VPS.net

This month my VPS.net account reached the grand age of 1-year-old. For this special occasion I thought I would do another review of VPS.net and recount some of my experiences from the last 12 months.

In this review I will go over the good and bad aspects of VPS.net that I have experienced. Also I will cover what is coming in the future and what I would like to see in the future as well. Finally I will give a bit of a summary of my thoughts after a year.

VPS.net

For those that don’t know VPS.net started up in December 2008 and are part of UK2 group. They offer cloud based hosting solutions that aim to give flexibility, scalability, failover and high availability. You can find a good explanation of the services they offer here.
If you haven’t already read my review of why I choose VPS.net in the first place I suggest you check it out here.

My VPS.net Servers


I initially started off with simply a single server using a single node. Now at the end of the year I am running 3 servers under one account and 2 under another account.

The 3 servers under my main account are as follows:

  • VPS 1: Ubuntu – 3 Nodes and 1 Storage Node
    This server runs most of my client sites.
  • VPS 2: Gentoo – 1 Node
    Development and Testing Environment.
  • VPS 3: Ubuntu – 1 Node
    This Blog and a few other websites.

The Good & the Bad

Let me start off by going thought the good and bad experiences that stick out in my mind from my year with VPS.net.

The Bad

Best to get the bad out-of-the-way first these are the three experiences that really stick out in my mind over the year.

Migration Issues

During the migration of what was then UK Cloud A to C, one of my servers was moved like everyone else who had a VPS on cloud A. Unfortunately in my case there was a problem and I lost two hours worth of data which included active orders for a client.

This was extremely frustrating as only one or two other people experienced this issue. It seems that all the VPS’s where backed up and then moved. However while this was in progress the new data was accumulating on the old cloud, when the backup went live on the new cloud it was two hours old hens the loss of data.

All I got with this was a response saying that shouldn’t have happened and nothing more. However this is most likely because I did not follow it up due to the fact I was flying off to America for two weeks.

SAN Failure

At the beginning of May the Cloud C SAN had some issues which took almost 4 hours to get resolved. This is the longest downtime I have had with VPS.net over the entire year. As a result of the downtime all people who were affected got a months worth of SLA credits, which I consider to be pretty fair compensation.

Auto Suspend of 250 – 300 Clients

Last week I got an email from VPS.net `Your account is suspended` naturally my first thought is damn I must not have paid a bill. Open the email and the first line that catches my eye is `Your VPS.NET Account has been suspended for the non-payment of invoice 0 on Wednesday 31 December, 1969.`

Thinking this has just been an automated email error I attempt to access my servers all 3 are down. I instantly get some support tickets going and check the forums. My ticket gets answered in about 10 minutes that it is an issue the auto suspended script has been disabled and people’s servers are coming back up.

This really was a case of replacing someone’s job with a small shell script gone to far. There is no more auto suspended being done with VPS.net it is now a manual job so this will not happen again. Just a pity it happened in the first place.

The Good

Constant Improvements

A great thing about VPS.net is that over the year I have been with them despite a few bumps in the road they have only continued to improve their services and there seems to be no sign of them slowing down as mentioned previously on an almost weekly basis. I have used many different hosting companies in the past and none of them have come anywhere near to improving their services as regularly as VPS.net does.

If you read my earlier posts about VPS.net you will see the lists of features I talk about or check out their own which on a weekly basis seems to mention some new feature or improvement.

Flexible

The flexibility of VPS.net is another one of the things I really appreciate. In the past with other providers its been difficult to get a balance of performance and effective pricing. With VPS.net its really easy as you can just add more resources as you need taking only the amount of time it does to reboot the system.

Very Good Customer Service

Another really good aspect of VPS.net is the customer service. Every support ticket I have ever opened has had a response within 15 minutes and the staff have always been very helpful.

Not only is the staff good at responding to support tickets they are also very active on the forum which is helpful as well. The forums are also very good because they are really active with users who have a range of knowledge.

What’s coming to VPS.net in the next few months

Console

Currently quite a good feature of VPS.net is having the  ability to reach your servers via a console interface in case your server can’t be accessed by SSH or you have other issues. It works fairly well and has helped me recover from a few issues such as an over zealous sshd.conf which stopped and user being able to login over SSH. Although in its current state there has been some issues where you can’t execute key combination’s such as CTRL + C.

A new version of the console is going to be a KVM solution and apparently is a lot better. This would be really good as although the current version is substantially better than the ones I have used with other hosting companies it is limited in a few ways, hopefully the new version will address these issues.

