have access to the CentOS distribution via NFS for example. We don't want necessarily to install yum or other packages using rpmfinder, which would not be very clean; nor we want to have to upload a ton of rpm packages to the server, which would be a huge waste of our time. We talked to Jeffrey about it and he came up with a bunch of excuses why this is not possible, and why it is the way it is since this is a an unmanaged system. It was clear from the conversation that this yahoo is incompetent and he is just a button pusher. Furthermore he was unwilling to help whatsoever.
We have taken this matter to our credit card company and have them reverse the charges that Zone.net posted on our account and barred them to post any future charge on our account.
I recently transferred to Knownhost after my previous host ask me to leave their server because my websites eats 35% of their system, not the bandwidth and not the diskspace but the CPU. I have several clients running SMF forums with less than a hundred users at the same time.
After days of searching through the pages of WHT and through the suggestions of other members for me to get a VPS, I signed up with Knownhost.com. That is after asking them a lot of question regarding VPS and their packages, AUP and TOS. Pre-sale is fast, chat support answered all my questions with precise information and the same goes with their sales when I emailed them.
Since I don't know anything about VPS, I asked a lot of question ranging from stupid to more stupid question. Should I delete incremental backup or full backup ? what is Apache backup ? Can I delete Apache archive ? Can my client run mod-rewrite ? What is wrong with their .htaccess ? What DNS entry should I change for wildcard? What should I do to fix system resource problem as it reached 35.92% ? As you will see, all this questions and the other questions that I throwed to them were answered in a very professional and precise manner. I must admit that I am really impressed on how they handled my problems and how they explain everything that I need to know. This may seem small issues to others, but for a newbie on VPS like me it is a great help. They are not just simply efficient, but also very effective in delivering the solution. All the help that I need was given to me to run the VPS from scratch, me having no knowledge about it. Honestly, at first I thought they were trained to be polite, but it seems the support are really polite in nature. Not like other support I encountered from other host that were trained to be polite yet their evil nature goes out when you asked something unusual and off their manual and they can't solve it. It's been more than a week now, but everything is running smoothly. I may have had a few downtime but loss is immaterial for everything is being resolved in reasonable time. Reasonable in a way that minor problem are resolved instantly while major problems are carefully evaluated to give not just work around but rather a solution to the cause of the problem. I experienced this when they fixed the problem of my PHP configuration that conflicts with the memory requirement of SMF and also regarding the wildcard DNS that my client need.
I can't tell how long Knownhost.com support will be like this, but as long as I got the same quality of service from them, then I will stay.
I saw more than 35% usage from virtouzzo panel and it is indeed a spike.
In the event that the quality of support change, I'll look for this thread and post it here.
I went there for the low prices to startup my Shoutcast station. At $3 a month, it sounded too good to be true. I got my service, and the owner, seemed like a nice guy. He was very helpful, and was eager to help me get started. This was back in March. The first half of my stent there was great, however, in the last half, downtimes and even a data loss was getting on my nerves. I saw some really personal issues and arguments in the IRC server about the owner and staff, and even some back talk and really personal stuff that I wish I never had heard.
Because of the downtime, the owner did provide me with some free service and features. In these times, I was itching to leave, but the owner lured me back in with something better.
In this time, the service was 'okay', no real big complaints, I was even promoted to an IRCop, on the server.
Four things happened.
1) There was an incident in the chatroom with a regular joke we have done may times was taken really the wrong way. (I did not use my IRCop powers when this happened)
2) After a long outage (last night from 'this' post date), I was the only human on the irc server. In order for me to ask the owner what happened, I silenced a eggdrop bot by banning it from the main room. This was so I can get a new message notification when a real person enters the room. The bot posted every 2min, and it was at 2am in the morning.
3) I actually found a pretty big security hole in the control panel, the owner thanked me yesterday, and was furious the next.
4) because of the top three things, the owner basically got extremely mad and took away my IRCops.
Those 4 things basically were the last pieces of trash I could take. Yes, I forgot to unban the bot I mentioned in #2, but is that a good reason to get me out? Tonight, after a somewhat heated discussion with the owner, my account was instantly closed, all http/ftp pipes closed. I am very lucky I saw the owner start to fall into this cycle he seems to do, I had a full backup of the space I had.
In a nut shell, I would highly advise people NOT to use Maximum-Hosting. If you want low prices, frequent downtime, and the possibility your data could be gone in an instant, this is the host for you!
