thought i would update on my progress with VPS.net as i have been with them a little bit longer and i also have a couple of clients and friends that i have helped here so by proxy have had the chance to experience a wide variety of setups and situations, including managed support
last time i reviewed them (see: http://antsomerset.co.uk/2009/09/29/vps-net-thoughts-and-review-kinda) i talked about pricing and some of the issues regarding IP’s and logins etc. firstly it might be appropriate to give an update on new key features, changes etc since last september. firstly nodes have been given a 50% boost, instead of 256MB ram and 400Mhz CPU you now get 600Mhz and 376MB RAM all at the same price! Introduction of Zones within regions to seperate local servers, Rsync Backups as well as snapshots, licensing manager and pricing for litespeed, softaculous and rvskin, free hostbill, FusionIO, delayed storage upgrades on node increases, Akamai CDN, By the Minute Billing and therefore crediting for unused node time and a host of other smaller backend adjustments and lots more new templates to play with including CloudLinux, ClearOS and FreeBSD (Beta still) with Windows imminently expected.
coming back to my last review i pointed out an issue with wanting to reinstall a VPS if a mistake was made or to try a new OS you had to delete and recreate and there was no gaurentees of keeping the same IP address – glad to say this was resolved very soon after with the handy reinstall vps button on the vps screen:
with this function you can create either from the same template originally used – a manual backup you created a template with or even a whole new template and with any of these options you keep the original IP so all the server licenses that you may have had for that specific IP are retained, which is a huge time saver for people.
second issue pointed out previously was security and with regards to vps.net staff needing access to servers/vps.net account, since then there have been a slew of improvements including pin based authorisation for key tasks via sms. and also the ability to leave server details securely in a support ticket (without the root password being seen in plain text in the middle of your support ticket) this has allayed a lot of my fears with this aspect.
support over the 9 months or so has been up and down, i guess like any normal team you have good days and bad days, generally support is very good, sometimes not so, and the issues usually are speed of response or support agent not understanding/reading the actual issue/requirements and therefore not giving relevant and correct advice. 
as a kind of quality control feature the team have now released a report to manager button which is very good for highlighting times when the team are very good or bad so that they can be given more beer or beaten with a stick depending
uptime again has been variable, they have suffered from some quite huge DDoS attacks and as a result learned from the problems and made the correct adjustments and policy changes to eliminate them and i can say that the service has stabilised massively since that time. there are some outstanding niggles that seem to happen with stability and range from Hypervisors locking up and your server going offline but not self healing again, to other san related incidents (with which no self healing currently happens if its SAN related) but they are being addressed and seem to be very minor when you consider the sheer number of VPS’ operated here (pretty sure the number is way above 10k)
Akamai another new addition to VPS.net in that you can get very very favourable pricing for akamai (pretty much worlds biggest and best CDN), i have the chance to use this for my main work job currently and it has been a large improvement in site load time and taking load off the server for the ChristChurch London podcast. i cant fault this addition at all.
there have been lots and lots of features and changes for vps.net and as i write about them i remember more so i could easily turn this into an never ending article but will close it off with what i think are one of there biggest updates and most significant, firstly is by the minute billing, this just means that your usage is tracked by the minute so that if you decide to delete a node mid way through your billing month, you will get an account credit for however many Minutes, Hours and days that deleted your Node early, this is obviously not convertable to cache but it certainly brings VPS.net in with services like Amazon EC2 and in fact makes them even better and more competitive than such services.
the next big thing which is not yet officially been launched but has been talked about and is literally very imminent (i wouldnt be surprised to see the open beta pop up any day) is windows support at long last! obviously details yet to be released but it sounds like the only extra charges to use windows will be licensing (so existing nodes will work fine) this could very well shift a huge move in the server market as very few companies i know do windows hosting well and even windows vps hosting at that. like the Iphone 4 this is likely going to turn into a game changer.
so 9 months in, still a true VPS.net fan and totally happy with the service i get happy to stay for another 9 months or more 🙂
Leave a Reply