I've narrowed down my VPS search to one of these providers.
SolarVPS.
JupiterLX
832MB Total SLM RAM
30gb storage
600gb bandwidth
with cpanel
100Mbit uplink
fully managed
not sure about the datacentre, the site says Euroconnex
around £45 per month
or
Clustered.net
512 RAM
512 swap RAM
Server has 2 x quad-core Intel Xeon "Clovertown" @ 2.33Ghz (18.64Ghz)
Max of 15 servers per node
25gb storage
300gb bandwidth
with cpanel
1Gbps uplink
1 hour replacement
fully managed
Looks like the datacentre is redbus interhouse in UK
£55 per month
Which is going to be the better quality provider? Clustered offer a 100% uptime guarantee, and for every hour a server is down they refund you a days hosting.
Clustered seem to offer tape backups? solarvps offer off-site hosting, which might come in handy as well.
I searched the forum for clustered.net, but didnt find many reviews.
From my first impressions I think clustered seem to be my best bet, although I will get less in the way of storage and bandwidth, I feel there website makes me think I'll get a better quality service. There website talks about how redundant everything is. Hopefully people can backup what I'm thinking.
I have a wordpress based website that is currently doing about 500,000 uniques a month and 5gb a day. It uses the wordpress module for php caching but it is still pretty damn heavy on the CPU. I am looking for a VPS, preferably one in a clustered type of environment so that I don't need to see them reboot the (single) physical server, or be down for physical maintenance of any kind.
Also this website looks like it will continue to grow pretty fast, so a place that can handle this kind of growth would be a must.
Does anyone know of a good reliable and redundant method of organizing clustered storage? I know that IBM has GPFS - has anyone actually used it? Do they charge a crap load for it?
I've switched my VPS to clustered.net about 6 months ago and I thought I'll just share a few of my experiences.
Clustered.net has their servers in London (somewhere in Canary Wharf, I've forgotten the name of the datacentre). I signed up for their smallest VPS available with 512MB/25GB/450GB.
Connections speeds to the UK and Europe are great, as far as I can see US is no problem either. I'm in the UK and most of the traffic is from the UK, so I wanted a UK provider.
I've got a 20M cable line at home and the server is always able to give me the full 20meg. I'd say perfect. I don't have any really heavy traffic sites, though. I've got a few sites on there, but mostly wanted my own spam solution and personal server for data-transfer etc.
Not only the speed is pretty good, the server has been up and running pretty much all the time, almost no downtimes at all. Really solid performance and reliability. Once we had a outage time of a few minutes and I got money off my next bill.
They offer cpanel, which I really wanted to have. We all know that Cpanel offers great versatility, and ASSP as spam solution is fantastic. Cpanel cost a fiver more per month.
Their website is a bit wonky, which shouldn't put you off - the support is awesome! I've done stuff like locking myself out of the VPS (set the firewall a bit too tight) and I've always had a helpful reply to my query within 10 minutes. Really helpful and quick.
Their support is truly outstanding.
I've been with Interhost before and it's a difference like day and night. At Interhost I got virtually no support at all, clustered.net always helpful, always quick. Interhost was unstable and poor speeds - clustered.net is the opposite.
Their services are not exactly at the lower end of the cost scale, but if you're looking for a reliable, fast VPS in Europe with excellent service, I can only recommend them.
I currently am in the process of building an online shop, so far we have about 200,000 products in the database to when running a search its taking up to 10 seconds to display the results which is not good enough. The setup at the moment is a cpanel vps with zipservers, 512mb ram.
Given this i have started looking for new hosting for the site which is built however it cannot be launched until we have a good server. We already have 150,000 adwrods adverts set up on pause ready to go so the project is needing to move fast.
Currently pondering between 1) a 1gb dedicated server with cpanel 2) Netfirms clustered hosting which they claim is more powerful than dedicated
at the moment i am tempted to go for the Netfirms hosting as i have used them for other projects in the past and seem to get on ok with them. They claim that when i make a database it will be servered by several sql servers which will make things much faster than if i went for the dedicated set up.
