VPS.NET: My Review

As I am sure you know, Tweaked for your Pleasure is hosted on a few nodes at vps.net. While it is sad to say that originally my experiences at VPS.NET was okay, I ended up leaving them due to their SAN issues.

However a while back I was sent an email about their discounted nodes and I have to say, vps.net itself has improved big time. Not only do the SAN issues seem to have gone (at least on the London clouds) but support itself seems to have improved.

My current setup with vps.net is running the latest CentOS image (others you can use such as Debian) and their free licence for ISPManager. With VPS.NET you can get a free ISPManager licence (I think it is the Pro Edition) which I warn you now, does not work well on Debian and if you are going to pick that license then make sure to select CentOS as your operating system.

Now let’s talk about support lately. While I am having an issue with being charged for an unknown node every month, support has removed this node from my invoice and is looking into the issue. Support itself, for me, has often replied within an hour with something useful. When I had a major issue in the past however they only seem to respond after the issue was sorted rather than giving updates. I am not able to say if this is still the case as I have yet to have a major issue beyond the billing issue I am having.

And now the last thing I want to talk about and what is likely more important to many – the network. I have never, ever had an issue with the network at VPS.NET both before and now and the network itself is pretty fast. The only issue I have with their network is the lack of IPv6 support at this time but been told by the support it is coming. And below is a speed test and the end of my review.

[root@terra unixbench-5.1.2]# wget cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test -O /dev/null
–2011-11-15 10:09:01– http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net… 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `/dev/null’

100%[====================================================>] 104,857,600 73.9M/s in 1.4s

2011-11-15 10:09:02 (73.9 MB/s) – `/dev/null’ saved [104857600/104857600]

So is VPS.NET the future of hosting? Well, “cloud-based” hosting is indeed going to be used more and more and if used right will overshadow physical servers and hopefully VPS.NET and UK2Group will stay on top of the game. If you decide to use them, just remember the key rule with any provider – make backups, backup those backups and then mail those backups to a backup location away from your home.

Hope it helped.