Linode.com Impressions
Jan 20, 2009I'd like to ask linode.com customers if they're happy with their service.
Are the VPSes fast? Are there I/O problems? Bandwidth? etc.
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Torrents: Linode?
Oct 2, 2008So I was wondering if anyone here uses linode and if they are using it for torrenting how well its working and what kind of files are you "torrenting".
View 3 Replies View RelatedLinode, Slicehost
Jul 15, 2008I am wondering what the difference between Linode and Slicehost is they both seem pretty solid (However linode's real monthly billing is more appealing.)
Also when someone has a VPS (the cheapest (256mb ram...)) Do you find it easy to run your own Sql server and Memcached while running a webserver?
Freemont Linode Vps
Dec 4, 2008I am after companies who will have vps plans with cpanel/whm operating servers out of Freemont. Is there anyone that is able to point me in the right direction.
Apparently freemont to melbourne australia is the best way to setup a serious hosting account.
Some Info On Slicehost/Linode
May 7, 2009I have a Magentocommerce shoping cart presently hosted on a dedicated server (2.40GHz , 28 KB Cache celeron processor - 512 MB RAM) and the processor is running on full steam when customer accesses certain pages. This is because the shopping cart is processor intensive. I see that my MYSQL hogs the processor and am looking to VPS to provide me with more power for less cost.
I have slicehost and Linode on my list of VPS providers.
1.Linode offer only RAID-1 against Slichost's RAID-10. Does this matter that much? How do I decide on this?
2. From what I see, on VPS, a 256 MB plan would mean around 40 sites sharing the quad core processor which means, I would get worst case, 250MHz guaranteed from VPS provider. Will this still be better than my present celeron processor. I am unable to compare them.
3. I would like to hire someone reliable to get the VPS server installed with basic LAMP setup and extensions required for Magento. Will someone be able to help me on this? Where do I look for such a service?
4 Month Review: Linode.com
Apr 28, 2008Here is my review on Linode. I have been using them for 4 months now. I was referred to them by a friend and I will try to cover the most important areas.
They provide UML VPSes and Xen-based VPSes. My VPS is Xen-based. I use it for:
-Small IRC Server
-Personal file/web hosting
-SFTP/Shell access for myself and friends
-Experiments and installs
Linode.com
Time Used: 4 Months
Setup:
The setup was very quick. I ordered and payed and within a couple hours I was able to login. Their system is very cool because upon your first login you build your VPS from absolute scratch. You decide first off which of their 3 datacenters you would like it in, and also your OS choice and configure your swap space and everything.
Service and Network:
These areas are very strong with linode. I chose their Dallas location in ThePlanet's datacenter. The network speeds are very fast. Pings are very quick, downloads max out, and many connections can be opened at once without anything noticeably slowing down. The host server I am on is a quad xeon 2Ghz and I'm not completely sure how much RAM it has but I know it is somewhere between 8-12GB. My pages and files always load quickly and the server load averages are never higher than normal. Their linode control panel is very nice since it was made in-house. It provides many customization options and things to play around with. Complete with CPU and network usage graphs as well as and area to start, stop, reboot, boot from another OS image, or reinstall your VPS, their control panel is probably the best I have used out of the 10+ VPS hosts I have experienced. Overall I would say they do a good job in this area.
Billing:
Pretty good for the most part, auto-charges my credit card for each month's payment so I don't have to deal much with billing. No complaints.
Support:
I haven't had much of a need for their support but I have opened a few tickets for various things. The replies are fairly quick usually within a half hour and many times quicker. The linodes are unmanaged, however, so they are basically there to help out with questions concerning setup or issues on their end. I needed help adding my additional IP and they gave me a few suggestions that put me on my way. Very nice and helpful and pretty good for an unmanaged host. I have used many unamanaged VPS hosts that act annoyed when you send them support emails or simply ignore them. Linode takes things seriously and is very sincere in there approach from what I have experienced.
Overall/Final Look:
Overall, I am very satisfied with Linode. They have met and surpassed my needs and expectations as a customer and I would not rather be hosted by anyone else. They are very professional and have a nice setup for provisioning new clients and maintaining their systems. Notifications of scheduled maintenance are always sent out to affected clients, so there are no huge surprises. I would recommend them to anyone and for the money, it's a pretty good deal. I hope you or anyone else may consider them if looking for a VPS provider in the future.