I can only hope no one else falls into the nightmare I have had to put up with for cheap hosting.
I've been with Blurstorm for 2+ years and I can say alot of good thing about the company and support. I even gave them a 5 out of 5 of webhostingjury and went as far as to say I would give them 10 out of 5, so you can imagine how happy I WAS with their service until this past week.
I has been an absolute hell. First the server kept blocking my ip and locking my session, when I would try and upload files with filezilla. They suggested to try a different ftp software which I did and it worked. At first I thought it was my computer/isp/router, so I tried it from my friend computer, same thing. And by the way, I never had this problem before. So I didn't make a big deal out of it, even though I prefer filezilla.
Now a couple of days ago, seems every time I would browse the pages or try and use the admin section the site would go down, or at least that's what I thought. After sending 8 hours going back and forth with support(Robert) through their support ticket system, because there is not live chat, Robert tells me there is nothing else they can do because they dont see any errors happening and I would have to pay a 3rd party monitoring service to find out what the problem is.
I mean I completely understand that if they cant find the problem but the site was working couple of days ago and I havent done anything different, so something must of happened on their end. Also I uploaded the site onto a friends server with a different hosting company and the site works perfectly with no problems.
Now being left high and dry with no help from Blurstorm, I did a couple of more test and found out that the site was not down but was blocking my ip and locking my sessions and the only way around it was for to renew my ip and to try again, but that would only help me for a couple of mins before it locked it again. Again, I also tried it from my friends computer and same thing. So I know for a Fact that it has to be from Blurstorm's end. I told that the server was blocking my ip and locking my session and haven't heard from them for over 16 hours, which is horrible customer service compared to the way they were before.
The main reason I stayed with blurstorm was for their support and quick response and I've referred them a boat load of business, and this was not the first time i've had problems with the server and support but I didnt make a big deal out of it and from now on no more referrals.
Well there is my review, sorry it's a little lengthy but just wanted to give an indepth review.
Second part - need suggestions for new hosting
From what I've gathers from searching that are reliable
precision effect jaguarpc innohosting
which would you recommend from those or any others?
And my site is based on joomla 1.5 + virtuemart so it should work with it.
For the last month I've had problems with my VPS being blacklisted, and it always seems to be around the same time of day.
Anyway, the VPS is managed, but it's a right pain the backside getting support to deal with the problem for me and sort it out. I get answers like "Its a PHP script", and when I ask which script they say they can't find out.
After getting advice from people on this forum, I asked support to setup exim so that it recorded the folder of any scripts sending out mail, but when I run grep so show any exim_mainlog entries with cwd= there is very little appearing appart from genuine mails being sent by contact forms on websites.
I managed to get evidence of a mail which caused the server to be blacklisted and sent this to support, who said the mails are being send via header injection on contact scripts, so I've got through the contact scripts and changed them, but again, still blacklisted.
I may be wrong here, but surely if someone was doing mail injection then I would be receiving copies of the mail myself as the website mails me with the enquiry, and also surely the exim_mainlog would so the folder containing the script as sending mails...but it doesnt.
I'm completely lost here, somehow mail is being sent from the server, whether it be via a script or what, but I can't(and neither can support) determine the exact script that is sending mail.
Here is a snippet of the exim_mainlog from around the time the evidence mail was sent.
