VPS.net Thoughts and review (kinda)

ok so this is kind of a review but not, i hope you stay with me, there are many excellent reviews of VPS.net and what it does out there and i dont want to rehash that. if you want a full review of what VPS.net does then i can wholeheartedly support this review over at GetOnTheCloud:
http://getonthecloud.info/2009/09/24/review-vps-net-cloud-computing-by-the-node/
i will rehash there pricing bit to put it in perspective for UK pricing, sorry for the copy and paste Mr Cloud Man 🙂

Pricing / Packages

A single node at VPS.NET starts at £15 GBP per month for your first node with additional nodes getting cheaper.

There is a maximum of 18  nodes per account costing £162 per month (£9 per node).  This gets you a whopping 4608MB RAM, 180GB Storage, 4.5TB Bandwidth and 7.2GHz CPU.

The most popular configuration is 6 nodes. This costs £66 per month (£11 per node) and provides you with 1536MB RAM, 60GB Storage, 1.5TB Bandwidth and 2.4GHz CPU.

You can allocate a single VPS to all your nodes or you can run multiple VPS’s across your allocated nodes to create your own VPS network.  VPS.NET also have daily burst nodes.  Burst nodes are used to increase your computing resources when you know you are going to need it.  They can be automatically scheduled to come online and only cost £1 per node per day.

Extras

VPS.NET offers a number of extras that can be payed for by the month.

• Backups- £4 per month per VPS.  Includes scheduled daily, weekly and monthly backups and manual backups.  This backs up your entire VPS image so it’s ideal for disaster recovery.
• Storage Nodes – An extra 25GB of storage costs £7.50 per storage node per month.
• IP Addresses – External IP addresses are charged at £1 per address per month.
• dotDefender – This web application firewall product is licensed at £10 per VPS per month.
• Pro-Active Managed Support – Let the experts manage your entire VPS infrastructure from only £69 per month per VPS (£30 setup fee).
• CDN (Content Delivery Network) – Pay as you go pricing starting at £55 for 1TB Bandwidth or monthly pricing starting at £35 for 1TB Bandwidth.  CDN plans get cheaper with more bandwidth purchased.

while the maximum number of nodes you can purchase at any 1 time is 18, i dont actually think there is a limit to the number of nodes you can have assigned to a VPS, while there is the physical limit of the hardware meaning that the maximum number of nodes assigned to a VPS is 60 whereby you basically have pseudo dedicated server with full redundancy, i have yet to think of a single server instance where you would want so much processing power and RAM, in every case i can think of it would always be more efficient to break that VPS into several smaller nodes and implement some form of clustering or load balancing.

the beauty of VPS nodes are that they get cheaper the more you buy, also i believe although unadvertised you can get a 10% discount if you pay a whole year upfront rather than monthly billing, if you know you are going to use all the nodes your purchase pretty much immediately then this is probably a viable option, for most use cases like myself its probably cheaper to gradually increase the number of nodes you have.

i originally took the plunge to test DNS for personal use as i was a bit concerned about some of the issues with my current webhosting one of which some of my sites were hacked by FTP (hooray that none of my drupal sites were touched!) and with performance and occasional lack of access for some users (DNS issues of some sort). i also am looking at VPS.net for hosting VPS’ for the company i work for rather than renting a dedicated server.

the signup process was smooth and i signed up for a free cannybill reseller account straight away (just in case) after that i hit my first hitch, for some strange reason i was unable to create a VPS with my 2 nodes. i flagged this straight away with support and amazingly i was surprised when someone got back to me within 3 minutes YES 3 minutes, at 10PM in the evening. i dont even get that kind of response from a company we host a managed dedicated server with!
once i got on my way i had one or 2 issues that again support came up trumps with. there was one issue that i felt the delay in response compared to the other issues i felt was a bit disappointed, i did tweet my issue to the world and was surprised to have @ditlev respond to me personally within a few minutes asking me to email him and he dealt with the issue himself and had it resolved within 20 mins. this is great service.

one or 2 other challenges i faced that i think need sorting out on VPS.net’s end soon is the fact that if a tech support agent needs to login to your account to try and solve a problem you have to provide your VPS.net login details, this means you should change your password everytime this is done, this can be a tedious task for an end user, having to think up different passwords to use each time and then remember them, i have been assured by Carlos and Ditlev that this is in hand and will be solved soon

one other minor niggle although not an issue is to do with IP’s and resetting a VPS to template state. there is currently no way of resetting a VPS to template (or other template if you fancy a change) withoug deleting the VPS and starting again, this process is long winded due to the verification that you really want to remove your VPS, also if you dont recreate quick enough and you were unlucky enough that someone else was doing the same thing in your cloud region at the same time then chances are you wont get the same IP back, which is a pain because of having to change DNS or if you have IP based licenses (like ISPmanager Pro or Cpanel) what would be nice is if your IP is held for 15 minutes from VPS deletion so that you can comfortably recreate a VPS if needed without it being reassigned somewhere else, this would save the heartache of having to change IP in DNS and having to wait for it to propogate in most cases.

the biggest thing i liked about VPS.net was the ability to effectively recommision nodes to new usage in under 5 minutes, this was brilliant and takes virtually all the hassle out of reconfiguring servers

overall i have nothing but praise for the VPS.net crew there support is absolutely awesome! even the guys leading the teams are proactive and involved in the community which is brilliant yet again. in basic speed tests and the like the server is very noticeably faster than my old hosting, drupal performs a charm on there and i can tweak and maintain to my hearts content.

it does however leave me with a dilemna, my current hosting costs me £5 a month and is adequate (except for the occasional DNS issues and speed) my current setup (at this moment temporary) is 2 nodes on VPS.net and costs £28 a month but is great for expansion if i were to move more of my sites there i would most likely have to add a node (or 2) to it to maintain reliable performance. as i am a part time student and working part time, i am not sure i can merit spending the costs on VPS.net without working out some possible business case whereby i can earn at least a portion of my costs back, if anyone has suggestions about this or would like some simple and secure web hosting with proactive support please contact me

so marks out of 10 for VPS.net… 12 🙂