DISCLAIMER: While this is an completely honest review about my experiences with VPS.net as a hosting company, they incentive to write the post came from their competition of giving away a free node. Since I wanted to share my experiences for some time, I might as well get an extra node out of it. So now you know, don’t hate me for using the opportunity.
About a year ago I started moving more of my hosting to “the cloud”, basically choosing to use a VPS solution instead of renting servers in a datacentre. It was right after a breakdown, and the danish hosting center that I had used since 2007 (former Plusnet, later bought by Jay.net) had a terrible customer service and the server I was renting was starting to break down. The point where I took the decision to switch, was when it took me over 3 days to get them to change the HDD in the server – in the end they “upgraded” me to a newer server and fixed the old HDD and connected it with a USB cable. But 3-4 days of downtime is just not acceptable, when you are running both email and production websites for your clients.
I have learned a lot more about hosting since then; I am no pro, no do I normally work with hosting, but having more and more production sites online, it makes me extremely annoyed when I get downtime. With this world of cloud-computing, any downtime at all is almost unacceptable. One of the things I did was to make sure all email hosting was no longer on the same servers (I actually use a $10-monthly account at HostGator for all email hosting).
Now with VPS.net I will start by making a short list of the good and the bad, before I try to make a final point. I can however say that I have decided to experience with Amazon in the future, but it will be when time allows me to play with a more challenging project – I already have the ideas to split it up (DB, main source & user data like images apart, using Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing to reach fail-over).
Things I like about VPS.net
- Excellent free support goes a long way. When people are nice and usually answers within 10 minutes, it is hard to get mad – even when having problems with downtime.
- The price is another great reason to buy a VPS. Starting at $20 USD per month (or $1 per day if you need a quick burst), and going down the more you buy, the nodes are pretty cheap. I currently pay around $100 per month for 2 instances with 3 nodes each, which is plenty to run for most of my projects. If you ever need more, you can give a quick burst for a day or two with extra nodes, which is a nice option to have.
- Scalability is the last thing I will emphasize. As mentioned above, upgrading your VPS with more nodes is easy and the user interface is really nice. Seeing a growth in traffic? Throw an extra node and make sure your VPS can take the pressure.
And now to the downsides of using VPS.net…
As I said in the beginning, this will be a honest review of my experiences using VPS.net, and going through the positive stuff have given them enough credit. Like I mentioned before I am planning to do some more technical experiences by custom building some application for AWS & spreading out the hosting with fail-overs.
So right off to the main points why I would not recommend you to use VPS.net and the couple of incidents I had..
The might be some downtime – yes I know, “how can you expect 100% uptime?”. This is the cloud. The only downtime should be when I fuck up my settings, or do some other stupid thing. I had a couple of times where my VPS was suddenly read-only, and they had to use some time fixing it. Below is a screenshot of the last couple of months where I have been using Pingdom, with “only” 98.62% uptime. anything below 99% is not good (in my eyes) when we are talking about “the cloud”. As the screenshot shows, I had a day with over 11 hours of downtime – just not acceptable with production servers in my mind.
Now you probably wonder if I am going to end this post either blessing VPS.net as “the best VPS hosting provider” and throwing some affiliate link, or if I will come with some negative crap about “that day with 11 hours of downtime”. But well, I promised to be honest so I can do neither.
In the end, they are providing a good service for what you pay. $20 per month per node including free support (where they always have answered within 15 minutes) is not that bad. But – and this is a big mother-but for me – the best host is where you do NOT need to contact the support at all.
I’d love to hear from you, if you have experiences with VPS.net – just throw a comment below. And if you are looking for a VPS provider, take a look at them. It also depends how serious you are, and how hard you look at a bit downtime. Nobody is perfect, and VPS certainly still have some work to do to become a 100% stable cloud-hosting provider, that I would recommend. If I ever get around to do the project using Amazon’s micro-instances to create fail-overs, I will ofcourse follow up with another blogpost about that.
Thanks Christian. Appreciate hearing your thoughts!
Nobody is perfect, but not everyone can suck as bad as VPS.net. I got a free lifetime node at last year’s DrupalCon Chicago, and I’m just about to tell them they can shove it.
Let me repeat that, I’m getting it for free, and I don’t want it anymore.
I’m plagued by downtimes lasting > 24 hours at a shot, and they seem to be happening once every 30-45 days. It’s always the SAN. Funny, our SAN runs with darn near 100% uptime. Just look at their status blog for their Chicago data center alone: http://status.vps.net/category/chicago/
Do not pay any money for VPS.NET, you will regret it.
@Terry: Thanks for your comment – best of luck improving the services. I sincerely hope that you guys will listen to the constructive critic you will get around, hopefully with more people that just me writing honest reviews about your services.
@Justin: I’m sorry to hear about your experiences. It sounds like you are on one of their unstable networks, and I agree with you that downtime like that is just not acceptable. As I mentioned in my post, I was really not happy with the 11+ hours of downtime in one stretch.
But I must admin, that I have seen many people having very mixed experiences about VPS.net hosting – I have heard from several people who have nothing but good experiences.