Code: Aug 25 21:59:40 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: checking message <16291601c7e75a$d5a016e0$0d4cb34c@ALLEN> for thegran:32010 Aug 25 21:59:46 awt spamd[23731]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 47366 Aug 25 21:59:46 awt spamd[23731]: spamd: setuid to libraifa succeeded Aug 25 21:59:46 awt spamd[23731]: spamd: checking message <494307824222.548029453854@flcjn.net> for libraifa:32006 Aug 25 21:59:48 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: identified spam (17.1/5.0) for thegran:32010 in 7.7 seconds, 1050 bytes. Aug 25 21:59:48 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: result: Y 17 - BAYES_99,DATE_IN_PAST_06_12,FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK,INVALID_MSGID,RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET,RCVD_IN_PBL,RDNS_DYNAMIC,STOX_REPLY_TYPE,URIBL_BLACK,URIBL_RHS_DOB,URIBL_SBL scantime=7.7,size=1050,user=thegran,uid=32010,required_score=5.0,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=47347,mid=<16291601c7e75a$d5a016e0$0d4cb34c@ALLEN>,bayes=1.000000,autolearn=spam Aug 25 21:59:48 awt spamd[28500]: prefork: child states: IB Aug 25 21:59:52 awt spamd[23731]: spamd: identified spam (12.3/2.5) for libraifa:32006 in 6.4 seconds, 6742 bytes. Aug 25 21:59:52 awt spamd[23731]: spamd: result: Y 12 - AXB_XMID_1212,BAYES_60,EXTRA_MPART_TYPE,HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_04,HTML_MESSAGE,MIME_HTML_MOSTLY,MPART_ALT_DIFF,RCVD_IN_PBL,RCVD_IN_XBL,RDNS_NONE scantime=6.4,size=6742,user=libraifa,uid=32006,required_score=2.5,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=47366,mid=<494307824222.548029453854@flcjn.net>,bayes=0.654621,autolearn=no Aug 25 21:59:52 awt spamd[28500]: prefork: child states: II Aug 25 21:59:53 awt pop3d: LOGIN, user=andrew@myhomeonthe.net, ip=[::ffff:212.159.101.86] Aug 25 21:59:56 awt pop3d: LOGOUT, user=andrew@myhomeonthe.net, ip=[::ffff:212.159.101.86], top=0, retr=39944, rcvd=56, sent=40746, time=3 Aug 25 22:04:12 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 48176 Aug 25 22:04:12 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: setuid to libraifa succeeded Aug 25 22:04:12 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: checking message <E1IP2ng-0002eI-Eg@wear.readytogo.net> for libraifa:32006 Aug 25 22:04:20 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: clean message (-2.6/2.5) for libraifa:32006 in 7.6 seconds, 1827 bytes. Aug 25 22:04:20 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: result: . -2 - AWL,BAYES_00 scantime=7.6,size=1827,user=libraifa,uid=32006,required_score=2.5,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=48176,mid=<E1IP2ng-0002eI-Eg@wear.readytogo.net>,bayes=0.000000,autolearn=ham Aug 25 22:04:20 awt spamd[28500]: prefork: child states: II Aug 25 22:09:29 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 49145 Aug 25 22:09:29 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: setuid to gbtravel succeeded Aug 25 22:09:29 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: checking message <putcgcbfbhamfer@fruitpads.com> for gbtravel:32017 Aug 25 22:09:39 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: identified spam (12.6/5.0) for gbtravel:32017 in 10.2 seconds, 5003 bytes. Aug 25 22:09:39 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: result: Y 12 - BAYES_99,HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_32,HTML_MESSAGE,LOCALPART_IN_SUBJECT,MSGID_SPAM_LETTERS,SPF_PASS,TVD_RATWARE_MSGID_02,URIBL_BLACK,URI_NOVOWEL scantime=10.2,size=5003,user=gbtravel,uid=32017,required_score=5.0,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=49145,mid=<putcgcbfbhamfer@fruitpads.com>,bayes=1.000000,autolearn=no Aug 25 22:09:39 awt spamd[28500]: prefork: child states: II Aug 25 22:10:06 awt pop3d: LOGIN, user=andrew@myhomeonthe.net, ip=[::ffff:212.159.101.86] Aug 25 22:10:07 awt pop3d: LOGOUT, user=andrew@myhomeonthe.net, ip=[::ffff:212.159.101.86], top=0, retr=0, rcvd=12, sent=39, time=1 Aug 25 22:11:27 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 49520 Aug 25 22:11:27 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: setuid to libraifa succeeded Aug 25 22:11:27 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: checking message <000601c7e75c$894ed180$0100007f@fpviosw> for libraifa:32006 Aug 25 22:11:36 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: identified spam (16.3/2.5) for libraifa:32006 in 8.5 seconds, 19328 bytes. Aug 25 22:11:36 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: result: Y 16 - BAYES_60,HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_12,HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_SHORT_LINK_IMG_2,RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET,RCVD_IN_PBL,RCVD_IN_SORBS_WEB,RCVD_IN_XBL,RDNS_NONE,SHORT_HELO_AND_INLINE_IMAGE,URIBL_BLACK,URIBL_JP_SURBL,URIBL_SBL,URIBL_SC_SURBL