DNS 2.0

A new version of the DNS system is coming soon which will add new functionality including the ability to configure TTLs and new failover functionality. Some of the improvements came alive on Friday the 18th but other changes are still to follow. The most notable new change that came alive on Friday was features the ability to set SOA/NS which allows you to white label the VPS.net nameservers.

Redundant SANs

This is my favourite one of the new things coming to VPS.net in the next few months. 100% redundant SANs, in the past most down time has been due to SAN issues such as a bad RAID card. But no more will this be the issue any problems you simply get migrated to another SAN which is just awesome.

This is also now in place to an extent but not for everyone unfortunately. If you want to take advantage of the new redundant SANs you need to have your VPS migrated to SANs that support the new failover implementation.
A bit annoying for old customers but perfectly fine for new customers as I believe they will be on new SANs anyways.

Windows

Windows is coming to the cloud. Not something that excites me personally but should be good as might work out as an effective solution for people who want to host gaming servers ( After all no one truly wants to run Windows for anything else :) ).

What I would like to see in the future

Failover Solutions

However resilient the cloud is even with the new version of the SANs it would be really good to have an effective instant failover solution. Such as using Floating IPs where in the case of using two boxes a master and a slave. The master uses the IP address if it fails the slave assumes the IP address till the problem can be resolved. One of the companies I am associated with does this and it’s a really effective solution.

Load Balancing – Geographic and Hardware

I have written this post over the course of the week and I saw a tweet about this feature, they are actively looking for beta testers for load balancing solutions. I have applied and if I get in I will do some posts about the new service.
You can find updates on this services here.

Ability to Download Imaged Backups

At the moment you can make up to four full back ups of your VPS daily, weekly, month and a custom. It has been discussed before on the VPS.net forum but it would be very useful to be able to download these backups to keep them for archiving purposes or just as another safety measure.

My Future with VPS.net

Currently I am planning on expanding to add some additional servers. Mainly adding ones for running databases separately. Also I want to add in some servers for failover which will be possible when the rest of the new DNS changes come live.

At one of the companies I am associated with we are planning to start the migration of two racks of servers currently based in London to a visualized solution with VPS.net.

Overall

Overall as you may have guessed by now my opinion of VPS.net is very good in general. They provide an extremely good and growing service with flexible pricing thrown in to the mix.

I give them a solid 9.9 out of 10 for a rating. I wanted to say 10 out 10 can’t be any better but the recent auto banning of ~250 clients just pushed it down a bit.
What I would say really is if you are looking for an effective VPS solution no matter what you scale VPS.net can cater for you and I highly recommend them. If you have any specific questions please feel free to leave a comment, email me or just check out VPS.net forum. If you do decide to go with them please use my affiliate link here.

PS: I would be very interested on hearing other people’s thoughts and experiences. So if you have something to say, please leave a comment.

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5 Comments

  1. lloyd

    I’m using vps.net and find support to be efficient and cost effective. At $10 per support ticket who could ask for more? They even helped me convert from php su to dso plus help with ownership change to nobody. Very good experience so far as I’m a picky person and a newbie to Linux.

    I was wondering why they recently sent out email on auto suspend being removed. Now I know why :).

    • Mark Davidson

      llyod guessing your talking about the On-Demand Admin Support (£7) per ticket and is limited to one install, issue, or question and last for 24 hours. I haven’t used one of them before but good to hear it worked for you and that they have given you a good service.
      Just looking at the range of things they cover under that one off ticket service quite extensive could imagine it being handy if your not familiar with certain OS or software aspects.

  2. gandier

    Have you tried gandi? You don’t need to reboot to add resources. In one year they only rebooted the whole system once. The DNS services is great , they started being DNS provider. What I’m not sure is if the gandi network performance is good or not, I just dont know if some slow loads of webpages that I get is because of gandi network or my vm with only 2 shares.

    • Mark Davidson

      I haven’t tried it but have looked at it was put of by the lack of a UK based data center. But they do have some cool features like you say being able to add resources without rebooting, I would like to see VPS.net do the same.
      I will need to check out their DNS system not ever looked at it personally. It is always difficult to diagnose bottle necks takes a lot of testing and trial / error in my experience. But I would say over that VPS.net is slightly better connected than gandi, from my understanding of their peering.

      http://www.robtex.com/as/as29169.html#graph
      http://www.robtex.com/as/as13213.html#graph

  3. Alexey

    After a year of working with VPS.NET I’m deciding to move out. For the last six months there was 82 downtimes with overall duration of 33 hours. They never warn about any upcoming maintenance works and never provide incident reports. Even when I ask what happened they say something like “there was an issue with SAN”. Lucky for me I have redundant servers on other providers, so these downtimes don’t really affect my customers. Interesting that I have two dedicated servers on UK2.NET and there was total 4 downtimes for the last five years.

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