It has been a year since I wrote my 3 weeks review on GPLHost, and I am still with them despite some uptime issues back in June. My site hosted on GPLHost’s VPS has grown in popularity over the last year and the performance has been fine over the last 3-4 months. Now the VPS renewal date is coming up in 2 weeks (I usually renew every quarter). I used to pay my bills on time — but this time, I need to think about whether I should continue with their service.

Well. Read my review first.

Downtime and Server Stability

From my previous posts you’ll probably figured out GPLHost’s Sydney VPS servers have some serious stability issues. In June/July, the entire server will frequently go down due to excessive IO wait that caused everything to lock up. It turned out to be a hardware issue! Somehow the server I was on had issues with its hard disk controller. GPLHost runs its server in RAID1 mirroring, and every now and then the IO wait would start building up, to a point where everything simply freezes. They found that taking away one of the drive would cure the problem, but obviously you loose the benefit of disk mirroring. Apparently it is only happening on the server my VPS was on, and my friend Nicholas who was moved to a different server didn’t have that problem.

Yes it sucks when it is hardware issue.

So for a period of time between July and August, the server is running with only one drive (and finger crossed), with a promise that a new server is being built and would be shipped to Australia to migrate everyone from that borked server over. The “crippled” server ran fine for a month or so, and then the new box arrived at the beginning of August. Migration has very minimum downtime. The new server (a Core 2 Duo 6400) has been rock solid and very stable — I had 100+ days of uptime… Then 2 unscheduled reboots a few days ago…

There has also been other issues (like an up-stream switch problem 3 weeks ago causing 4 hours of downtime). Some might be outside their control, but overall the availability is still patchy.

I guess one problem with GPLHost is that they are physically remote from the data centre. Thomas is in Shanghai, and Damien is in Singapore. Both of them provide great support, but during downtime they can only act with a proxy, i.e. someone in NOC.

Server Performance

As I have said, since switching to the new server things are much more stable. Core 2 Duo 6400 at 2.13Ghz is no speed demon. My VPS only has 192MB running Gentoo Linux, Nginx, PHP5+xcache, MySQL, Postfix and a few misc daemons. However it performs very well.

I am only running one main site on this VPS (+ a few small sites getting only 10-20 visitors a day each). My main site is getting 4,000-5,000 visits and 18,000 page views a day. It is using Drupal so very database-heavy. Moreover it also runs an OpenAds server that takes 1-2 extra hits per page view. In November my GPLHost VPS is getting around 300,000 “hits” (dynamic + static content) everyday…

But the load average rarely went above 0.3! It rarely swaps, and at this point in time it still has over 100MB free in free+buffers+cached!

That was impressive. I have always used my GPLHost VPS in arguments that you don’t need 512+MB VPS to support forums or community websites with 100+ concurrent visitors online (using 15 minutes average). A solid host + good optimisation will carry you a long way with only 192MB of memory.

Customer Support

So, GPLHost VPS has patchy uptime but has been much better recently. The performance has been good. However if I am going to leave GPLHost today, one thing I missed the most would be their customer support.

Thomas and Damien are usually on MSN. As they are in Shanghai and Singapore (UTC +8) the timezone difference is not too different from Sydney (UTC +10). I found they have always handled support issues professionally. They will also follow up with detailed explanation after they have solved the severe issues.

Leave or Stay?

I have been thinking of leaving GPLHost when they had that hard disk controller issue with their old server back in June, but I managed to stay. Then after the new server has been deployed in August, I have been generally happy with the stability and performance.

But now with renewal coming up in 2 weeks, I am again considering whether to leave GPLHost or stay. This time — it is not stability related as I think it has been resolved. My growing site needs more data transfer allowance. I am close to using up 30GB that came with the plan, and it appears the only way to get more data transfer is by upgrading to the next plan, as there is no overage charge.

The next plan, Package 5 with 256MB and 50GB monthly transfer, is a bit steep at USD$28/month more than my existing plan — which is an expense you might not be willing to pay when you are only running a hobby site. I don’t really need the extra memory and disk space either as my existing setup still allows me to scale.

I still have 2 weeks to decide. If I am to stay, I will probably need to cough up $28/month more to upgrade to the next plan. If I decide to leave, I will need to find another Australian VPS hosting provider that can give me more data transfer for less (which can be a big challenge), or a US West Coast provider that has fast ping to Australia (preferable in Los Angeles).

We’ll see.