scantime=8.5,size=19328,user=libraifa,uid=32006,required_score=2.5,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=49520,mid=<000601c7e75c$894ed180$0100007f@fpviosw>,bayes=0.726583,autolearn=spam Aug 25 22:11:36 awt spamd[28500]: prefork: child states: II Aug 25 22:16:17 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 50217 Aug 25 22:16:17 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: setuid to sr8 succeeded Aug 25 22:16:17 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: checking message <984907979.55364767348457@utsc.utoronto.ca> for sr8:32004 Aug 25 22:16:26 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: identified spam (12.9/5.0) for sr8:32004 in 9.3 seconds, 9431 bytes. Aug 25 22:16:26 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: result: Y 12 - DATE_IN_FUTURE_03_06,FH_HELO_EQ_D_D_D_D,FUZZY_CREDIT,HELO_DYNAMIC_IPADDR2,HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_OBFUSCATE_10_20,MIME_HTML_ONLY,RCVD_IN_PBL,RDNS_DYNAMIC,TVD_RCVD_IP scantime=9.3,size=9431,user=sr8,uid=32004,required_score=5.0,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=50217,mid=<984907979.55364767348457@utsc.utoronto.ca>,autolearn=spam Aug 25 22:16:26 awt spamd[28500]: prefork: child states: II Aug 25 22:19:29 awt pop3d: LOGIN, user=andrew@myhomeonthe.net, ip=[::ffff:212.159.101.86] Aug 25 22:19:29 awt pop3d: LOGOUT, user=andrew@myhomeonthe.net, ip=[::ffff:212.159.101.86], top=0, retr=0, rcvd=12, sent=39, time=0 Aug 25 22:20:33 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 51016 Aug 25 22:20:33 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: setuid to thegran succeeded Aug 25 22:20:33 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: checking message <21ecc01c7e75d$bbd32420$2f01a8c0@windowsa607f1d> for thegran:32010 Aug 25 22:20:41 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: identified spam (17.5/5.0) for thegran:32010 in 8.1 seconds, 1174 bytes. Aug 25 22:20:41 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: result: Y 17 - BAYES_99,DATE_IN_PAST_06_12,FH_HOST_EQ_VERIZON_P,FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK,INVALID_MSGID,RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET,RCVD_IN_PBL,RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL,RCVD_IN_XBL,RDNS_DYNAMIC,STOX_REPLY_TYPE,URIBL_RED,URIBL_RHS_DOB scantime=8.1,size=1174,user=thegran,uid=32010,required_score=5.0,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=51016,mid=<21ecc01c7e75d$bbd32420$2f01a8c0@windowsa607f1d>,bayes=0.999360,autolearn=spam Aug 25 22:20:41 awt spamd[28500]: prefork: child states: II Aug 25 22:26:21 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 51946 Aug 25 22:26:21 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: setuid to gbtravel succeeded Aug 25 22:26:21 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: checking message <264166.236793146.1188032962@ourfirststep.net> for gbtravel:32017 Aug 25 22:26:30 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: identified spam (7.1/5.0) for gbtravel:32017 in 9.2 seconds, 6091 bytes. Aug 25 22:26:30 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: result: Y 7 - AWL,BAYES_50,HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_04,HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_TAG_BALANCE_HEAD,MPART_ALT_DIFF,SPF_PASS,URIBL_BLACK,URIBL_JP_SURBL scantime=9.2,size=6091,user=gbtravel,uid=32017,required_score=5.0,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=51946,mid=<264166.236793146.1188032962@ourfirststep.net>,bayes=0.592462,autolearn=no Aug 25 22:26:30 awt spamd[28500]: prefork: child states: II Aug 25 22:34:09 awt pop3d: LOGIN, user=mike@camberleydrivingschool.co.uk, ip=[::ffff:86.13.153.74] Aug 25 22:34:10 awt pop3d: LOGOUT, user=mike@camberleydrivingschool.co.uk, ip=[::ffff:86.13.153.74], top=0, retr=2252, rcvd=50, sent=2521, time=1 Aug 25 22:51:28 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 55911 Aug 25 22:51:28 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: setuid to libraifa succeeded Aug 25 22:51:28 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: checking message <3235985408.20070825170556@qmuqybrxw> for libraifa:32006 Aug 25 22:51:35 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: identified spam (9.8/2.5) for libraifa:32006 in 7.2 seconds, 836 bytes. Aug 25 22:51:35 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: result: Y 9 - BAYES_99,RDNS_NONE,SPF_HELO_NEUTRAL,SPF_NEUTRAL,URIBL_BLACK,URIBL_JP_SURBL,URIBL_SBL scantime=7.2,size=836,user=libraifa,uid=32006,required_score=2.5,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=55911,mid=<3235985408.20070825170556@qmuqybrxw>,bayes=1.000000,autolearn=no Aug 25 22:51:35 awt spamd[28500]: prefork: child states: II Aug 25 22:54:30 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 56343 Aug 25 22:54:30 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: setuid to sr8 succeeded Aug 25 22:54:30 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: checking message <8678967196.190217665470@yahoo.com> for sr8:32004 Aug 25 22:54:37 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: identified spam (14.0/5.0) for sr8:32004 in 6.9 seconds, 847 bytes. Aug 25 22:54:37 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: result: Y 14 - FORGED_YAHOO_RCVD,RCVD_IN_PBL,RCVD_IN_SORBS_WEB,RCVD_IN_XBL,RDNS_NONE,REPTO_QUOTE_YAHOO,URIBL_BLACK,URIBL_JP_SURBL,URIBL_SBL scantime=6.9,size=847,user=sr8,uid=32004,required_score=5.0,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=56343,mid=<8678967196.190217665470@yahoo.com>,autolearn=spam Aug 25 22:54:37 awt spamd[28500]: prefork: child states: II Aug 25 22:57:06 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 56732 Aug 25 22:57:06 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: setuid to thegran succeeded Aug 25 22:57:06 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: checking message <1IP4?n-000NOC-YL@pool-72-82-6-40.prvdri.east.verizon.net> for thegran:32010 Aug 25 22:57:14 awt spamd[5164]: spamd: identified spam (13.8/5.0) for thegran:32010 in 8.3 seconds, 1185 bytes.
I have been hosting (reseller account) with HostGator for about 1-2 years now. While I have had no problems with any of my own personal domains, some of my clients for whom I provide hosting are reporting email problems.
One client is a company that hosts about 15 email addresses on the server. They have complained that they don't receive all their emails. People tell them how they sent them a message, yet they never received it. The problem isn't consistent. Also, not all messages they send are being received. After much fussing with this, and looking into every possible solution, we came to learn this scenario:
- Someuser@hotmail.com sends an email to johndoe@mycompany.com
- Hotmail looks for an MX record for mycompany.com and finds it’s IP to be 10.10.10.1
- The Hotmail server contacts 10.10.10.1 and delivers the message
- John Doe receives the email fine
- John Doe then replies to the email back to someuser@hotmail.com
- Mail server at mycompany.com looks for an MX record for hotmail.com, finds the IP, and delivers the message to it
- Hotmail, because it does spam checking, uses reverse lookups as one of it’s spam checks. It takes the IP that sent it the message, 10.10.10.1, and looks for a PTR record. It finds one and it maches ‘astra.websitewelcome.com’ instead of ‘mycompany.com’. As a result, the spam check fails and the message is dropped
- Some User never receives John Doe’s response
I asked HostGator about this.
HostGators response: "Unfortunately that IP a ddress is a shared IP address and so you will run into issues such as this, however, we have quite a number of other accounts that use this sort of setup without any issue and are able to send to Hotmail. *Another issue would be that ultimately the IP address that is sending a the message to them would not be from the server that you are on, but on one of our gateway systems, however, this should be overcome with the SPF record that you have in place."
Since then, another one of my clients (this time a Hotel that needs to receive it's reservation requests) is beginning to report the same problem. Some (not all) emails just don't make it to the inbox. Customers call and report that they had sent an email; but said email was never received in the first place.
I have again consulted with HostGator who have not been able to help because they don't see any of said emails on server, so what can they do? Nothing, I guess.
So what can I do about this. Do I need to switch to another host? Do you know of any hosts with whom I can be sure not to have this problem?
In looking at new webhosts, I have begun to consider VPS options. However, I am afraid that if I get a VPS server I will have to configure all of these MX Records, PTR Records, SPF records, and so on. I don't want to have to deal with all of these technical details. I am a website developer who sometimes provides hosting. I don't have time to learn the ins and outs of hosting and email server configuration.
I recently decided to upgrade to a VPS from shared hosting. I have decided to give VPSLand a shot, even though I am a little skeptical after reading a few negative reviews.
I will be providing an in-depth ongoing analysis of my experiences with them for the benefit of the WebHostingTalk community.
I signed up for the "Windows-EZ VPS Value" package. RAM: 768MB (a great vlaue) HDD: 8GB Transfer: 300 GB Price: $29/month ( with 50% off first month coupon my total was $14.50 )
After completing the sign-up process, I checked my email and noticed I had received 6 automated e-mails from them during the process
The order was placed at 9:46am. They e-mailed me that my VPS was created at 10:10am (nice) The followup e-mail with my server information arrived at 10:20am. For a total of 34 minutes from sign-up to server access. So far I am very happy.
