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.
When you visit www.afreewebhost.com , you don't see an ugly portal with to many links, advertisements, etc... You get a nice...HTML website. That's right, no ASP, no PHP, but a simpel, but very good looking, HTML website.
Is it a bad thing? Yes and no. "Yes" because it has "founded and owned by one person" written all over it and "no" because my experiences with small or "one-man" companies have been much better then with companies with many employies.
Free Web Hosting
The free hosting offer looks good. Even though they require advertisements on your free site, the free hosting is not going to bring in any cash. 1GB webspace with 20GB traffic. That's more then enough for 90% of all websites on this planet. And a 468x60 or 120x600 banner and a textlink don't bother anyone. Most site-owners use Adsense or something simular to cover the montly costs anyways.
I do not own a free hosting account. But from the looks of it I think that both free and payed services offer the same features and support. The company is able to do that because they also make money with site-/banner-designs. The little bit of money that they might loose with free hosting can easely be covered by a few design-assignments.
Pro Web Hosting
You don't see it very often. A company that offers monthly prices and gives a discount for 3 months. Most companies only offer yearly sign-ups and some of them give a 14-30 day money-back guarantee. But if you are not aware of everything you "agree" to when you sign up for a year and/or when you do not have a valid reason for asking your money back, you will not get it back.
4$/month for 5GB with 100GB traffic or 3$/month for the same deal when you sign up for 3 months. Personally, I think those prices are very realistic. The best deal is to go for 3 months offcourse. And the more expensive packages have the same "GB for the buck" value.
The most expensive package will cost you 22$ for 50GB webspace with ONLY 500GB traffic.
Yes, I say ONLY, because for that amount of money there are better deals out there. Don't get me rong, I still think this is a realistic price.
But, and there is a bug BUT, I do not beleave that people go for the most expensive package without any experience with the company. The people that do pay 22$ for 50GB with 500GB traffic are the ones that started off with something small that has grown to something bigger, people that are satisfied with the features an the support that they've had for some time.
Nice offer, but are they honest?CPanel -> Yep, it's there. Fantastico -> Yep, it's there. No Ads Required -> Offcourse. Daily Backups -> Yep, tested and working. 99.9% Uptime Guaranteed -> Only time will tell. 24x7 Support -> It's more like 12x7 Support, wich is 100% acceptable in my book.
Everything else that is listed on the webiste is there and it all works 100%. The company has not modified the CPanel features in any way, wich is understandable, but there are features that I miss. Features that I have encountered before ( don't ask me for names because I don't remember them ).
For example, it's possible to backup every single file on your webspace in one huge compressed file but it's not possible to backup the content of just one folder, one add-on domain. So if I want to backup a small website like my clansite, I have to backup all the other megabytes/gigabytes that are on my webspace. All other sites and files that are not even remotely related to my simpel clansite.
AFreeWebHhost.com is up-to-date and offers Fantastico De Luxe 2.10.4 r17 This is the latest stable release of Fantastico. Even though many scripts are not up-to-date, it's basicly "the best you can get" at the moment when it comes to auto-installers. For those of you who don't know, Fantastico allows you to install PHPBB, SMF, PHP-Nuke and many other platforms without any knowledge. All you need to know is how to click a link
How about the service?
So far, so good. Because I had to wait about 24 hours before I could actually use and view my webspace, the company gave me 25GB extra traffic and an extra month for free. Now that's what I call good service! ( maybe the company knew about my Servage.net review )
After sending many emails back and forth I was able to view my testpage. And even though I did not contact the company about any other issues, a day or two after our last contact they contacted me once again, just to see if everything was working ok.
When I made my first backup I got the message that it got saved in the "home" directory. I wasn't able to find my backup so I contacted support. Within 12 hours I got a reply.
Some of you might feel like 11-12 hours is to long, but I rather wait 11-12 hours for a decent, friendly, HUMAN email with usefull information instead of getting a "human-robot"-hybrid reply with noth enough information.
Uptime?
Uptime can be checked on [url]. This is the parked domain on my webspace. For my websites I use addon-domains.
Speed?
Download this file to test the speed: [url]
I have the "Pro Webhosting - Starter Package".
Visit www.tgow.info to check how fast pages load.
Would you recommend this host based on your first impression?
I sure would.
