17Alright. I might got my small Xen VPS hosted in Sydney, I am still looking for alternatives every now and then. After all, virtual private/dedicated server hosting in Australia has a very small market, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It is good, because it does not take long to survey all the hosting providers to see what they have on offer. It is bad, because there actually aren’t many choices. Few choices means less competition. Less competition means expensive price. Expensive price means annoyed VPS shoppers heading overseas.
Anyway. I have documented my research and put a list of companies providing VPS in Australia.
Virtual Private Server Hosting in Australia
I am pretty sure that there are more VPS hosting providers in Australia than what is on the list, but these are the ones that I can find via the almighty Google. The documents are no where near being completed either, but hopefully I will find time adding more and more content to it.
Here are some verdicts after compiling this list.
Gee, That is Expensive!
Want some examples of really expensive VPS hosting? Look at these:
- Conexim Australia‘s 256MB “context-based virtualisation” VPS (whatever that means) for AUD$198/month (~USD$162/month) + AUD$99 once-off setup fee (~USD$81), and you only get 10GB monthly data transfer.
- OzNet‘s 256MB VPS with unknown virtualisation technology would cost you AUD$250/month (~USD$205/month) + AUD$195 once-off setup fee (~USD$160), and you get tiny 2GB storage and 20GB monthly data transfer.
Yes. That is right — the monthly cost of a small VPS from these guys can let me rent a Core 2 Duo box with gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of bandwidth somewhere in Dallas.
Lack of Information
Other than one provider, I have not written anything to enquire about the details of their VPS specification. All the info are collected from their websites, and for some hosting providers, the amount of information available is just really lacking.
Besides some standard metrics that I look for when I compare VPS plans (memory, disk space, bandwidth, etc), I am also interested in:
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Location — Australia is a BIG country, and a server in Sydney will feel different than a server in Perth. Personally I prefer East Coast servers (Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane), because I live in Sydney, and they also have relatively short return trip to US.
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Data Centre / Network Provider — It is nice to know which data centre is these VPS hosted at, and who provide network from VPS to the rest of the world. You definitely want a VPS with multiple transit provider (just in case one gets DDoSed). Also your Australian visitors might get free data due to peering arrangement (many ADSL companies give free PIPE Network data, for example).
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Hardware Specification — You do not see dedicated server shoppers going around looking only at memory / disk space / monthly transfer, do you? I would like to know:
- What kind of CPU?
- How much is the host memory? (So I can guess how many VPS are crammed into a physical box)
- Disk arrangement? (Because RAID 0, or single drive is really a bad idea)
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Virtualisation Technology — don’t just call your service a VPS. Behaviour of a Xen VPS is actually quite different from a Virtuozzo VPS, and I would that before I pay the bill and get the root prompt!
I am actually quite surprised that many aren’t even providing you the method of virtualisation they have used. Some are more interested with terms like “unlimited domains”, “unlimited MySQL database”, “unlimited mailboxes” Obviously they looked at VPS as a grown up shared hosting/reseller account, than a shrunken dedicated server.
Not Enough Demand
Looking at the price and lack of information, there is no wonder that the competition is not strong. Maybe it is due to lack of demand? I think there are far more dedicated server providers and resellers than VPS providers. Although I am not in the hosting industry, I would think that selling VPS will be much easier than selling dedicated servers, as provisioning itself is much easier and can be easily automated.
It is also quite evident from looking at WHT.au’s dedicated server/VPS/co-location offer forum. No one, except maybe Sofitech Media and DarkStarX advertise in there.
Maybe people are just not aware of the benefit of VPS. Or maybe for people with that much money to spend on hosting, they will go for a US-based dedicated server instead.
Vigabyte — A New Breed of VPS?
Vigabyte, a sister company of SmartyHost, has a very interesting setup. Instead of a simple single-box-split-into-multiple-VPS, it provides high availability virtual data centre infrastructure. It uses Sun Blade servers on the front, and a SAN setup for storage. Moreover it uses VMWare to provide hardware virtualisation (+ live migration I suppose), which allows you to run any operating system on virtualised x86 hardware.
Very similar to Layered Tech’s GridLayer, except GridLayer uses AppLogic + Xen, whereas Vigabyte uses VMWare and privately developed technology.
Very reasonable price for high availability as well — starting from AUD$49.95/month for a 256MB VPS with 40GB disk space and 10GB monthly transfer. The pricing seems to be a bit of stuff up — the next level up costs $80/month but only has 256MB more memory, but 256MB is a standard $16.50/month upgrade…
I might wish to write more about Vigabyte when I have a chance. However, SmartyHost does not have the best reputation in Australia, and there have been many dis-satisfied customers due to the mess-up from their previous data centre move.
Anyway. If you can contribute to the VPS AU website, please contact me so I can setup a Wiki account for you.
Nice survey. I’m sure it’ll be useful for folks.
I would point out one minor correction though. Although we use Xen, 3tera’s AppLogic isn’t a layer you run atop Xen as implied. That’d be a mess to manage all those layers and still try to sell the service at an aggressive price.
