VPS Hosting Advice

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NeilWeb

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webdrive.co.nz

#229842 1-Jul-2009 10:37

It's worth looking under the hood with a VPS the three main technologies are VMware, Xen and Virtuozzo (for some reason I don't come accross many people offerring a Hyper-V based VPS) . They are all great technologies but they work in quite different ways and are suitable for different sites.

The cheapest tend to be based on virtuozzo. A provider can often get more VPS onto the same machine and pay less to microsoft if it's a windows offerring you are looking for. However on the down side their is less isolation between VPS so high demand on one server will affect others. (I've heard of customers being asked to leave for this reason!) I'd recommend this for a customer looking to have a bit more control but still only expecting a few thousand page views and not expecting the site to demand too much server resource large database queries etc.

VMware is very expensive by comparison (there are also lots of different levels and ways to install VMware) but is more of an enterprise product. The virtual server can be given dedicated resources (depending on how the provider configures VMware). They can also provide realtime failover to a spare server in the even of hardware failure. I'd recommend this for a site that would need to grow and get more complex and anything where reputations are at stake!

If you want to know any more about the differences let me know!

Cheers,

Neil.
www.webdrive.co.nz

freitasm

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#229844 1-Jul-2009 10:41

I think the lack of Hyper-V offerings at the moment is just because VMWare had a hypervisor solution before Microsoft did. Also because Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 wasn't the most scalable solution.

Hyper-V R2 seems to be a strong option in the future...

I also think a lot people don't understand the difference between one or another, and most providers just say "we use [insert brand here]" but the customers don't really get any difference - they all provide virtualisation, the main difference will be the load on the physical server and how easy to administer the guest machines - something customers never see really, since they only see their servers as an independent unit (which they are in a sense).

Nickh1976

26 posts

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#229847 1-Jul-2009 10:45

Thanks everyone for your helpful and informative responses. I may indeed take you up on your offer for further advice.

imd6662

119 posts

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#240047 29-Jul-2009 09:09

I recently used Net24 for about a year and found it really good. I epsecially liked the very easy and slick provisioning. Wasn;t pushing it hard so can't comment on performance.

Also check out Unleash -- had a look at their new datacentre yesterday that looks very impressive.

insane

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#241127 1-Aug-2009 02:22

imd6662: Also check out Unleash -- had a look at their new datacentre yesterday that looks very impressive.

Is this their own datacentre or leased space in another?

Simonm

181 posts

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#242623 4-Aug-2009 19:22

Its their own

ChillingSilence

301 posts

Ultimate Geek

#245479 12-Aug-2009 09:19

Just thought I'd throw in my 2c worth:
I've had a few dedicated & VPS with Hosting Direct and have mixed feelings to say the least. They had some pretty darn major issues earlier this year. I'd rather not go into how I feel about Ben and his moral compass, but lets just say he appears to have quite a short fuse. Its always difficult to get a hold of somebody from there, communication is scarce (When there's an issues it "we don't care, we're busy fixing stuff and didnt think to email customers to let them know we're working on it"), and I always had the feeling they weren't being 100% up-front. Not to mention their "If we dont have 100% uptime you get a 50% refund" ended up changing to 25% when they *did* have some major downtime (Another long story).

Anyways, SiteHost have always had brilliant customer support, great turnaround on all queries, easy to get setup & running, great communication and reliable servers that perform great (I run several VoIP VPSs). Quintin is always around and quite a knowledgeable and friendly person too :)

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NeilWeb

12 posts

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webdrive.co.nz

#245482 12-Aug-2009 09:28

Hey Chilling

how do you find running Voip on a VPS in terms of call quality? I had understood that call quality could be affected by latency variation due to the fact that the NIC etc is shared?

Do you have a work around for this?

Neil.

Cheers,

Neil.
www.webdrive.co.nz

amanzi

Amanzi
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#245484 12-Aug-2009 09:29

ChillingSilence: Just thought I'd throw in my 2c worth:
I've had a few dedicated & VPS with Hosting Direct and have mixed feelings to say the least. They had some pretty darn major issues earlier this year. I'd rather not go into how I feel about Ben and his moral compass, but lets just say he appears to have quite a short fuse. Its always difficult to get a hold of somebody from there, communication is scarce (When there's an issues it "we don't care, we're busy fixing stuff and didnt think to email customers to let them know we're working on it"), and I always had the feeling they weren't being 100% up-front. Not to mention their "If we dont have 100% uptime you get a 50% refund" ended up changing to 25% when they *did* have some major downtime (Another long story).

It's funny to hear you say that, because that's exactly the same experiences I've had with Hosting Direct. I paid for a year's service up front as Ben offered a generous discount on the monthly fees. But I had endless problems with my VPS with it crashing as well as terrible disk performance, plus their Xen console wouldn't let me reboot my VPS - so when it crashed there was nothing I could do. I then tried to cancel my account and get a refund for the rest of the year's service which I hadn't used, and they flat-out refused. I received several rude emails from Ben and am still looking at whether it's worth me paying for a lawyer to take it further.

nitrotech

1285 posts

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#245493 12-Aug-2009 09:53

I also had a server in the data centre with hosting driect, found them great in the beginning then Ben got increasingly difficult to deal with.

Long story but in the end I got my server back but without the rails, front bezel or cables that were provided when in went in and got charged for being in the data centre when the server was removed.

Srongly recommend that you avoid Hosting Direct.

I have had a VPS server with Freeparking - but found it too slow and it went down quite often.

ChillingSilence

301 posts

Ultimate Geek

#245494 12-Aug-2009 09:53

Well long story short, they're surprisingly good with SiteHost.
I've tested with a few other VPSs where they overload their servers and that *does* affect the quality. I never stuck around too long to figure out if it was the latency between me and the server, or the CPU usage fluctuating on the server, I didn't really care, all I knew was that it wasn't suitable.

With SiteHost, latency has never been an issue, call quality has been superb (iLBC on trunks, with iLBC or g729 to the endpoints), and I've got a couple of companies running full-time from a VPS, one even runs their Aus office from the SiteHost VPS!

It *does* use a bit of CPU because of the transcoding, but not much, especially not on the grunty hardware they're using to host the VPS's. When you ring SiteHost, they also use one of their own VPS's for VoIP.

Have you done any testing on your own hardware with VoIP serving?

All I know is that it beats having to pay $150-odd for a dedicated box, making it much more cost-effective for a small business, even compared to multi-tenanting a dedicated server :)

ChillingSilence

301 posts

Ultimate Geek

#245496 12-Aug-2009 09:59

amanzi: You're not the only one who's suffered like that ... I spoke with Quintin from SiteHost shortly after their last *big* outage about 3-4 months ago and he said people came flocking to him from HD :p

RedJungle

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#245503 12-Aug-2009 10:33

I'm happy to put in a plug for Webdrive. I've recently deployed a couple of VPS without any hassle. So far I'm quite happy with server performance. And as always Webdrive's customer support is excellent.

cr250bromo

222 posts

Master Geek

#245512 12-Aug-2009 10:52

I've been using Rimuhosting for my VPS services for several years now. NZ based company although the servers are hosted in the states, UK and Australia. Good support and reasonable rates, would recommend them as long as you don't mind not being hosted in NZ.

Woffle

6 posts

Wannabe Geek

#246345 13-Aug-2009 23:23

Webdrive also gets a recommendation from me, they are happpy to help and have good customer service. They have been great when it comes to taking ram in and out of the vps as required (not stuck to the billing cycle)

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