All the features are working just fine, the speed is not "superb" but good enough and the support so far is great.
I started hosting with ModVPS on March 14, 2007. My VPS was setup quickly and had everything I needed to transfer my clients over pretty seamlessly. They did a swell job there. This is a VPS we were using primarily for some shared hosting clients and a reseller or two.
Over the past 5+ months I've submitted numerous support inquiries, all of which I feel were tended to in an acceptable amount of time. Their personnel were always friendly and seemed knowledgeable.
Apropos the performance of the server, well, in the beginning it was great. Over time however, the speed and reliability progressively deteriorated. It has recently come to a point that the VPS is almost unusable. I attribute some of this to our growth. Currently, we only have about 10% of our disk allowance available. Obviously it's time to move on. This is where things start getting pretty sketchy.
For the past 3 months I've been receiving automatic notification emails of services failing. I'm not talking about 2 or 3, or even 5 to 10, I'm talking more like 15-20 per day. Granted, there are couple of notifications regarding a suspended account or disk space warnings but the lion's share of these (~90%+) are failed services emails. I submitted several tickets on this to no avail. Take a look at the attachments to see only some of the emails.
I started off having a positive opinion of modVPS. I quickly learned however that once you make them aware of your interest in leaving, regardless of how legitimate or impersonal the reason, you suddenly become a second-class customer. Their ability to make prompt responses suddenly ceases to be. Huh? That's odd.
As it is, all of my data is being held hostage by the sub-par VPS it's hosted on. The VPS has become so unresponsive that it's impossible to migrate any of the data. My new provider sent me this message:
Quote:
I have some bad news. We have been working on your source server for the last hour or so, and it has been extremely unresponsive. We tried shutting down various services such as Apache, etc but your load won't go below 3 or 4 -- which is really bad. All disk operations are taking a very long time. For example, to edit a file 'vi' requires 60-seconds just for the file to load up and be viewable.
We cannot continue migrating your account, you need to contact your provider and have them double your disk space. Right now you are using 90% of your disk space, so 10% of free space is not enough for us to backup all of your accounts and then transfer them over. We already tried doing a cPanel -> cPanel migration and that failed a few times because the accounts are just too large and the source server is too slow.
Theres not much here we can do I'm afraid, you'll have to contact your provider and ask them to double the disk space and also ask if they can move you on a less crowded node, because it's apparent that your server is extremely slow yet major services are not even running.
So I contacted modVPS with the request to temporarily increase my disk space to allow me to transfer my data.
The excuse was:
Quote:
please note that the main node is now performing a raid intialization which is a resource intensive process and will be affecting the server's and there by VPS' performance. Once it is over, every thing will function fine. Also it is not possible to double the disk space of you VPS. You can go for a plan upgradation, if needed.
Quote:
RAID initialization is being run in the server for the last 3 days. Also it is not possible for us to increase the VPS quota. Any way I am forwarding this ticket to our CS department and they will confirm this.
To sum this up, modVPS made a very good first impression and managed to keep me in their good graces for most of my time hosting with them. The failed services emails weren't a huge deal and we didn't notice much of a performance/uptime hit because of them. The services must've rebooted pretty quickly. It does go to show there was definitely a problem the modVPS SAs were ignoring. It's when they decided I was no longer worth the trouble that my perspective on them changed. It was a noticeable change in tone and responsiveness and what's worse, they've been of very little help with my transition to my new provider.
This post isn't me dragging modVPS through the mud. This is me sharing my experience with them as a host and hoping for 2 things: 1) they decide to facilitate this transfer and salvage the good impression they once had and 2.) to enlighten any potential customers considering them. I don't think this is an unfair review but then again, I'm the one writing it so I'm not impartial enough to make that assessment.
let me first clarify that they have been a VERY good host for me for the past 18 months... if you are ready to discount one VERY bad month.
The last month saw 4 outages on my server... HUGE ones.. each time the server was down for at least a day... the last one for 3 days.. after which i contacted them and asked why was the site down (i was outstation and did not know the status till i came back...)
They replied, there was an accident at the DC and If i had a backup they would happily restore it.
This was thorough unprofessionalism... one of your DC had such accident that you could not even recover data and you dont bother to tell the customer till he himself asks?
my bad luck was that i had already paid them in advance for the following month... BEFORE DUE DATE OF JULY 7th...
the server was offline since June 26th.. i asked for a refund for JULY since i was not using their services anymore and more than that i was really annoyed at the way they handled the issue.