Yesterday LT pulled the plug because of a DoS that took place on my server. I asked LT to bring back my server online so that PSM can investigate. PSM did that and then said that they had cleaned out all the tmp directories, and scanned my server with rkhunter and that it was clean. LT got the message and problem was fixed...or so I thought.
Today I got another email from LT saying that DoS is an ongoing issue with my LT server and that they will unplug my server and do a mandatory server reload if I don't do something about it and provide documentation of what was found and removed. Again, I contacted PSM about this and they investigated, only to tell me the same thing that they had cleaned out the tmp directories, and that if this continues they would have to disable common server functions. Doesn't sound too good.
Anyway, is it really hard to find out and fix this DoS problem? My server has modsecurity but no phpsuexec is installed. LT recently offered a DDOS protection server for my server and don't know if it's really necessary, is it?
Here's part of the log file that LT sent to me. There's a whole bunch of the following:
I stumbled on a webhost today. icdsoft.com. Looks like a solid host. They do not have phone support, which left me hesitant. A newbie without phone support. OH MY GOD! I tested them and asked few questions via e-mail. My questions were answered in 10 minutes! Reviews are nothing but favorable, and they have been around for over 3 years.
They are also very reasonable (under $10, 1GB disk space, 20GB bandwidth). One note they do not supprt ASP or JSP.
I've been with XenVZ for about a day now, and thought I would share my initial impressions thus far.
I was looking for a cheap, basic little VPS to run a few simple services off of. I had raked high and low through these forums since I was looking for something located in the UK, with Xen virtualization for <£10/month.
I came across XenVZ in the advertising forum, and thought I would check them out. Started up the Live Chat, and got through to Sean right away. I asked a series of questions and received prompt and professional replies.
I thought I would start out cheap, so I signed up for the £3.99 'taster' VPS (they have a 30 day money back guarantee, so can't really lose). Signed up around 8:10, received invoice 8:12, paid invoice right away and had the server details at 8:21. Whole signup process took around 11 minutes.
Even for a tiny VPS with only 64MB RAM, it performs fairly well. I am running a Ventrilo server inside Screen, IRSSI session inside Screen and Lighttpd server (serving a simple static placeholder page), and I still have around 20MB spare RAM.
The network seems pretty solid too, I thought I would test it out with a wget from a UK mirror service, the connection capped out at about 9.5MB/s.
If your looking for a UK VPS, I highly suggest giving these guys a check, can't fault them so far.
Of course, I'll be back in a month to give a more detailed rundown of the service.
I don't run a domain off the VPS but can provide the IP on request.
I was on shared hosting with Site5 and found the level of service declining the cheaper their shared hosting plans got. My site was down more often than I wanted, so I canceled my plan and went with VPSLink.
I signed up for the Link-2 plan for a few months just to feel it out and see if I could get a Debian server up and running from the command line. After signing up I was in my VPS in less than 30 minutes. Much quicker than I expected!
Following some tutorials I was able to have a lighttpd, PHP5, MySQL server installed and running in a little over an hour. I had a site up right away ! I'm used to FreeBSD, so Debian's apt-get is very simple to use. I used VPSLink DNS and it was easy to set up. To keep the load off the server I transferred my domain email over to Google Apps. I've spent more time tweaking the configuration and I'm happy with the result so far. VPSLink is much faster than my old Site5 shared hosting. That could be due to the VPSLink server sitting in Seattle while I'm in Vancouver BC, but I kind of doubt it.
My initial impression of VPSLink after a couple of weeks is positive. The price is right, the performance is good and it's no frills VPS. I like to have full control over the server and I'm glad I just took the leap away from shared hosting. For the prices they offer it's worth trying.
I am migrating my sites from a Xen based Centos 5.3 + cPanel/WHM instante to another Xen based cPanel/WHM solution with Centos 5.3 64-bit. I am having issues with easyApache now after it was successfully ran for the first time.
It does not time out however even the profile selection screen takes well over 10 minutes to get to once easyApache is initiated. Once the profile selection is made it is still slow moving to the customization screen.
The server is neither overloaded, nor out of memory. I have actually executed /scripts/checkperlscripts in hopes that it would identify something. I am planning to remove /home/cpeasyapache folder however I am not confident whether this is the right approach or not.