Does anyone have experience of clustered hosting and is it better than dedciated?
I am evaluating XEN hosts and was wondering if anyone has had experience with Clustered.net (UK). Their name makes it hard to search (too many false matches) and the only posts I found were in the benchmark section.
I have selected a VZ host after days of research but may need XEN for some of my other clients. (I personally prefer XEN technology for my type of applications). I am familier with serveraxis and many others (some of which cannot provide me with more than 1 or 2 IPs per server or are sold out).
clustered.net sounds interesting. They have fall-back to static pages, support backup DNS (via bind so not limited to web pages) and SMPT (the only provider I know of that does). I am NOT a panel kind of guy so not offering Cpanel or Plex is fine.
This has been gruling research but well worth it. Thanks to all who post and answer on this forum, this site is a treasure trove of knowledge!
Thew initial setup process for my future web hosting company will require a redundant dns setup. I was thinking of having two servers from softlayer (one on the east coast and the other on the west coast) being used as the dns servers (ns1.mydomain.com & ns2.mydomain.com). With one other server for handling the shared accounts, of course adding more servers (as needed) to the cluster in the future. Just wondering if this is the best possible way to setup for having only two name servers (with redundancy) for all shared account servers with my fleet. As well, I was thinking a dns only server wouldn't need to be that powerful, but I would like to be prepared in advance if you feel a strong server would be needed to handle the loads for all the shared accounts on many servers.
I needed more control over my aplications (needed SSH, eaccelerator) and I upgraded from their Solar Cluster 3 to their 512RAM emeraldVPS.
Let me tell you the setup that these guys have rules in every way.
The only thing that runs on the VPS is Apache so you might have an idea that this may perform better in some aplications than most 1GB RAM dedicated servers that also run MySQL, mail and other services ...at a fraction of the price. MySQL, mail and dns runs on their clusters. I installed zend and eaccelerator, and now my busy Romanian blog (with wpcache) runs in 82MB RAM
I'm going to move 90% of my sites there, I have lots of space and resources to grow.
According to cpuinfo I also benefit from 8 of these:
CPU model name:
Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 865
The support guys have always been fair and square to me, they answered fast to all my questions (mostly less than 10 minutes), moved my sites on the VPS and told me what's good and what's not so good about their VPS (yes, they told me without asking them about the minor "inconvenience" I may have with the VPS before I bought it). I feel they are the kind of guys you would love going to parties and drinking beer with.
I am looking for a vps account, perferably managed. My price range is up to about $60 a month. I am looking at solarvps and they seem to have good reviews, I was just wondering if anyone could share there personal experiences with them. How is there uptime, speed, flexibility and support.
We have a client looking for a mail server solution for their business. Around ~500 members of staff will be using this so uptime is essential, we are looking to have 2 servers mirroring each other so if one goes down their emails will simply be routed onto the other server and continue to operate without issue.
We are looking for a clustered solution for redundancy similar to www.zimbra.com 's Standard edition ( the open source edition does not include clustering ) however the pricing ( $9k usd ) is simply out of the clients budget at this time.
So I am asking if people have any suggestions for software for dedicated mail servers, in this situation!
Also a plus would be to have anti virus / SPAM included as they obviously receive a large amount of spam emails.
I'm currently connecting one of my servers to an iSCSI SAN but would like to hook up another server to that target as well. However, this doesn't work with NTFS filesystem and I couldn't really find any windows solutions for that. Does anyone have experience with this?
My choice of VPS provider has come down to FutureHosting and SolarVPS... I like SolarVPS because Douglas has experience with hosting a high traffic SMF forum and therefore I hope he would be very useful and understanding if I encounter resource problems from my SMF forum.
I've looked at the VPS packages on the SolarVPS website and I can't seem to find a UK VPS with 1gig of RAM... am I going blind? Most VPS providers I have looked at always have that and more.
