This post is a continuation from my previous post, searching for an affordable VPS on the East coast Australia. At the end I was choosing between two offerings — GPLHost’s Xen package 4 in Sydney, or DarkStarX’s VDS package in Perth. Although DarkStarX is cheaper, but (1) it’s on OpenVZ with only 128Mb guaranteed (2) it’s on the west coast so 60ms ping, at the end I picked GPLHost.

3 weeks later, I am writing this review.

The Package

Here’s the spec of the VPS that I got:

Storage:	15Gb
Memory:	192Mb RAM + 192Mb Swap
Data transfer:	30Gb / month
Server hardware:	Pentium D 3.0Ghz1
Operating system:	Gentoo Linux 2006.12
Cost:	USD$42 / month3

Note 1: Even though Pentium D is a dual core Pentium 4, my VPS on GPLHost has been bound to only one CPU so it cannot utilise both cores. Hardware node / dom0 is currently running Xen 3.0.2-2.

Note 2: GPLHost offers Debian, CentOS, Gentoo and NetBSD for their Xen VPS. I would have gone with Ubuntu, but Gentoo is probably easiest and fastest to setup for me (not counting the package building time). Also note that it is running 64bit OS, so beware if your apps are not 64bit clean.

Note 3: Even though you are getting a VPS in Australia, GPLHost charges you in US dollars. That means (1) you have to pay exchange fee if your credit card is in Australian dollar (2) price fluctuate depending on exchange rate, even though it is now in Australian’s favour as US dollar weakens.

Another thing is, GPLHost charges gateway fee — something I have never experienced from other hosts. That’s $1-$2 on top of your monthly cost, depending on your payment method (CC or PayPal). I have seen no frills shops charge extra for credit card / PayPal payments in the name of not disadvantage cash-paying customers, but GPLHost is no way near cheap no-frills, nor is any payment exempted from gateway fees.

They should definitely add the cost into their advertised monthly fee.

Signing Up

Signing up a VPS from GPLHost is easy, and provisioning is pretty fast. I filled up the form, paid with my PayPal account, went for dinner, and the VPS has been set up and ready to go after I came back 30 minutes later.

I was given an URL to their DTC control panel. Log in with the password used in the setup time, and I was presented with menus on what I can do with my brand new VPS. The Gentoo 2006.1 image they used bootstraps almost nothing. No password for root, and SSH has not been started. To make it operational, I have to log in via the Xen console (which is accessible via SSH), set up my root password, and start SSH daemon.

Now it’s ready to roll!

Control Panel

Before I start talking about the VPS itself, let me describe GPLHost’s control panel for Xen. GPLHost uses DTC-Xen, which GPLHost wrote it themselves and open sourced it under GPL. From a user’s point of view, it has pretty much all you need to control your own VPS:

• Start / Shutdown / Kill your VPS.
• Check your VPS’s current status.
• Set up password or SSH key for Xen console access.
• Check the current network and CPU utilisation on the hardware node.

Network/CPU utilisation on the hardware node is probably one of the most distinctive feature of DTC. It’s a RRDtool-based graphs, and it allows you to see how many Xen VPS this hardware node has, how much bandwidth each node is currently utilising, and how much CPU each node is current using.

I am sure there is privacy concerns, as the URL of the graphs is actually public — no authentication needed. However I am also happy to know that whenever I feel my VPS is responding slowly, I can log onto DTC, and check which one of my neighbour is being naughty.

Yup. That’s me who is using up all the CPU time from the above graph, while trying to compile MySQL 5.0.30. :)

Network Performance

GPLHost’s Sydney VPS are connected to the world via MCI/Verizon’s pipes. Not having PIPE might be a disadvantage, as Australian broadband users love peering (and many providers don’t count PIPE traffic). However, the round trip time from pings is very good regardless. It’s 5 hops from my home ADSL connection at around 29ms — do note that my first loop is currently around 27ms.

Update 23 December 2006: After they moved server this morning, they are now on PIPE!

Downloading and uploading from Australia is very fast. I am getting around 2.5Mbytes/sec downloading from Pacific Internet mirror, and 2Mbytes/sec from AARnet mirror. After all, that’s why I picked an Australian VPS for my new site, as it needs to be fast + low latency for Australian visitors.

My VPS has been assigned and pre-configured with 1 IP address (instead of 2 as advertised), and it has default netmask of 255.255.254.0. It is actually bad as it picks up quite a bit of broadcast traffic from ethernet (600-800Mb per month). Not that they are harmful — but annoying. Maybe I’ll do some experiment and listen on the ethernet device to see what kind of packets has been broadcasted.

Server Performance

So far I have not experience any performance “hiccups” on my VPS, and the speed in general is pretty good. The server hardware node itself is nothing high-end — a 3Ghz Pentium D is not someone I’ll brag about. However, I seem to be able to get a pretty good slice of CPU time whenever I need it. DTC utilisation graph also helps, as it shows most nodes are idle most of time.

IO is also very acceptable. It’s a RAID1 disk so I expect good read performance.

Outage and Support

Let me talk about the outage first.

A few days after I had my VPS up and running, an outage has occurred. It’s on the 28^th of November, and the server became uncontactable for almost 6 hours. It was a complete lock up on dom0 node, and the whole box needed a reboot.

Fortunately I don’t have anything important on my VPS at that time, so I wasn’t that worried. Well, what’s a better chance to test out supports than an actual outage!

First of all, channel of support on GPLHost is actually quite limited. There is no blog and hosting-related forum to announce outage. There is no support ticket system. All there is contact details in the form of email addresses and IM.

Maybe I will give IM a try, as the response will be more instantaneous. So I added Damien to my MSN list. He is online! And then I asked him about the situation of the outage. Apparently I was the first one reporting it (although it has been dead for almost 2 hours). He then quickly informed the data centre about the situation, kept me updated, but it wasn’t resolved until a few hours later. VPS came back online later that night (while I was sleeping).

Two days later Damien IM’ed me again to touch base on the outage, and informed me about the possible cause. He has also explained the improvement they are going to make with the co-lo facility to minimise future outage. He then wrote an email (to all affected nodes?) about the cause and the solution, everything explained in detail.

So how do I rate the support?

• Live support via IM is excellent, and big kudos to Damien for keeping me well informed.
• However, without a tracking system, it’s hard for both sides to be accountable.

As of the big outage in my first 2 weeks? Well, I think I am forgiving on this one — GPLHost is not the only one I’ve heard that is having stability issue with Xen. However, being remote from the data centre does put them into handicap position, which I hope they will continue to improve communication with the co-lo facility to minimise down time.

Conclusion

GPLHost is not perfect, from my 3 week experience so far. However, I have just paid my next 3 months of hosting with them, because (1) they are very professional (2) they are one of few Xen VPS providers in Australia (2) their price is very reasonable.

Again, this is just my initial impression. A bit of turbulence, but I hope the next few months will be smooth sailing.