Slicehost Vs Linode.com - A Comparitive Review
Sep 4, 2008A friend and I both recently purchased VPS "slices" for various reasons. I joined linode.com and he joined slicehost, agreeing that we'd share opinions and experiences with each other to see which one was the better deal.
Up front, slicehost gives a better first impression - but that's subjective - so we were at first both inclined to buy from them. That's when we learned about linode through WHT.
We both got a low-end slice - he got the 256MB slice from slicehost, I got the 360MB slice from linode.
After about 2 months of service with both companies, I can definitely say that they've lived up to both their reputations. We haven't experienced any downtimes from either of them, performance has never felt sluggish (although the extra ram from linode certainly helps!), and support has been quick to respond from both companies.
I think the thing about our particular situation, though, is that we're both very familiar with linux systems, so apart from the initial set up phase where we wanted to make sure we got the right distro (CentOS 5 users here), we haven't heavily used either administrative web apps. Most of our access after day 1 has been ssh to our machines to install various components, mostly ruby, rails, mysql, rubygems, apache, and the rest of the web app stack.
For our situation, both these companies met expectations, and I give them a thumbs up to potential customers that are on the fence for whatever reason. That said, I'm giving the slight edge to linode, because you're getting basically the same service but with more RAM at the same price.
Whirlhost First Impressions
Mar 10, 2009I purchased a small VPS from whirlhost. Now I try to enter to my.whirlhost.com and it is down
What would you guys do? Should I cancel and ask for a refund?
IndiaNets - First Impressions
Nov 19, 2008I recently went out on a limb and signed up for dedicated hosting with IndiaNets, a company that I'd never heard of in all of my years as a web developer. I found IndiaNets in my search for a host that offers multiple, non-sequential Class-C IP addresses. (I need this for SEO reasons.)
Normally, I like to either call or chat online with a host before I sign up to see how responsive they are and how they treat people. Prior to signing up, I had a couple of live chats with Vijay, and he was great -- quick to respond and very knowledgeable. I also asked for an account feature that was not specified on their web site, and he went out of his way to accommodate me. After the second chat, I signed up.
Since all of my 20 accounts had to be set up manually, I expected this to take a few days, but Vijay set them all up within 24 hours, and this was on a weekend! He was also online and available to chat over the same weekend, which was good because I had a few tech support questions.
So far, so good. Then came an email after a couple of days saying that there was an issue with one of the servers, and the hard drive would need to be replaced. While it's always an inconvenience when these things happen, they happen nonetheless. It's the nature of the business. What really matters is how the web host deals with the problem. I must say, I'm impressed with how IndiaNets handled this issue. They sent an email to all customers explaining the problem and how it would be solved, as well as the time frame during which it would be solved so that people would know not to make any updates to their sites during this time. They also set up a web page with frequent updates about the status of the issue.
In addition, I submitted a non-related support ticket while all of this was going on, and I still got a fast reply (within minutes, actually). Even though I had to wait until the server issue was resolved for someone to address my other issue, I appreciate that I still received a reply with an explanation of what was going on and that it would be handled as soon as possible. This is much better than submitting a ticket and having to wait for days to get a response. I appreciate some kind of communication, even if it's to say something like, "I got your message, and I'll help you as soon as I can." This type of customer service is extremely rare, especially in the hosting industry, and I just want to say thank you to Vijay and IndiaNets for being so refreshing.
Medialayer - First Impressions
May 22, 2008Been using ML for 2-3 days now.
vBulletin's performance is a hell of a lot better compared to my last host (fasthosts.co.uk - which takes 60 seconds to give an error page!)
In addition, litespeed is pretty damn sweet.
Setup took maybe 10-25 minutes from payment.
Only problem I have with it is that SSH is a bit too locked down - wget/etc don't work, and sort of negate the need for me to use SSH in the first place.. (to get and unzip files without having to upload massive things)
First Impressions Of IWeb
Jun 9, 2008I recently switched my dedicated server hosting from The Planet ($100/mo) to iWeb ($70/mo). I'd been with The Planet for quite a long time (originally Rackshack, then renamed to ev1, then bought by The Planet), and had been reasonably happy with them, but I'd been thinking about jumping ship for a while, for several reasons: (1) I was unhappy with EV1 for paying protection money to SCO; (2) my hardware was getting out of date; and (3) I thought I'd see if I could save some money on my monthly bill. I found iWeb because they were high up in the netcraft rankings, and netcraft showed them as running Linux. Searching the webhostingtalk forums for comments, I did find one long thread that involved one very unhappy user, but I wasn't convinced that his complaint was completely reasonable, so that didn't scare me off.