Well.. they are yet to reply to the ticket where i asked for refund.. yea yea its been 20 days almost..
And what do i find now? the ticket was closed yesterday :-|
Have i lost my money? Just wanted to warn others about them...
I finally decided to go with vectorlevel after my last topic and researching some more and I'm completely amazed by how seamless the process was. I signed up on nov 5th and got my account information in a few minutes. Now I'm pretty knowledgeable about all the new technology stuff such as computers and tvs, but I'm pretty much a newbie in web hosting. I have always wanted to start a personal blog but had no idea what I needed with domains and hosting. Vectorlevel assisted me with getting my own domain (woot) and showed me how to install wordpress with "Installatron" which was pretty cool. My blog loads very quickly almost just like any of those big company websites like google.
Who do you guys recommend between these two? I've read good things about both. Just want some input before I make my final decision. Thank you all. I'd probably go with the Link 4 on vpslink with cPanel addition or VenusLX with cPanel on solar vps. So who would you choose? This is for an ecommerce site running on joomla with virtuemart and a blog running wordpress.
i like to start is to know why this company treated its customers the worst treatment
engaged the services of this company in the month of march 2008
The workers have started well treated but the support was very slow in responding to the tickets, I was always solve their problems themselves
In the recent period've Arrest 5 server others have, and I pay a monthly $ 500, but this is not the problem, the problem was me that he was working on one of Saba servers, you've done with them, but closed all servers
Asked them to open servers and already opened and you have to close any dispatch from within the server
Two days later stopped both server and when you ask them again grocery SPIKE
The surprised them that I locked all means of transmission from the server
Then a senior, said, we Ntasef history and an old letter
Has been re-booting again Servers
Nicola want to Pak in August of servers you've licked
Director said after day 20 of this month
And then request a copy of my visa by paying
And sent them to the ticket by photo
And then close down its servers for the third time
He said after the access to your file Alaspam
Director does not allow you operate the service
-------------------------------------------
When you ask them retroactive, which paid me money, Give me a backup
I am having a downtime issue with VPSlink, the "low-cost" VPS service from Spry, specifically they have let me out in the cold for over 24h and counting, due to a hardware problem in the node I am hosted for about 2 months now.
In all truth, the service has been great (read outstanding for low-cost) until this day.
It's Spry with another name after all, and they insist in putting that reference in each and every page footer.
I know hardware problems are neither easy nor fast to fix, and given that they refuse to give an ETA, I have patiently only asked for a situation update each 12h.
No answer to the update so far, only the initial reply to the support ticket and a thread post describing the situation which dates from yesterday (~24h ago).
The thing that really annoys me is that they are taking new orders to the very same plan, and those new orders are being placed on a new working node.. Couldn't they just move the affected costumers to the other node while they are fixing the affected one, even if just temporarily?
Everyone should know what to expect from subscribing a "low-cost" service, even if it comes from Spry. Despite being "low-cost", keep this in mind, you can't subscribe a "low-cost" service without incidentally subscribing a service of some kind.. Service that hasn't been provided for over 24h.
Don't really know what your feelings are on this one, but I for once remembered Spry to be better than this. You can't honestly expect to put everywhere "VPSLink, a subsidiary of Spry" and don't expect people to draw some parallels..
My expectations were just a very low end box, totally self managed, that simply worked in the areas that aren't my responsibility. To me, in the hosting world 24h downtime is just way to much time to go without giving an update, no matter how low each one standards may be.
There is a difference between asking for patience and leaving people in the cold. Over 24h downtime tell the difference.
I was going for 3 months...i'm sorry i just couldn't take it anymore.
So, 2 days ago i started getting insane lag spikes (2+ minutes.)
I opened a support ticket explaining i'd started getting these lag spikes, and could they do something about it.
They said there was a network issue and it would be fixed soon, so i figured no problem.
But, 24 hours later...the problem still persisted so i mailed them back again to inform them the problem is still persisting.
They asked me for a traceroute, which i provided.
They said they forwarded the issue to the admins.
24 hours later, still nothing new. So i email them back again.
