Ubiquity VPS Four-month Review (and About Adventures With VPS In General

The short: Professional, honest, and competent. I've learned that when dealing with VPSes, if you want to be fancy you need to tolerate problems. While Icertainly had some interesting issues [url] with Ubiquity, besides a few of them they fall into the categories of 'stuff happens' and 'should get a dedicated server, instead'. It ran two of the most active adult communities in the world without a hitch. Except my members are addicted to them like crack and 15 minute lag issues are the end of the world for some : )

So now, four months after I left Acceleratedweb for Ubiquity [url]I am the proud owner of an overstock server from Ubiquity and am reviewing their VPS.

As the first link suggests - it wasn't my first shot with Ubiquity. I think that says a lot for making "If you ever want to come back." offers. They now have $125/month of my money, most of that guaranteed (I dislike having only one host so am probably going to try poking Futurehosting again after Lenny becomes a VPS install option there, or maybe Steadfast).

I really appreciate Ubiquity's patience with me while I learned how to self manage. I've come to detest control panels and have gotten rather good at it, especially after custom designing my own LAMP stack (handled over four thousand php page landings and forty thousand queries a minute from seventy connections... bad AJAX is a good DDOS simulation).

Typical Response Time: Ten minutes or so - pretty fast, though resolution can often be longer. The clock on vz010 is off by six hours on reboot. Very annoying.

General attitude: Not as individually detailed as AcceleratedWeb was, but this is okay, since I know more on my own now. Beyond that, they are generally pleasant compared to other VPS host's I've tried.

Server ping: Originally around 15 milliseconds. 40 now, and the same to my new server -

I wonder if echo requests or replies are throttled. I'm not sure if I'm a good judge here - the forums rarely take more than 2 mbps during any given minute unless I'm downloading a backup.

Server uptime: There was a crash a few days after I moved the forums to the VPS. November was around 99% with that, but otherwise it's closer to 99.8%, if you count occasional local outages. There is a router in between their network and their VPSes which sometimes goes haywire, which seems to be the main culprit.

Server speed: This is a bit tricky. Ubiquity only gives you access to one core. This may seem bad, but occasionally VPS members get hoggy, do you want one person out of thirty bringing your VPS down or one person out of four?

In the end, raw disk bandwidth is what counts for performance for me. The VPS server itself has a monstrous amount of RAM making this, usually, a non-issue. Occasionally though another VPSer would do something disk-heavy enough for us to suffer. "Get dedicated" <- we just did, that's why this review is here : )

Security: Ubiquity only took my root password when trying to diagnose the mystery disappearing disk space issue. They run a RAID and perform daily backups, and their control and billing software has no obvious security issues (though their billing software is plenty funky in other ways).

Price: Futurehosting is a bit more expensive but offers the future protect deal, while Ubiquity only permits one backup via the control panel. Pretty competitive for what is offered and allowed.

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I did have issues with Ubiquity. Their DNS servers fritz occasionally. There was the mysterious disk issue that caused me to leave them in the first place. The server crash really made me grit my teeth. The system clock on vz010 gets set ahead 6 hours on reboot - very annoying (and the butt of a lot of time travel jokes on my forums). Even though that only happened twice. There are lag spike issues, but it never brought the forums down after the first time and even then it was resolved within 15 minutes.

Something I've learned and made it a bit of a mantra. Tolerate mistakes, cheap, do what you want - pick two. Or better, a good balance between them.

The support staff is both professional and, in general, technically competent. If something is over someone's head, it happens, it gets forwarded on and is generally dealt with. The only thing I really blame them for is letting vz010's clock be off for six hours after I notified them - but they were apparently rather busy.

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I looked over dozens of VPSes for the criteria I wanted, and paid for several.

I needed a US host, in a fairly liberal state - I do not want my server hijacked by puritan authorities as had happened in Florida and Pennsylvania. I needed to host adult content, with an irc policy that makes sense. I needed to run Debian Lenny, and manage it on my own.

Out of all of them, Ubiquity was the only one that let me do everything I needed to, reliably and with confidence, for a price I could comfortably afford.

Not sure what else could matter, in the end. : )