It is human nature that we more frequently post scathing critiques, but I would like to take the time to post a positive review.
I run a trading system that day trades in real-time. It is written in Java. However, the API that it connects to runs under Windows. Because I live in a remote place, the bandwidth here is "unreliable". Having your broadband die when you are fully leveraged and there are only 20 minutes to the close is a serious dose of adrenaline that I personally do not care for.
For this reason, I was looking to host the trading system where the power and bandwidth were more reliable. To save money, which is always foremost in a traders mind, I decided to try a VPS solution.
After searching the net for a while, and finally realizing that the majority of posts worth reading were posting in these forums, I came upon SolarVPS as the outfit I wanted to try. There was a post where a user was commending them on their support, and mentioned speaking with "Ross" and the posting gave me the impression that I could count on SolarVPS.
I purchased the Windows Server 2003 VPS.
The fact is, I am very happy with SolarVPS. I had initially not been able to login. Why? Because, as a longtime unix admin, when the instructions said to "login as root", I assumed the login name was "root". I posted a support case that I could not login. I received a response in less than 20 minutes indicating that I needed to login as Administrator. Duh. This is windows.
I had another question, which I posted as a case, and it was replied to within 4 hours, even though I had marked it as a low priority.
The process of setting up my account was painless. I was able to try the first month at 50% off, which I thought was fabulous. The installation was reasonably fast. Everything ran smoothly and I had no complaints whatsoever.
Would I recommend SolarVPS to you? If you want a VPS hosting solution, I would strongly recommend SolarVPS. They gave me a great service at a very good price with excellent support. I would recommend them to my mother.
I have to say. They are a pretty nice company. I was able to get everything setup under a couple of hours, thanks to Douglas with my clean neat install of CentOS 5.1 x64 with cPanel. I love the resource usage interface provided by the Virtuozzo control panel as well as the emotion and motivation their team has to provide quality service.
The VPS has been very stable, fast and reliable. Have not had any problems. This is my 3rd day. I will keep you guys updated as how it goes. Overall, it is great, their discount and increase of resources for their current promotion is also great. Looking forward on also getting a Windows VPS soon.
I did a search, and found mostly good things about solarVPS here. I want a little more re-assurance and hope that others that had good or bad experience with them can chip in on their VPS service.
I'll tell you my story right now. I got the VPS and they charged me $60. The page didn't even look like a paypal page and I didn't know when I went through the order process that I have been charged. They accepted my payment even though they had the radio button that said first month a dollar. They even didn't have cpanel installed at first! They gave me the email and I had to contact them to install cpanel! They have this stupid contrat thing and they will take you to a collection agency for failure of the billing system that they have. It says DO NOT MAKE PAYMENT! but how can you tell? They are a complete total scam! The vps firewall was dropped for no reason during the morning. I asked why and they left the chat. They have good VPS if you got the extra $59 to cover the beginning.
I've been with SolarVPS now for about a year, and have absolutely no intention of leaving. They have simply given me no reason what so ever to consider going elsewhere. Support is lightning quick and the staff are quite knowledgeable and very polite. Also very important is that their prices are quite competitive with a wide range of VPS customizations available to get a package to suit you, and you can get some really good value for money if you commit to a large amount of time or happen to hit one of their many special offers.
It has not all been smooth sailing though, but in no way do I attribute all that solely to SolarVPS as I've caused myself a few headaches from using unstable app versions. In March this year my site had a 95.024% uptime, which simply put is not flash. However, this is much more of an exception rather than the norm as I had an uptime of 99.579% in April and a fairly amazing 99.921% in May. In this you have to consider this is not just VPS uptime, but everything on top of that which I use to deliver my site contents, i.e. web app, PHP, IIS 6 & MySQL. Overall I have a site uptime of 98.257% in the last year, and most of that downtime was cause by using the APC opcode accelerator with FastCGI on IIS which is not a reliable configuration. You can see my uptime stats here
Today, i will tell you the history of last 2 years which includes some good providers and what are their pros and cons, and if they can improve those things then everyone will benefited.
