CheapVPS: a 2-week Review
So, after nothing for almost two months, the first post is going to be about changing servers! How interesting? No. But read on for a review of my new hosts after two weeks.
After many months of hosting on SFN’s server, I’ve decided that it was probably time to move my main site off of there, simply because I may have projects going on that require a reasonably large amount of resources. But I send my immense thanks to John for letting me camp out on there for a couple of months.
Another part of the reason for moving was to try out Xen-based VPS solutions. Previously, we’d been using OpenVZ/Virtuozzo, and rumor had it that performance was immensely improved under Xen. So the hunt was on: cheap, Xen-based hosting with at least 256MB RAM guaranteed, and UK based if at all possible.
After much searching, meet the new hosts: CheapVPS. For starters, I liked the name — anything with cheap in the title catches my ear pretty quickly, especially when it’s in relation to cool things like VPS hosting. It’s pretty much impossible to give an objective review at this point because you really need a few months instead of two weeks, but I want to write a few points for anyone looking for decent VPS hosting.
- The prices really are cheap. Take a look at the plans — a proper UK-based host, utilizing Xen systems, for less than £15/month on a decent plan is excellent value.
- Support is very speedy and helpful. So far, I’ve submitted a couple of tickets for an additional IP, and more importantly for an obscure iptables related kernel issue. Both followed up and resolved in under 4 hours. Their online support chat is also very good.
- Performance is good. Damn good. Data transfer speeds are excellent, and you get a lot of bandwidth for your money. If you’re trying to choose between Virtuozzo and Xen, I urge you to pick the latter. There is a vast improvement in the speed of this blog hosted here, from two OpenVZ-based systems.
- Good selection of OS templates: Gentoo, Ubuntu Edgy/Feisty, CentOS and a couple others.
To cut to the chase: these guys are good. They don’t seem immensely over-subscribed, don’t oversell their hardware and certainly know how to manage a VPS cluster as they have a separate managed VPS company (presumably using the same data centres).
So give them a go, and see what you think.
28/3/2007 3:22 am
[...] much the most common keyword is linked into my CheapVPS review; in fact, I was pretty surprised to see that it’s actually the fourth result for CheapVPS. [...]
18/11/2008 11:23 pm
[...] couple of months has gone by now since my initial review of CheapVPS, and I think it’s about time to finish it up with a fairly quick [...]
31/12/2008 12:33 pm
This website is very nice and colorful too. Its nice to have something to show others where you attend church and to show all the smiling people filled of the goodness of the Lord. You have a wonderful website here. May God rich bless you always.
9/12/2009 12:22 pm
Got hacked this week over 100 server with dataloss 2000+ accounts gone ?
20/3/2009 3:19 pm
It’s worth pointing out they USED to be good. I loved cheapvps back in the day.
But now they have no templates we can access. Asking for a simple restore, which when they had HyperVM took 3 minutes, took them over 2 weeks for me.
They also downgraded my account after they got rid of HyperVM (presumably assuming most people don’t check how much ram or hard drive space they actually have) and made excuses for months about how “they didn’t have any more server space to correct the package.”
But naturally kept charging me for the original package.
There’s not even a way to tell how much bandwidth you’ve used.
And backups? “Use FTP” they say.
It’s not just my experience of them, they’ve cut so many services over the past year they’ve become terrible.