The dedicated server page at iWeb has a prominent offer of 1-hour activation on selected servers, but that wasn't an option I could use, because I wanted to use their cheapest configuration, which is a 2.4 GHz celeron, with 1 Gb ram, 160 Gb disk space, and 1500 Gb/mo. Since this was a step down from $100/mo at my old host to $70/mo at iweb, I was worried about quality of service and support, so I only signed a one-month contract. If you prepay for 24 months, you can get the same service at $52/mo. There was a setup charge of $49. Access to a web control panel would have cost extra, and they tried hard to sell me on that, but I didn't need it, since I'm comfortable managing everything via SSH. I got Debian installed on my machine rather than their default for Unix boxes, which is CentOS.
The first problem I ran into was that I made a mistake at one stage of the sign-up process, and although the interface did have buttons for backing up to earlier steps in the process, they didn't work for me. Starting over from scratch didn't work, and I finally had to put in a different email address in order to get a fresh start.
I placed my order by phone Wednesday morning, and got access to my server Thursday afternoon. Everything worked well as far as getting apache, mysql, and postfix set up.
IWeb is Canadian. Their pricing for US customers is in US dollars. They answer the phones in French, but everyone I spoke to was bilingual, and we never had any significant problems communicating. My credit card company's risk management thingie got triggered because of the non-US transaction, but that wasn't a big problem.
The big problem I had was that I was unable to log in to the iweb web site, which I needed to do in order to set their nameservers to point my domains to my box's ip. I put in the username and password, but the login page just refreshed. I started attempting to resolve the problem first thing on Friday, and ended up dealing with a total of six people before finding a solution at noon on Monday. In the interim, they offered to set the dns zones for me from their end, and that worked. Support was pretty bad. Sometimes I was able to get through to a technician on the phone in 5-10 minutes, but other times I spent ~1 hour on hold waiting to talk to someone. Email support generally received either no reply or a non-helpful reply. This was one of those typical, frustrating tech support situations where you keep on explaining the same things to different people, they promise to get back to you but don't, they send you canned email replies that don't address your actual question, etc. The long and the short of it seems to be that their login page had at least one known OS/browser incompatibility (with some versions of Windows+IE7), and one other, which was the one I had run into (with both Firefox 3+Linux and Konqueror+Linux). (I had javascript and cookies enabled on my Linux box, and in fact the cookies were being accepted, but the page just wasn't loading.) Tech #3 was unable to log in to my account on his own machine using my login info on Firefox+Win. The final resolution of the problem was that tech #6 suggested I try a different machine, and I found that it worked on my wife's machine with Firefox+MacOS. Go figger.
So in summary, their support is horrible, but basically I'm resigned to the fact that all webhosts' support is horrible. Maybe iWeb's is a little more horrible than The Planet's, but they also cost significantly less. The experience has been bad, but not bad enough to make me give up on the initial investment of the setup fee plus first month's service. I realize that at $70/mo they're working on a very thin profit margin, and I'm not under the illusion that they can afford to provide the level of support that would come with a $300/mo account. I'm going to stick with them for at least a while and just try really hard to avoid ever needing support.
Hostpc.com - First Impressions
Oct 16, 2008I got hostpc after hostsimplex.com closed down.
They have been very helpful in getting my site back up and running. I had a few issues like unable to get the back up of my sql to restore so I uploaded the back up and they restored that for me. Nice guys.
An interesting issue came up which required me to have a symbolic link well could have gone with out it but would have made it so one of my sites was down for a few more days.
Basically the symbolic link allows 2 sites I run to have the same games with out taking up any more space on the server. Actually this was hostsimplex's idea and they created the link. How ever I could not restore that link or figure out how it was made to after opening a ticket with hostpc I got one made.
But not right away cuz I was first told it would not work, which had me kind of puzzled so I told them hostsimplex had that file so I know it works just I am not sure how they did it. Any way they did get a symblolic linke, 2 in fact one I could not delete and another one. I had them delete the one I did not need and got the other one working.
I will say they are very good people and very helpful. They even put up with my frustrating of things not going right which was not thier fault.
verification link is in my siggy.