They paste me the output of free -m, and tell me i'm out of RAM. total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 64 61 2 0 18 9 -/+ buffers/cache: 33 31 Swap: 127 0 127
As no doubt all of you can see, there is quite a bit of free ram there. Theres 9 being used for caching and 3 available, and i'm not using any swap at all. So not out of ram.
None the less just to proove a point, i restarted my server from the control panel, Logged into my server via SSH and started top. Then waited over a minute for top to load. I went and asked some of my buddies on IRC what could be causing the problem, so we all started poking around and eventually found the problem. mainpc (0.0.0.0) Mon Nov 3 18:00:40 2008 Keys: Help Display mode Restart statistics Order of fields quit Packets Pings Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1. 192.168.0.1 0.0% 58848 0.4 0.4 0.4 183.8 1.2 2. t.dsl.enta.net 0.0% 58848 26.1 24.4 22.2 559.5 30.5 3. gi4-1.telehouse-east3.dsl.enta.net 0.0% 58848 25.0 23.6 22.4 494.3 16.1 4. te5-2.telehouse-east.core.enta.net 0.0% 58848 26.9 24.0 22.4 637.9 22.9 5. linx.ge1-0.cr01.lhr01.mzima.net 0.0% 58848 34.8 24.4 22.8 502.5 16.8 6. eos1-0.cr01.lga02.mzima.net 0.0% 58847 111.3 100.1 98.6 554.2 16.7 7. xe1-0.cr01.lga01.mzima.net 0.1% 58847 100.5 100.2 98.5 622.9 16.4 8. eos3-2.cr01.ord01.mzima.net 0.0% 58847 133.1 118.8 116.8 642.4 16.6 9. eos1-22.cr02.sjc02.mzima.net 0.1% 58847 173.9 168.3 166.6 673.8 16.4 10. eos1-23.cr01.sea01.mzima.net 2.1% 58847 200.9 188.2 186.8 656.7 16.4 11. xe0-2.cr01.sea02.mzima.net 0.0% 58847 199.9 188.5 186.8 708.8 17.0 12. ge1-spry.cust.sea02.mzima.net 0.0% 58847 188.5 188.6 186.7 677.5 31.7 13. po1-core0-tuk.wa.spry.com 0.0% 58847 188.8 188.2 186.8 696.0 17.6 14. vps.cshadowrun.com 34.9% 58847 581.7 226.7 187.2 1393. 122.0
So, i mailed them back explaining that not only am i not out of memory, but the problem persists when i'm running the base operating system only (debian, 25mb ram usage), I then pointed out the obvious networking problem and added a bunch of results from my friends like the one above.
They again mail me back saying it's because i'm out of ram.
I start to realize this is a pointless endevour, but none the less mail them back explaining that processes take priority over the file system cache, and that there is plenty of free ram remaining, and just for extra insurance i added another traceroute like the one above.
They then mailed me back to tell me i am out of memory again, and that the game server i am running uses memory and bandwith depending on the amount of people that are logged on. And that the lag i'm experiancing is caused by the distance the packets from the UK travel to Seattle, WA, USA.
As we can see, they obviously don't know how to read a traceroute.
They also don't seem to be able to tell what is running on there servers, I've never ran a game server on this thing...i use it to host my IRCd and bouncer.
So at this time i realize i'm bashing my head against a brick wall, and move on. I was warned away from spry by you guys when i first signed up. You was right. VPSLink - Stay away.
We concluded today our evaluation on Cameron Jones VPSLink and we are impressed with this product for developers and all people seeking for a cool VPS at cheap price!
