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.

11:15 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development