XenVZ.co.uk - Initial Impressions
Jan 20, 2009I'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.
Sweden Dedicated First Impressions
Oct 28, 2009A few days ago I got our new dedicated server with Sweden Dedicated and at first everything looked fine. The server was provisioned with some delay but still it works as expected and the network is fine.
Their support though is quite a different story and far from the advertised 24/7 and response time under 3 hours. A simple reverse DNS record request is still open after almost 24 hours. And what is worse is that today I found the the IP address we were assigned is from a blacklisted spam network. Their phone number is playing a voicemail message and nobody seems to be looking and the tickets I opened, so I'm seriously considering alternative providers.
VPSville Impressions After 4 Days
Oct 7, 2008We moved our hosting from Knownhost to VPSville approximately over the weekend and here are the initial impressions of VPSville. By the way, Knownhost support is great, the best, and we had no problems with them, just wanted to get the server out of the US.
We decided to try out VPSville based on the few reviews on this site and taking on their supposedly 'Stellar 24/7' support and 'Satisfaction guarantee' as promised on their website.
The few support tickets initiated so far were either answered very late (up to several days) to one ticket not having been answered at all.
The answers themselves were not very satisfactory and very incomplete, and kept recommending irrelevant 'upgrades', instead of trying to tackle the problem. I solved one ticket issue on my own, but got the reply that basically a tiny server (HIB 1 - 128MB guaranteed RAM with 4x Xeon processor) is 'too tiny' to even support attaching e-mail attachments larger than 2MB via Roundcube, so that I should 'upgrade' to HIB2 (256MB RAM guaranteed). Now, having used Roundcube on a VPS with 128MB RAM and having researched the issue with Roundcube, I know that it has to do with modifying configuration files to reset the maximum upload limit, etc. All I asked was for was the easiest way to go about doing it, since they are the 'experts' and this is the first time using an HIB LXAdmin for me.
Regarding the servers themselves, the setup was instant and I have no problems with the servers, very satisfied.
It's just the support that makes me quite skeptical. I really think that either the VPSville support are manned by nameless non-technicians or their priority is to have their customers upgrade over every issue, instead of helping to tackle the problem.
CheapVPS.co.uk - Early Impressions
Jun 21, 2007As a first time VPS user, looking for something to mess around with, to host my basic website and mail, I went looking for something cheapish to get started.
My original hosting was with A Small Orange (Shared Hosting), and although they offer exceptional service, their VPS plans were a bit high in price and we're Linux based (which would leave me completely and utterly dumbfounded).
I signed up with CheapVPS after browsing this forum and clicking through from their sister VPS company a2b2. Straight off the bat, their live sales web chat was open. Joined the chat, got all my questions answered in a very friendly manner. After thinking about it for half the day, found there was a 10% discount code. I was sold.
From ordering the VPS to using it was less than 24 hours (but the site did say 90% in about an hour) so I was at first fairly suspicious, and worried that customer service might be a bit of a pain. But hey, up and running in 24 hours is excellent, I was being a tad impatient and excited to get at it
I'm from Australia, so ping times are generally highish to the US and download speeds can be average if the server is not located in the right place. Server is currently pinging at 210-220ms (which is pretty damn awesome for US-Australia). I've been using the VPS for the last 2 days and so far, no downtime and the server has been very responsive.
As for the customer service, it is fantastic, more than fantastic (so far anyway, and I hope it stays that way!). Rus, who is obviously one of the main owners, has been responding to my tickets within 2-5 minutes at varying times of the day. I often wonder if he sleeps. As I am a complete n00b to the whole VPS thing I've submitted a fair few tickets and all of them have had friendly responses
These are of course early impressions, and I certainly hope they don't change, but I thought I would write up this little review because I personally think they deserve a little plug for being an excellent provider at a great price point (for someone starting up anyway). I hope their uptime stays constant, because I need my VPS for my mail
Currently, I'm on the cheapest Windows 2003 plan, 10GB HDD, 30GB bandwidth. Hosts are digitaldj.net, w00ties.com/.net/.org. Not all domains have been transfered over yet...As I said I'm new to all of it, trying to get all the DNS working
Future Hosting VPS: Initial Impressions And Review
Dec 22, 2008After 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
Some Initial Impressions Of Fsckvps / Vaserv: Mixed--set Low Expectations
Oct 13, 2009I 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.