VPSLink really rocks! This product is a virtualization based on Open VZ invented by SWSoft and VPSLink is running it's high performance ones in a monster server with SCSI raid in the Name Intelligence Inc Datacenter (Seattle, Washington). We ordered Link 4 and started it running two websites for test, setupped at command line at hostmenow.us and server.hostmenow.us. Then we launched 15 websites in 15 domain names and all of them The VPS we are using costs $39.95 monthly ($ 33.29 for annual contract), offers 20GB of space disk, 512MB RAM 3 IP, 500GB of premium bandwidth and equal share CPU from the referred server, a Dual Xeon. VPSLink provide users with a custom Server Control Panel that's allow customers do reload or change Operating System from a list with a lot of distros like Slack, Ubuntu, Gentoo, various Fedora Core, CentOs, OpenSuse 10 and two Debian. We evaluated CentOS 4.0, Debian Sarge 3.1 and Fedora Core 6 LAM, Fedora Core 7, the latest Ubuntu and more. CentOS, a free distribution based in Red Hat Enterprise, have some problems with yum but VPSLink have it's own mirror with all packages needed to install yum in CentOS (at ourt nest OS reload we installed a CentOS 4x that have not problems with yum - we installed mc, emacs, g++, flex, sendmail, proftpd atc, ISP Config (this one failed with php issues). Debian runs fine, in high level of security and you can update it by apt-get, but have problems with .gif due the patent issue and browser does not display .gif images stored in Debian environment if you does not recompile the appropriate package to get lzw enabled. We also installed Webmin in port 1000 of this Open VZ VPS and also Zervex Server CP (it is available there at only five bucks monthly). I also installed cPanel 11 + WHM (our own license) in this VPS running with template CentOS and the install has been performed fine, without only one problem.
cPanel WHM runs fine on Link 4. For those interested in know how various different distros runs in a VPS this VPSLink is in fact a school; for those interested in run a VPS that rocks like a physical server these ones are highly recommended IMHO. Note that you can reload or change your Linux Operating System in few minutes, you can reboot and stop your VPS by VPSLink CP that is very fine and intuitive! These guys accepts PayPal and have a technical forum where users help users and uptime is 100% including during VPS upgrades (but note please that your entire data is destroyed when you reinstall or replace your OS, then you must have a backup). It's cool and only one negative point we found: due poor CPU allowed by the equal share system build a tarball for /home hasconsumedd (all times we did it) above 1h30m (in another VPS we evaluated, unde VZPP and under Hyper VM this task have an ETA of 11 minutes, no more. VPSLink administrator has informed us through VPSLink Forum that this problem is due some customers running hard scripts for development tasks. The principal advantage of VPSLink over the rest is that it's VPS are really robust, solid and simply does not exist downtime there. Note that under Open VZ using UBC the correct memory available and used cannot be obtained with # free -m and it is necxessary to run this script:
beans=`cat /proc/user_beancounters | grep priv` max=`echo $beans | awk '{ print $4;}'` use=`echo $beans | awk '{ print $2;}'` let "per=$use*100/$max" let "mb=$use/256" let "mmb=$max/256" echo "privvmpages usage: $mb MB ($per% of $mmb)"
For our Link 4 we extracted the output shown below (with cPanel WHM 11 running):
root@64.79.209.184's password: Last login: Mon Jun 25 20:00:18 2007 from 189.24.88.81 [root@server ~]# beans=`cat /proc/user_beancounters | grep priv` [root@server ~]# max=`echo $beans | awk '{ print $4;}'` [root@server ~]# use=`echo $beans | awk '{ print $2;}'` [root@server ~]# let "per=$use*100/$max" [root@server ~]# let "mb=$use/256" [root@server ~]# let "mmb=$max/256" [root@server ~]# echo "privvmpages usage: $mb MB ($per% of $mmb)" privvmpages usage: 291 MB (62% of 464) [root@server ~]#
The complete and illustrated review on VPSLink is running in my personal blog with WHT 4.1 Unixbench output and more...
We are at this time evaluating Link 4 from Spry Cameron Jones VPSLink, virtualization based on Open VZ running it's high performance ones in a monster server with SCSI raid in the Name Intelligence Inc Datacenter (Seattle, Washington). Currently we are running two websites for test, setupped at command line at hostmenow.us and server.hostmenow.us. The VPS we are using costs $39.95 monthly ($ 33.29 for annual contract), offers 20GB of space disk, 512MB RAM 3 IP, 500GB of premium bandwidth and equal share CPU from the referred server, a Dual Xeon. VPSLink provide users with a custom Server Control Panel that's allow customers do reload or change Operating System from a list with a lot of distros like Slack, Ubuntu, Gentoo, various Fedora Core, CentOs, OpenSuse 10 and two Debian. We evaluated CentOS 4.0, Debian Sarge 3.1 and now we are running Fedora Core 6. CentOS, a free distribution based in Red Hat Enterprise, have some problems with yum but VPSLink have it's own mirror with all packages needed to install yum in CentOS. Debian runs fine, in high level of security and you can update it by apt-get, but have problems with .gif due the patent issue and browser does not display .gif images stored in Debian environment if you does not recompile the appropriate package to get lzw enabled. We also installed Webmin in port 1000 of this Open VZ VPS and this week we will install Direct Admin (also Zervex Server CP is available there at only five bucks monthly). For those interested in know how various different distros runs in a VPS this VPSLink is in fact a school; for those interested in run a VPS that rocks like a physical server these ones are highly recommended IMHO. Note that you can reload or change your Linux Operating System in few minutes, you can reboot and stop your VPS by VPSLink CP that is very fine and intuitive! These guys accepts PayPal and have a technical forum where users help users and uptime is 100% including during VPS upgrades (but note please that your entire data is destroyed when you reinstall or replace your OS, then you must have a backup). It's cool.
