Things To Ask A Vps Provider

I have been researching the vps market for a month or so now and have started to compile a list of questions to put to vps providers who get short listed. I would love some contributions!

1) What is the cpu and how is cpu capacity distributed, by account number limits, by assigning a certain number of mhz, is the asisgned capcity burstable?

2) ram is usually clearly advertised but who scalable is it? Can you add just extra ram or do you need to upgrade to the next package. Is it burstable and with what constraints.

3) are there any limits for the number of processes (shared hosting providers may limit processes to only a few, 15 for instance before terminating them). This isnt advertsised but need to be answered for dynamic sites with high traffic.

4) Number of simaltanious connections, both from individual Ips to the sites/account or to pop3 accounts. If the pop3 account sim con is low its will be annoying when trying to donwlaod email from several of your sites at the same time....attempts after the X number will fail.

5) Will your account have assigned bandwidth or will you just be sharing whatever connection 10/100mbps with the other uses on the server. This isnt such a big deal as a lot of servers will be streched to output 100mbps of data. If the connection is a 10mbps one then its much more important.

6) if you're used to a certain type of control panel make sure they have it and at what possible extra cost.

7) Check their terms and conditions for liability regards lost data. I chose a hosting company beofre because of their superior back up system, turns out they didnt use it and I lost 5 weeks of data (about $4000 loss for me). Their t & C avioded libility for any losses inspite of the fact that they advertises the b/u facility as a special feature.

8) quiz them on "Monitoring" and "Management". Us hosting novices may see these as the same thing but hosting companies do not. Monitoring is knowing that something is wrong, management is doing something about it. Many vps providers advertise full management but wait to be asked to fix problems that could have been lossing you money for days till one of your kind users lets you know.

9) What is their infrastructure...power, location, connectivity redundency like (ie how many T1,2 or 3 do they have and is that enough).

10) Support. Is it in house or outsourced....the later is bad as they are usually given little power to do anything and you have to wait longer for an inhouse guy to get off his lazy boy.

11) Do they limit the number of emails per period (ie like 500 per hour). This wont affect some but for those of us who have large memberships to send newsletters to this is a non starter.