First i launch my website on shared hosting and I choose site5 for that, due to exciting pricing and features but actually features (rollback) doesn't work well and they have taken back by site5 but on my server there is some problem and that's get restarted in 10 days and downtime was around min 1 hour. But after various complaints they reduce the load on that server and then no looking back but site5 customer service is simply ok, get a response in 6-7 hours. But after 1 year load on my site increases and they asked me to please move on VPS because we can't handle so much load.. I paid them on yearly basis and they refund my whole money of the second year which i already paid in advance.
Then my second hosting service is PowerVPS, no doubt when you move from shared to VPS you will get better performance but actually I am getting the best server performance..? I have no idea because speed little bit improved and looks no other problem and i think i am getting the best after paying $120 per month when for shared service i am giving same amount for a year. But actually on PowerVPS i am hosted on lowest performance server when i am on the highest paying plan and that is revealed by the customer executive after 6 months stay. The problem with PowerVPS is the admin is very rude and can't listen to you but customer service is very helpful and gives you very prompt reply and help you in every matter. PowerVPS servers are also very prone to hacking and this can you check by searching on WHT, and they always replied server is hackable due to your script but no idea which script.. quite interesting :-) When server hacked and asked them to backup the server then they charge $85 per hour for backup your data which is too high and billing time was also not accurately logged. But in my plan 600GB bandwidth is allowed and 1-2 times i gone till 700 GB and they didn't charge anything, that's really good.
Now from last 2 months i am with SolarVPS and want to say this is one of the best i used till date and if they improve 1-2 things then probably i will be solarvps customer for long time. After transferring of data on solarVPS, many members of my site asked me what you have done on site... site is too fast now. Which is never said by anyone before when my site on powervps and my site is graphics heavy. The price is also half on solarvps in comparison to powervps. And like to mention admin is very very helpful. On some matters which i arise to check the customer service, they totally denied to do but after talking to admin the customer service done that task in a few minutes. Response from solarvps is also very prompt. But few things i didn't like about solarvps and hope they will do anything...
a) If server goes down for any reason then they must post in the forum about what's the problem but they didn't do, like few days before server goes down, even solarvps site is also not opening but actually don't know what is the problem... except some server problem.
b) They asked you to buy a extra bandwidth in advance @.25 per GB, but how anyone can calculate if they required more this month or not like on my website sometimes i used 400GB and sometimes 600GB without doing anything extra. Secondly they say otherwise we will charge $.50 per GB for overusage but customer service said when you touch 600GB then account will be blocked and have only limited access but admin said account will not be blocked and we will charge on overusage but actually don't know what going to happen because both giving different answers and also not have a bigger plan. So, why don't they give + 50GB on every account (or on client prompt payment records) and asked the user to take action within this 50GB otherwise we will blocked the access and if month finishes within that 50GB then don't charge anything. Hope they will do something soon because i am looking for a plan which gives me same service and price with better bandwidth, but i like to stay with them if they do something.
Currently i am also using hostgator.com for another website and no doubt customer service is very good and online availability at every time its awesome. If looking for shared hosting account then they are must look.
PowerVPS - 2.5 Star because of admin rude behaviour, charging high price and don't give the server as per their cost and inform the user that they are on the best config .
SolarVPs - 4 Star for nice behaviour by admin and wonderful performance by server. If bandwidth problem is solved then 5 Star.
hosting solution for 3 very high traffic blogs, all running on WordPress.
I have been researching dedicated and I came across a couple posts where people recommended Clustered hosting over Dedicated for better handling high traffic DB driven sites in the times of Digg or Slashdot frontpage exposure.
I would like your feedback, and your opinion on what to choose from the following options:
1. Netfirms Enterprise III (Clustered)
2. ResellerZoom Failover (Clustered)
3. LiquidWeb Dedicated Webmaster Series (Dedi w/ 2GB DDR and a 3Ghz Intel Hyperthreaded)