last month i came here asking about a VPS provider to replace my shell provider that died, i was on a very tight budget and ended up with VPSLinks smallest package, Link-1, 2.5gb disk space, 100gb monthly bandwith, 64mb ram, 1 dedicated ip, all for $7.95 per month.
I signed up, the setup was done before i managed to get to the login panel (must have been instant). There i was presented with OS choices, i choose debian. 10 seconds later my VPS was online and ready for me to connect with SSH. Very good
Setup - 10/10
Installed all the stuff i need (My IRC server, my bouncer, and bitlbee gateway) this takes up about 60mb ram (few, just inside the limit) and all was well.
Networking is the only problem i have with VPSLink so far, there are odd lag spikes every now and again that last around 20 seconds, there was also just under an hours downtime this month. The administrator in vpslinks IRC channel had this to say.
[lylev] No, I cannot. I did just receive word from our network administrator that one of our racks main switches died, but instead of dropping connections, it created a routing loop, overloading the rest of the network. That one rack has been taken offline, so the rest of the network is back up, but some clients will still be down.
There is real room for improvement with networking, so i'm giving it 5/10.
Customer support was pretty nice, the representatives in the IRC channel are quick to reply with informative answers, links to pages with more information, they also have a large wiki with various configuration examples and tutorials. I can't give them 10/10 because i didn't really have to deal with the customer support that much, i only asked one or two questions, so i don't know how they'd be with more in depth questions. On that basis i give customer support 7/10.
So that really puts us at an overall rating of about 7/10, not bad at all really for $7.95/month.
I'll do another update at the 3 month mark, hope this is useful
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 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.
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.
I have a page that is loading very slowly the first time I connect to it. After that it's very fast.
Now I did some research and found out that this could be a DNS issue and that my nameserver might do a reverse DNS lookup. I do not know excatly what that means yet, but I suppose that could be the issue.
To the my.cnf file I added skip-name-resolve in order to disable DNS lookups, but what I can do to find out if I have a dns issue?
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 just thought I'd take a moment to share a few of my thoughts on my initial experiences getting set up with Pacific Rack...
It was finally time for me to take the plunge for a dedicated box, and after browsing through these forums and hearing a lot of good things about Pacific Rack, I decided to contact their sales department. I was immediately responded to and soon found myself talking to Alex and Jordan (both very helpful). We quickly found an appropriate solution for my company, and soon I was off to the setup queue.
Setup took longer than expected, but I think that was due to some custom configuration issues on my end (they had to wait for parts to come in). Support/sales were pretty good about keeping me up to date on what was happening though, and soon things were rolling along nicely.
(Initial experiences with the network...) Wikipedia lists 14 Tier 1 networks on their article page (for whatever that's worth!), and I think PacificRack (and parent(?) company OC3Networks) sits on Gigabit links to 6 or 7 of those networks. So I was excited to see what the network would look like once I was set up.
Once my server was provisioned and I received a login to their client portal, I started messing around with things and was quite impressed. I signed up for a 1Gbps switch and I've seen several transfers in the 20BM/s - 60MB/s range (PM me if you would like a speed-test file link). These guys have got quite a network!
(Initial experiences with the client control panel) Their client section is minimalistic, but has the basics. Server info, billing info, ticketing system, and a nice little graph showing you how much throughput your server is experiencing at the moment (or historically). I can't really think of anything it's missing, though it looks a bit bland.
