VPSLink 2 Months Review

We concluded today our evaluation on Cameron Jones VPSLink and we are impressed with this product for developers and all people seeking for a cool VPS at cheap price!

VPSLink really rocks! This product is a virtualization based on Open VZ invented by SWSoft and VPSLink is running it's high performance ones in a monster server with SCSI raid in the Name Intelligence Inc Datacenter (Seattle, Washington). We ordered Link 4 and started it running two websites for test, setupped at command line at hostmenow.us and server.hostmenow.us. Then we launched 15 websites in 15 domain names and all of them The VPS we are using costs $39.95 monthly ($ 33.29 for annual contract), offers 20GB of space disk, 512MB RAM 3 IP, 500GB of premium bandwidth and equal share CPU from the referred server, a Dual Xeon. VPSLink provide users with a custom Server Control Panel that's allow customers do reload or change Operating System from a list with a lot of distros like Slack, Ubuntu, Gentoo, various Fedora Core, CentOs, OpenSuse 10 and two Debian. We evaluated CentOS 4.0, Debian Sarge 3.1 and Fedora Core 6 LAM, Fedora Core 7, the latest Ubuntu and more. CentOS, a free distribution based in Red Hat Enterprise, have some problems with yum but VPSLink have it's own mirror with all packages needed to install yum in CentOS (at ourt nest OS reload we installed a CentOS 4x that have not problems with yum - we installed mc, emacs, g++, flex, sendmail, proftpd atc, ISP Config (this one failed with php issues). Debian runs fine, in high level of security and you can update it by apt-get, but have problems with .gif due the patent issue and browser does not display .gif images stored in Debian environment if you does not recompile the appropriate package to get lzw enabled. We also installed Webmin in port 1000 of this Open VZ VPS and also Zervex Server CP (it is available there at only five bucks monthly). I also installed cPanel 11 + WHM (our own license) in this VPS running with template CentOS and the install has been performed fine, without only one problem.

cPanel WHM runs fine on Link 4. For those interested in know how various different distros runs in a VPS this VPSLink is in fact a school; for those interested in run a VPS that rocks like a physical server these ones are highly recommended IMHO. Note that you can reload or change your Linux Operating System in few minutes, you can reboot and stop your VPS by VPSLink CP that is very fine and intuitive! These guys accepts PayPal and have a technical forum where users help users and uptime is 100% including during VPS upgrades (but note please that your entire data is destroyed when you reinstall or replace your OS, then you must have a backup). It's cool and only one negative point we found: due poor CPU allowed by the equal share system build a tarball for /home hasconsumedd (all times we did it) above 1h30m (in another VPS we evaluated, unde VZPP and under Hyper VM this task have an ETA of 11 minutes, no more. VPSLink administrator has informed us through VPSLink Forum that this problem is due some customers running hard scripts for development tasks. The principal advantage of VPSLink over the rest is that it's VPS are really robust, solid and simply does not exist downtime there. Note that under Open VZ using UBC the correct memory available and used cannot be obtained with # free -m and it is necxessary to run this script:

beans=`cat /proc/user_beancounters | grep priv`
max=`echo $beans | awk '{ print $4;}'`
use=`echo $beans | awk '{ print $2;}'`
let "per=$use*100/$max"
let "mb=$use/256"
let "mmb=$max/256"
echo "privvmpages usage: $mb MB ($per% of $mmb)"

For our Link 4 we extracted the output shown below (with cPanel WHM 11 running):

root@64.79.209.184's password:
Last login: Mon Jun 25 20:00:18 2007 from 189.24.88.81
[root@server ~]# beans=`cat /proc/user_beancounters | grep priv`
[root@server ~]# max=`echo $beans | awk '{ print $4;}'`
[root@server ~]# use=`echo $beans | awk '{ print $2;}'`
[root@server ~]# let "per=$use*100/$max"
[root@server ~]# let "mb=$use/256"
[root@server ~]# let "mmb=$max/256"
[root@server ~]# echo "privvmpages usage: $mb MB ($per% of $mmb)"
privvmpages usage: 291 MB (62% of 464)
[root@server ~]#

The complete and illustrated review on VPSLink is running in my personal blog with WHT 4.1 Unixbench output and more...