So its been about two months since I last did my last review of VPS.net and since a few things have changed I thought I would expand on my original review. If you haven’t read it already I would suggest reading it here.

What’s New with VPS.net:

Lets start of with whats new features VPS.net have added since my last review.

rsync:

A couple of weeks ago VPS.net finally got round to providing rsync support. Like the snapshot backups that they already provide at a cost of £4 a month it really is a good price which is the same no matter how big your overall storage is. This is pretty useful and makes the backups extremely cost effective.

However there are a few disadvantages to this firstly your backup space is the same size as your VPS meaning that you are limited to the amount of space you have for backup making it difficult to do stuff like rolling backups.

The second major disadvantage to the rsync backup that vps.net provides is that it can only be accessed by VPS’s within the VPS.net network that them themselves have backup enabled. Meaning if you only have a single server and then have an issue where your box is unusable you would need to setup another server in order to access your backups. There is a perfectly good reason for them doing this mainly that it stops people using the rsync space as a really cheap solution for online storage and for security reasons. Its kind of unavoidable with providing backups like these which are locked to the hosting.

Overall I would sum-up rsync backups with VPS.net to be really worth it and suggest using them in conjunction with snapshot backups.

Delayed Storage Upgrade:

As you may or may not know with any cloud hosting that works like VPS.net if you upgrade your VPS you usually upgrade the CPU, RAM and HDD Space at once. However an issue arises in the fact that if you add say an additional 6 nodes to an existing VPS it can take a bit of time like 30minutes to resize the partition and bring the box backup. Since most people dont need to the HDD space as much VPS.net give you the option to delay the resizing of the partition till you want it to be done perhaps when you schedule down time. So if you want to upgrade your VPS its just a case of do the usual but instead of 30 minutes it takes maybe 1 or 2 for the box to restart.

Not the most amazing feature in the world but one worth mentioning when every day people get customers complaining about a few extra minutes of downtime.

FusionIO:

VPS.net recently introduced Fusion-IO nodes which are nodes of storage provided from a RAID SAN that uses a PCI Express solid state storage devices. By using SSD there is a significant boost of performance for clients who have heavy I/O usage.

Pretty cool they have got this going. I have not had chance to try it yet, but hopefully going to be trying it out soon and will do a full post on it when I do.

What has Happened Since My Last Review:

The Bad:

Lets start with the Bad as I can hammer on for ever telling you how awesome stuff is most of the time but what happens when it goes wrong. There have been two problems in the last 2 months that spring to mind.

  • Issues with a RAID card on one of the SANs resulted in two of my servers ending up in a read only state for a few hours till I realised. Kind of frustrating as could not sudo on the box as sudo needed to write a file.
  • London Zone C – SAN3 Failure
    This was a true bad one where there was a complete failure of one of the SANs for about 5hrs. However Nick Nelson ( VPS.net Managing Director ) has issues a month of SLA credits for the people that where effected, which is very good compensation at least for people at my level, I could imagine you would be a bit more annoyed if you where  pushing more traffic.
    Nick sent an email the following day with an explanation of the issue  and has explained on how VPS.net are going to soon be stopping this problem from ever occurring again with the new SAN solution that should in theory provide complete redundancy and hopefully result in a 100% uptime solution.

The Good:

  • Well for a start all the new stuff mentioned again. I have never come across hosting company before that pushes development as much as VPS.net does. In the ten months I have been using them there has not been a single month where something hasn’t been improved.
  • Despite the issues mentioned above the general stability has been improved dramatically and I really can’t wait till July when the new SAN solution should come online and give almost 100% uptime to an already great service.
    The stability has really held up lately with me going away for two weeks to America and coming back to find there had been no server related issues.
  • Great Attitude of staff. In my experience the staff are very good always on top of the problem which is great compared to some other companies I have dealt with who don’t care unless something is on fire. In particular I really appreciate Nick Nelson ( VPS.net Managing Director ) taking such an active role and always being very helpful.

Summary:

As you might guess my review of VPS.net is still overall very positive. By the time its gets to July and the new SAN redundancy functionality goes in place, I think at that point VPS.net will be the best solutions around for hosting by far.
If this review has convinced you to give VPS.net a go yourself please use this link which contains my affiliate code VPS.net and this discount code ‘TURNK30’ which will get you 30% off your first month.

If anyone has any questions specifically about VPS.net do please leave a comment or send me an email I would be happy to help you out.

For those who are still undecided stay tuned when I reach a year of being hosted by them I am going to do a complete blow by blow of every element of their services and you can decide yourself if they are right for you.