Well, it’s been a long trip.
Finding a VPS provider is one thing, but finding one that you can afford even on a college student’s budget is a horse of a different color. It may have taken forever, but I think I’ve found the Holy Grail of VPS hosting: my new host, VPSFarm. I don’t mean to gush, but I’m truly impressed by their VPS offerings, and I’m really hoping that I don’t anger the Gods of Uptime by writing all about them.
Background
Now, there are a few things you should understand about my hunt for the perfect VPS before I explain why I went with VPSFarm as my final provider:
First, I am a control freak when it comes to my servers. I want to have as much fine-grained control over them as I possibly can. Being a programmer, developer, and general all-around-hackity enthusiast, I’m constantly tweaking things — opening things up, changing settings, running benchmarks, tuning, and prodding; not only am I doing this with packaged software, or source code that I compile myself within the Operating System, but I’m doing it at the kernel level, too. This pretty much immediately ruled out anything that utilized kernel sharing. Goodbye, OpenVZ.
Second, I’m a DIY kinda guy. While some people find it convenient to simply let their host load up a new image onto their VPS node, I’m not really into that. I don’t like the fact that I could accidentally push a button, or an intern at the host could type something wrong, and my node and all of it’s data could be blown away. That sounds bad to me. I’m also really into customizing the installation that my VPS will run on. I don’t like fluff. I’m the kind of administrator that prefers a very minimal installation: a functioning operating system, and a package manager. Not only that, but I need console access to the box. I need to see it boot up. I need the lowest-level interaction I can possibly get.
Unsurprisingly, there are very few VPS providers that offer this kind of control. This criteria essentially led me down a very narrow path: I’m looking for a VPS that is virtualized all the way down to the hardware. I’m looking for a Xen HVM provider, on a piss-poor college student’s budget.
Finally, power is important to me. If I’m going to buy resources on a server somewhere in a remote datacenter to do my computing and spend my time setting it up for my needs, I’m not going to buy a wimpy low-end box. I’m going to buy in bulk. I’m going to buy enough for my needs. And then a lot more. I’m talking a fast CPU, a boatload of RAM, and some serious network performance, including low ping, high throughput, and miniscule downtime.
Oh boy, now I’ve really gotten myself into a pickle. Let’s recap my search criteria:
I’m looking for a hardware-virtualized, roll-your-own server with console-level KVM access with a quick CPU, as much RAM as I can get, and premium bandwidth. Oh, right, and it’s gotta be really cheap.
And so, the search begins…
My first instinct was to go lurking about the Web Hosting Talk forums. For days, I scoured the VPS Hosting Offers and read what seemed like an endless stream of mixed reviews about a plethora of hosts in their oh-so-helpful VPS Hosting forums.
My first guinea pig that match my rigorous specifications was ThrustVPS. Now, the company profile was good (the owner, Rus Foster, is rather notorious for his hosting ventures). The reviews were good, the price was certainly right, and they have a pretty-damn-close datacenter to where I am (Clifton, NJ), so my pings were sure to be nice and low. For the first few months, everything went reasonably well. I can’t really badmouth ThrustVPS. As far as bang-for-the-buck value, they simply can’t be beat. What really got to me was their ridiculous downtime. It seemed alright at first — once in a blue moon, my VPS would reboot. I barely noticed. After awhile, my node would fall off the face of the earth. Sometimes it would disappear from my SolusVM panel. Sometimes my IP would change without my knowledge. I even had it wiped without warning (see my concerns about that above). This got to be a little too much hassle, even for the tiny pricetag. So, I decided that “this is not the droid I’m looking for“, and proceeded to shop around a bit more.
My first instinct was to simply pay a little more for a little less. I looked into the big guys: MediaTemple, Linode, Slicehost, VPS.NET. They really need no introduction. They were all, of course, amazing for what they were: if you need a reasonably powerful VPS with a control panel, they’re you’re go-to guys. You’re going to pay a premium though, which means — as I said before — paying a little more for a little less. I tried all of them. All of them were absolutely awesome, and I loved them. It was hard to love the pricetag though, especially considering that I wasn’t getting some of the bigger features I was looking for: console access and custom installations. So, I kept my eyes open for something a little closer to my specs.
“A diamond in the rough.”
Then I stumbled across VPSFarm. They’re a small company, hosting their services in Ashburn, VA — only an 8ms ping away from me. I was a bit wary of their pricing model at first: they charge on a per-hour basis based on the specs of the VPS. Their prices range from $0.03-$0.12/hour, which is equivalent to approximately $21-$86/month — should you choose to keep the VPS that long. Basically, you load up your account with a minimum of $10.00 via PayPal in their customer area (from their Twitter, they will have more methods soon), and they ding your account a few cents every hour or so.
This is what is truly intriguing about this model, especially for a developer: should I all-of-a-sudden need some wicked horsepower — say, to crunch a lot of numbers — I can fire one up, and not pay a hefty $86. I may only need one for a few hours to get my work done, and then I can delete it. If that isn’t good enough, VPSFarm also allows it’s customers to set their own hourly rate, but with the added risk of having the node removed without warning. So, even better, I can ‘rent’ one of those beastly VPSs, with 8GB of RAM and all of the trimmings, for the wallet-friendly price of $0.01/hour. Pretty cool, hm?
Even if I’m not doing that, their monthly prices are reasonable, especially for the specs that they offer. There is a price comparison on their home page, showing their price-per-megabyte for RAM in contrast to their competitors.
They absolutely meet my specs, especially when it comes to console access: their entire service is controlled by logging into a Java Applet provided on their site, aptly-named the Console, where you have a command-line interface to create, modify, and delete your nodes, among other account controls.
The VPSFarm Console area, where you can control your VPS as if you were sitting at the keyboard in front of it.
Let’s be clear: they are all about no frills. Their customer area is simple, showing your account balance, a list of your active nodes, and a quick bandwidth usage overview for your VPSs. To be honest, I absolutely love it. It’s very clean and simple, and reinforces the “if you can’t use it, you don’t need a VPS” mantra. When you want to interact with your VPS, you either SSH into your booted-up box or, if you need more ‘at the keyboard’ control, VNC into their Console area.
So you have the hardware specs. What about network performance? Well, I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty, but being that I’ve got a 100Mbit connection to my house, it was pretty easy to test. My ping to the server is approximately 8ms, with almost no jitter. I get about 9MB/s both up and downstream to the server. And before you ask: no, it doesn’t go down. I have Pingdom reporting 100% uptime for the two months that I’ve had the box, and it’s going strong. Not a single reboot nor a network outage in sight. Extremely impressive for such a seemingly small company.
My favorite part of this whole adventure and writing about it is that I have absolutely no experience dealing with their support team. With Thrust, I was contacting them constantly: “my server is down”, “I’m getting horrible lag”, “you overbilled me… again“. I was always getting back half-English responses telling me it was my fault. That I somehow caused my billing cycle to repeat itself.
For now, I am happy to report that I have not had a single problem with my VPSFarm service since I signed up, and I’ll be posting my uptime counter on this site in the near future for you naysayers out there.
I will be giving my newfound friends at VPSFarm my 5/5-star seal of approval. Good job, VPSFarm. Keep up the good work.
Have you had any good or bad experiences with VPS or other hosting providers? Leave it in the comments, I’d love to hear about it.
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