Sunday evening. I sent an email to Unixshell billing with a request to terminate my account. A few email exchanges later, on Monday evening, my ex-7 month old Xen VPS stopped responding to ping, and I was no longer a Unixshell customer.

Aargh. It wasn’t meant to be a sad story about relationship break ups. In fact I have to say that I am very satisfied with their VPS over the last 7 months. Besides some Xen-related rebooting glitches in May, I had good smooth sailing with their network, servers and services. I was thinking of writing a 6 month review, but just could not overcome my laziness.

The VPS itself runs pretty decent speed. It had 192Mb of RAM on their dual Opteron box, and coped pretty well under load (serving around 25 sites and quite a bit of data processing in the background). Located on the east coast of the United States means high latency (around 240ms) over SSH, but I have sorted of grown used to that.

In general, I give a thumb up for Unixshell. But maybe it would be a different story if my VPS was on one of the disastrous nodes. Considered myself lucky.

I was going to keep this VPS for a while, however due to my current circumstances I decided to let it go. What circumstances?! Well, just trying to save some $$$.

Currently I am having two other US-based VPSs with VPSLink and SliceHost, and a DreamHost account which currently has almost unlimited storage. Many my recent projects are however Australia-bond. I would prefer the users do not have to make 200+ms return trip to grab any piece of media.

And we all know Ajax sucks with long latency. D’oh.

Therefore I decided that I’ll need an Australian server — earliest would be beginning of next year. VPS in Australia ain’t cheap, so I need to get rid of one of my US-based VPS to save some money. SliceHost? It is faster and cheaper and 64 bit. VPSLink? Even though I hated the user bean counters, I am on 6 month pre-paid with life-time half-price special which just can’t be beaten. Sorry Unixshell! Looks like you are the one to be evicted.

I have moved this site to SliceHost, and other sites to my VPS at VPSLink. Meanwhile I need to start investigating Australian-based VPS products. GPLHost’s Sydney-based Xen VPS looks the best so far, but I wonder whether there’s any good value Australian operations (GPLHost operates from China and Singapore I think). Any good Aussie VPS?