Liquidweb VPS Performance/experience...

A few days ago, I ordered a premium fully upgraded linux VPS with Liquidweb (after reading all the positive reviews here). After becoming familiar with their setup (was not all that smooth..), I noticed how the whm and cpanel were sort of slow compared to the whm/cpanel reseller setup with hostgator. After copying a site to it and letting a few people review it, all came back with the same remark: "it's slower then the current host" (a dedicated windows server).

So I ran a little php test to try to put a number on this "slowness" (liquidweb support was trying to get away with excuses like: well, it could be your location or what might be slow for you might be fast for others... etc...). Here are the results:

Cheap shared hosting HostGator account:
0.64119696617126 seconds

Current co-located windows 2003 server:
0.83531999588013 seconds

Liquidweb upgraded premium linux VPS:
1.81236195564 seconds

To be fair, I'm still waiting on then to try to tweak the php setup on that VPS (I think PHP none-TS and cgi with fastcgi would help). But I'm not sure they care...

This is a "bummer", because I was excited by the reviews here I even paid the $150 setup (thinking I was going to be with them for years).

I might consider a dedicated if it's truly 100% fully managed and PHP performance is at least as good as a cheap shared account.

Feel free to also run this PHP script and post your results. Also if you are currently using a VPS or dedicated server your feedback (even negative) is welcome as I will likely be shopping again soon.

Thanks,
Christophe

PS: Here is the php code:
<?php

$startTime = microtime(true);

for ($i=0;$i<500;$i++) {
$j++;

for ($k=0;$k<10000;$k++) {
$j++;}
}

$endTime = microtime(true);
$delta = $endTime - $startTime;

echo "total time: $delta seconds.
";

//phpinfo();
?>