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by krobertson 5000 days ago
The VPS market is crap if want to look at the low end market.

This comes from my own experience running my own small scale VPS host for a few years, with a purposely small customer base (mostly people I knew personally).

Look at WHT and follow it for a while. That market is crowded, a race to the bottom in pricing AND support, and is full of drama. Some examples I've seen:

* Lack of experience in production systems with no backup procedure... some systems go down, they loose all data, entire business caves.

* Super tight margins and low capital... fall behind on a build, their provider shuts them down (most these guys are leasing dedicated servers or reselling from another provider)

* Don't know who really is in control... reselling from someone and don't know who? On dedicated servers with a provider who is known for a problematic network?

* They're some 16 year old and their dad grounds them from the computer so they can't answer support tickets.

* Don't understand the technology they're using for virtualization and get noisy neighbors, don't properly secure exploits, don't understand the inner working of their COTS control panel, etc.

* Look up the history of Lxadmin. VERY popular control panel package, company behind it, but most coding/knowledge behind the CEO. Big exploit found, 100k servers exploited, CEO commits suicide. Company is dangling. Believe licensing servers went offline. All providers using them were screwed. They were using COTS software, didn't know their own stack, left scrambling.

Stick with providers that are a real company. Employees of their own, support staff of their own, own their own equipment, etc.

Linode is great, EC2 is great, and there are several other providers.

2 comments

My first experience with the VPS market was hilarious. IRC support... which should have been the sign to run away. Went to IRC, kick banned because they thought I was some other user that came in under another IP address to avoid a ban when I went to ask for help.

Run away.

> Linode is great, EC2 is great, and there are several other providers.

What are some of the others?

Are you asking for a list as a counter argument? A list of ones to look at? Or a list of companies that match my personal criteria?

Rackspace, HP Cloud, VPS.NET, Gandi, RIMU, Slicehost (back in the day), Webbynode, Liquidweb, StormOnDemand (though a part of Liquidweb), Burst.net, PowerVPS, FDC Servers, ...

List could go on. I usually look for whether they have an established history, a site that doesn't look like a crappy overused template, a real physical address, WHOIS info on the domain, Google them and research, whether they have a real status site, maybe lookup if they have an ARIN number, traceroute to their site, etc.

>Are you asking for a list as a counter argument? A list of ones to look at? Or a list of companies that match my personal criteria?

The last two.

Why do a lot of these providers differentiate between OpenVZ and KVM? Usually there's a significant pricing difference, but little in the way of explanation as to why.
KVM is stronger isolation, its a hardware layer virtualization. You can (though the provider might not let you) run a custom kernel, etc.

OpenVZ is more OS virtualization, there is less isolation between instances.

OpenVZ usually has "guaranteed CPU/RAM" and "burst CPU/RAM", while KVM always gives you what its assigned. The guaranteed/burst is typically BS. More often these budget providers like OpenVZ because you get greater density, which means more noisy neighbor and taxed resources like disk IO.

So basically OpenVZ is what gave VPS nodes a bad name when they came on the market.