(Initial experiences with the sales/support team) So far I've sent in several tickets for a number of things (they don't set up rDNS by default), and from what I can tell a support/sales agent is usually on it within minutes. Once it almost felt like I was on a chat with the support rep. Everyone seems to know his/her stuff, and they have all been quite helpful, resolving each issue in (usually) a manner of minutes.
All in all I'd have to say these guys are great. I've only been around for about a week now, but I've been quite impressed. If anyone finds this post useful I'll probably write another one at the 6 month mark.
Feel free to respond here or PM me for further information/speed test links, etc.
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.
I have 2 reseller accounts with one provider, and in the last several days I have noticed that when you visit the site for the first time, my AV software detects a trojan on the site, but the code & html files are 100% clean!
I'm suspecting that there is something being injected into the scripts from the server daemons that's either running or something else.
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
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 had three VMs with Fsck VPS, dating back to before they got hacked in June. I've been paying the bill since then, I imagined as a kind of insurance, so that I had the VMs handy if I needed to use them in a big hurry. Last week, I tried to log in, and found that my three VMs didn't exist, anymore. As far as I can tell, the VMs haven't existed since the June break-in.
SETUP / PROVISIONING
My first reaction was "They've been billing me for three months, and providing nothing?!??!" I'll be honest, I was pretty tweaked, but after I'd calmed down I decided to see how they handled the situation. So I submitted a ticket asking for an explanation: How long had the machines been down for, and what would it take to get them back up and running?
It took about a day, but we eventually established that VAServ could build three new OpenVZ VMs, and that they would give me three months' credit for those three machines. Since I actually do need the VMs, and I didn't really want to fight about the billing, I decided to go for it. It took another day, but I did get three new machines up and running.
Unfortunately, I do have some complaints about the process, specifically:
- VAServ's technical support is very inconsistent, and different techs seem to have vastly different levels of communications skill and professionality.
- Many of the techs don't seem to bother reading your ticket, beyond the subject. They tend to only be capable of answering the first question in each ticket/email, and they ignore anything else you've asked.
- After the FSCKVPS/VAServ buyout, following the break-in, the HyperVM control panel was disabled. If you need a reboot, or a root password reset, or anything that you can't accomplish yourself by SSHing into the VM, you have to open a ticket. (Seems like a chancy proposition, now, to me.)
REBOOT-AND-PRAY
Today, I started seeing memory allocation errors in running programs. The machine mostly worked, but certain operations (shell scripts, in particular) would error out. I opened a ticket asking for some guidance, and within less than 10 minutes, the VM started rebooting. I got an update about the ticket a few minutes later, and was told that the VM had been reconfigured (increased memory allocation limit) and rebooted.
I was pretty mad about the no-notice reboot. I'd been in the middle of editing a bunch of configuration files, and I lost an hour of work. It just seems so unprofessional and inconsiderate for VAServ's technician to bounce the VM without confirming it with me, first.
I did get an explanation/apology from the tech who rebooted the machine. I asked him to have his supervisor contact me, which took a few hours, but I did hear back. The supervisor wrote:
"...we reboot the vps if we found any VPS out of memory. Normally most of the service stop working or access got killed when VPS is out of memory..."
To me, it sounds like the reboot is a standard procedure for a common problem. Given that kind of environment, it's only natural that the tech's first impulse would be to reboot, given a ticket about memory errors.
At the same time, it's also indicative of a bottom-of-the-barrel service, isn't it?
- Memory problems seem to be common--is that because they're over-subscribed? Does your 512MB allocation mean anything, or is it just talk?
- The staff can't / won't bother to read through a ticket and give it some consideration.
- The staff has an itchy reboot finger. Their first impulse is to power-cycle, rather than to try to understand and fix the issue directly.
FOR THE FUTURE
I do intend to continue using VAServ / FSCKVPS, at least for now. They're really cheap, about $10/month for a 512MB VM, and I can mostly get done with what I need to do. But this is a qualified opinion. I am solely using these VMs for simple R&D projects: Quasi-professional work, stuff that nobody is currently paying me to do.
Given my experiences so far, I would never trust these guys with a real, money-making business project. VAServ / FSCKVPS is suitable for toying around with, or if you're flat broke, but I wouldn't bet my job on them if I could possibly help it.
I'm setting a calendar reminder for myself, right now, to check back in another month or so with an update to this post. Assuming I'm still chugging along with these VMs, I'm going to make a point of posting my impressions on a regular basis.
