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.

I will try to explain my setup and then the solution to the problem

I am trying to watch /song/upload with mongrel_upload_progress plugin. Inside /song/upload, I save the song if the validation passes (such as file size, title present etc) otherwise I want to display some errors on the upload page. The problem is that since the page is not reloaded, the <%=error_messages_for :song %> does not work.

I employed a simple solution to fix this. I put <%= error_messages_for :song %> in a div like this

<div id="err_msg" ><%="error_messages_for"></div>

and in the song_controller/upload method, if the validation fails, I do the following


responds_to_parent do # execute the redirect in the main window
render :update do |page|
page[:err_msg].replace_html(error_messages_for("song"))
end
end


This displays the error messages for the upload even without the page being refreshed.

However there is an issue. What happens if there is an activerecord validation error. In that case the error messages have to be shown back on the upload page. This is something that I have not been able to figure out yet. The upload controller uses a responds_to_parent function and I don’t understand it fully yet. If I do not reload the page, the page won’t stop polling mongrel for upload progress. If I do reload the page, the error messages go away :(

I will try to figure this out soon and will post the progress here …