Hosting Review : VpsFarm.com
I had written sometime back about why shared hosting is bad for your startup and recommended VPS hosting for any serious web venture. Today, as promised in that post, I am writing a review of VPSFarm.com. VPSFarm is based out of US and while researching for VPS provieders, I found them to be pretty good. I considered slicehost and other popular VPS choices as well as some cheap dedicated boxes from layeredtech.com etc. This is what I did not like about them
- Most VPS providers take some time to setup your VPS. This should be mostly fine but there is a delay nevertheless
- Providers like Slicehost etc have a waiting time before you can get your VPS. I think after signing up, it took a few weeks before I got an email.
- Cheap dedicated boxes have older processors which may be ok for you but I was not so sure about that. Another thing is that they have a regular hard drive and no RAID protection. Even with backups, I think its good to have RAID so that your server does not go down with a drive failure.
- I found the RAM being offered everywhere else to be almost half for the same price.
I did not find many reviews of VPSFarm when I was trying to signup and I already had not so great experience with two providers before so I was a little concerned. However I went through their docs online and finally ordered. Somethings that I really liked about them then were
- Xen based Virtual Private Servers (from my research I found out that xen is the preferred way)
- No setup time or fees or annual contracts (pay every month by paypal)
- Choice of operating systems (I picked debian as ubuntu was and is still missing)
- You can install/reboot/halt VPS using a web based control panel
- Bandwidth is unmetered (speed depends on your plan) and RAM/price ratio is awesome
- RAID 10 for storage
Something that may be of concern to some people are
- Only one IP address assigned. As far as I know, you cannot currently buy more. This is ok in general but not good if you want to host DNS. I however recommend outsourcing DNS and emai.
- Its not possible to move to a higher or lower plan without some kind of downtime or manually setting up the new VPS. If you are ok with downtime however, they would help you move.
So far (last 8 months) my experience with VPSFarm has been awesome. Only once my VPS went down for some 20 minutes but I got an email from them immediately and the issue was fixed. There was once a network outage but it was automatically restored in a minute. I started out with XEN 1024 plan and I am currently on XEN 2048 plan.
Do give VPSFarm a try and let us all know your experience too.
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Comments
Prateek,
What about tech support? How good is their tech support in case of a failure on their end and/or a screw up by you (such as upgrading-of-mysql-went-wrong)? Also, do they provide any backups?
I have been using Servint for more than 3 years now. Their rates are a bit higher in general, but the service is excellent. They have fixed my mysql version screwups, memcached installing issues, etc. in a couple of hours.
Have you given a thought to EC2 and S3? As far as I understand, your needs are a bit different as you need more of storage and bandwidth than processing power. Comibination of EC2 and S3 would be cheaper and efficient for you.
@Gaurav
The tech support is good .. its useful if there is a service outage. Other than that .. for software related stuff, you have to deal with everything yourself. You even have to install all the software yourself. VPSFarm would install a basic OS (of your choice) for you.
@Anon
CPU is split between many VPSs on the system. I am not sure about the exact ratio. However I know that if you take more RAM, you get a bigger piece of the pie
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I’ve been pleased also. I don’t do really “serious work” just some coordination of group projects, however, I’ve played around enough to know their machines are capable. I have the 1024MB play ($40/month 4GB space). I’d say CPU-intensive tasks run about 30% slower than on my C2 2.0GHz laptop, however if you’re using all 4 processor cores maybe it’d be faster. Hard drive throughput blew me away! I haven’t had dedicated hosting (no point), but I have had dedicated hosting in the sense I’d use an old computer we had lying around. Certainly a VPS plan through VPSFarm (if you’re on the server I’m on anyway) is much faster than a non-dualcore machine. Oh, and very good bandwidth (1MB/s+, depends on where you’re downloading from mostly). I had a plan for $12/month prior through Veggiehost and they got bought out . . . I’m glad I paid $40/month and my projects weren’t lost.
Hey Prateek,
I was just checking out difference between VPSfarm and slicehost offerings…
slicehost provide limited bandwidth of 200GB for 512 plan..
Do you this is something any startup should care about in
beginning?
Slicehost hasn’t had a waitlist for several months now, I got my slice in under a minute.