A 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 follow-up.

Uptime

Clearly the most important aspect of any hosting company, and unfortunately it’s been a little disappointing. Obviously I am not expecting 100% uptime; however, there have been two major outages in the two months I’ve been with CheapVPS. Both have been resolved in less than twelve hours, and in their defence one outage was caused by the data centre they’re using.

Speed

There are absolutely no complaints on this front. I’m running a Xen VPS with 384MB RAM guaranteed, and an additional 384MB swap space. It absolutely flies – really, it’s equivalent to having your own dedicated server. There are also many processes running; lighttpd, mysql, php5, postfix, dovecot, and others.

Connected speed is also excellent; upload speeds are fast, and latency is very low. Of course, this may be because I am in the UK, but I’ve not had any complaints about the speed in the US.

Support

Although there have been some reports that support is slow, on the few times I’ve had to contact them my issues have been resolved pretty quickly. Generally they’re always forwarded to one guy, Rus, and I don’t know how he must keep up with the constant inflow of tickets.

The ticketing system is pretty good, as is the online chat which I’ve found most useful of all. Generally you can get a response almost instantly if the problem is small, and if large then it might take a bit longer.

Control Panel

Since I’m using a Xen VPS there really isn’t that much custom control panel software out there. That being said, the one supplied by CheapVPS — HyperVM — is pretty terrible; interface is very clunky, often unresponsive and making backups is often a pain and very time-consuming.

That being said, it serves little function. You can log directly into the server’s console via SSH to see if there are any boot errors, and it’s not very often at all that a restart is needed.

Value for Money

Not beatable. Not by a long way. I signed up with a 10% discount-for-life offer on my monthly charges, and so pay about £10/month. With the quantity of resources, speed of the server, UK hosting and amount of data transfer I’m getting, I’m very happy. I don’t believe there’s another deal out there that matches this.

Yes, there are misgivings. But if you’re willing to ignore them and need a cheap, no-frills VPS package then go with CheapVPS.

11:23 pm | Posted in Computing, Site Development, Web Development 1 Comment »