Cheers,
Bert
Great – I’ve been having a issue every week so far with GPL host – like you I’ve paid for 3months so will just see how it goes.. They are very professional and gets things sorted out pretty quickly, would be better if it didn’t break in the first place though ;)
I’ve signed up for a Vigabyte value and will see how that goes.
Awesome site – will be keeping an eye on it :D
@Bert — thanks for the correction. I have to admit that I have never studied how AppLogic works (maybe I should!)
@Nicholas — yes, like the outage this morning, where my node (and yours too!) went down for almost an hour. Although the support is pretty good, but the stability leaves a lot to be desired.
Do report back how Vigabyte goes! I might set up a forum there for the Australian VPS users so people can post comments. Personally I found them to have a good spec, but because of (1) the technology is new (2) SmartHost’s history, I think I will sit back and wait for a while.
Vigabyte – I signed up three days ago they took my money but haven’t herd boo out of them :/
Lets see what happens tomorrow…
Aargh. That surely suck.
Please keep us informed. Also feel free to post a review on your blog, and I will make a link to it from the VPSAU website.
Similar experience with Vigabyte… they claim “Your Vigabyte server is setup in less than 24 hours.” – well I ordered it three days ago and haven’t had anything happen other than my credit card being billed and an invoice being sent through! (Note there is no * “conditions apply” around this less than 24 hour claim)
You call them up, and there’s a recorded message which asks you to leave a message. Which I’ve done, but haven’t heard back from them. It certainly all feels very virtual, but the credit card transaction is very real!
So disappointing, a very crap start to what I was planning to be a long relationship.
Finally got a call back from a sales guy at SmartyHost/Vigabyte after multiple attempts to get in contact with someone who could help. The explanation I received is that they cannot currently meet demand, and have run out of capacity for their Vigabyte service. So basically, “at the moment” they’re not able to provision the service I paid for. I signed up to get something online quickly (as per their promise), which they can’t do, so I requested a refund – we will see how quick they are at sorting this out.
I’d caution you from rushing into this service, my suggestion is to try calling them first and see how happy you are with that process. My feeling is that whilst Vigabyte appears promising, and they seem to have worked out what people want and have the photoshop resources to make it look ready and able, based on my experiences it is presently not a viable option. I’m not pleased with them at all!
Anyone want to go halves in a box with me, and we’ll stick Xen and CentOs on there? ;-)
Well, after being told on June 5 that I would be given a refund within 48 hours – I’m still waiting, it’s now the 13th.
I have sent an e-mail requesting action, no reply. Not impressed. Vigabyte took my money and gave me nothing – not even a refund!
At least they had the decency to give me a refund, albeit extremely slow.
If you are looking at Vigabyte as potential service provider, I encourage you to try to and speak to them first. Good luck with that by the way!
Gee. After all these comments I still don’t know what your name is, but I can certainly feel the frustration! I am hoping people searching for Vigabyte will land on this page. Thanks!
Updated – But not totally resolved yet… just over 2 months now…
Vigabyte/Smartyhost Update
Oh crap. What is that?! 2 months down the track and finally woken up thinking, “hey I think I have a VPS business that I am supposed to taken care of”
There are heaps more VPS providers now in Australia although most of them run Virtuozzo and few actually support Gentoo…
That’s terrible, my slicehost was available in 2mins. It took me longer to get the email and click the link than it did for them to setup the slice. Haha
I’m looking in australia for a host too. I want slicehost in australia.
Ben
Unlike most people here i have been fortunate enough to have a fairly good run with vigabyte so far. I took advantage of their free months trial, my system was set up within 24 hours and the one time i tried to contact them they got back to me within 4 hours. That said i think they have some sort of firewall appliance that kills my SSH connections after awhile as a developer that mounts to what i am working on using sshfs this really pisses me off, and if changing the ssh port number to something higher doesnt stop it i will go elsewhere.
CPU cycles seem all to easy to burn with even pretty simple PHP pages getting served making a visible jump on “top”. My other pet hate is the lack of a control panel at least for just looking after the basic stuff like paying invoices and viewing how much bandwidth i used, at the moment i have to calculate my own bandwidth usage which is ridiculous.
@scotty good post. Updating http://www.vpsau.com/ with details of some of our Sydney based VPS hosting plans
I’m sure you can count this as shameless self promotion :) My company Cloud Central has just launched a private beta for our Cloud Infrastructure as a Service product. You could look at this as the next generation on from most VPS type products. Our service allows you to signup and get a cloud server online in around 2 minutes. Our charging model is pay as you go on an hourly basis, so you can have it for an hour or a month and pay only for what you need.
Our private beta will run until the end of December, so I welcome anyone who would like to test out our service and provide feedback to signup for free at http://www.cloudcentral.com.au/signup
Cheers,
Kris
The signup link is actually https://secure.cloudcentral.com.au/signup
Cheers,
Kris