No Such Thing As The 10/10 Provider :p

so after 16 months using vps servers i thing i have it all cleared up. There is no such thing as the 10/10-allmighty-everything-is-so-good provider it all depends in what are you OK with.

Now t3h facts, what i care about a provider is
- Price
- Performance
- Uptime-AKA-Reliability
- Provided Resources

I've been with 4 different providers (SolarVPS, Knownhost, JarguarPC, FutureHosting)

I will not do a long review but i will tell you some facts of my experience with them.

I started with SolarVPS (Mercury Plan 256MB-384MB-10G-200G-Cpanel-unmanaged-33.75), i started having a lot of problems, black zone alerts every day most of the time, bad performance, the server felt really slow, but after many months in the vps market i think it was because 256MB with Cpanel don’t play well, specially if you have a busy forum that needs many apache childs and lots of mysql usage. After 1 months using it i jumped off the ship to Knownhost. I started blaming SolarVPS but then i realized it was because 256MB weren't enough for my need. So i can't really talk about them, only 3 weeks but i don't think ill be going back , maybe providers shouldn’t offer Cpanel with 256MB systems.

Then the Knownhost Experience (384M-768M-10G-175G-Plesk-semimanaged-42.50), Now after a bad first experience I wanted to go back to shared, but seeing a lot of good reviews about a starter company at that time, I decided to go with them, I used them for 11 months, I can tell you they are reliable, they are good priced, but the performance was my problem.

For example running WHT-UnixBench scored like 60-80 on knownhost, and I had problems with mysql, a lot of queries took too much time and I kept having visitors to the point that apache always reaches the server limit and mysql just wasn’t ready to give the results, so the server also reached the memory limits and virtuozzo killed some services and all that, to the point that just wasn’t ok with it so I started looking where to move. If you need some reliable service, looking closer to that 99.999% uptime and don’t have too much of that resource intensive sites, then imho knownhost is your choice.

I do not know that much of Microprocessors but what I hear is that at this time Intel is really better than AMD, but knownhost stays with AMD for many reasons im sure, I just think that the servers would be a lot faster if they were using Xeons instead of Opterons, but once again I’m not 100% sure

Ok now this is where JaguarPC comes into play, when I was looking for the new provider I find out that Jag was running an awesome deal, if i was moving from another provider they will give me 2 months free, and a lot of specials ->(384MB-1G-30G-450G-fully-managed-Plesk-33.50) <- , so that looked like a really really good deal, I did not hesitate and signed up quite fast.

Started up really bad, when they servers were badly configured so they had to restart the entire node to fix settings many times, virtuozzo was going crazy killing processes and all that, but they fixed it and after 5 months with them everything is really good, then only problem is the reliability-uptime, I can’t get above 99.89%, they have many downtimes, call it “fixing settings”, call it “patching kernel”, call it “getting better”, still it is a downtime, it is a client calling you cause they cant access the mail, or something like that. (BTW im monitoring the server with host tracker).

So why am I staying with them? , because I get a better Prices $$$ , I get more resources, and at this moment my business does not require 99.999% , im ok with 99.9% uptime, and also my sites works really faster, mysql handles the load like a champ. But if they could increase the uptime they will be the closer to 10/10.

If you noticed I didn’t mention futurehosting its because I use them for small experiments, like lighttpd, server administration, as backup server, and other administration learning related tasks. But the servers works really good, im using the Chicago DC and getting better latency than Texas

I hope some day I will use futurehosting more and give a proper review, right now im using the 384MB_SLM-10G-200GB-NoPanel-20$ , everything looks quite good but running unixbench scored less than jaguarpc.

Its just a matter of what you need, and what are you OK, im a student and give hosting to friends and family, I have my own forum that gets many visitors and it is really database intensive, so at this moment im staying with jaguarpc and hope to continue that way