Alright. 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.

Didn’t I just talk about life-time hosting plans last week, and used TextDrive/Joyent as a pioneer example? They have just released the new VC200 — Life-time Accelerator Plans! For only $799 out-right, you can buy a small Solaris container with 256MB RAM, 5GB NAS storage on the Thumper and 15GB/month data transfer. You’ll be in front within 18 months!

Even better — if you are an existing life-time plan holder, you get to pay only half the price ($399 for a small life-time Solaris container) AND keep your existing shared hosting with TextDrive as well! However, there will only be 200 slots available. My Solaris skill is pretty rusty (last used one — 2000), otherwise I will be very tempted.

Now, the mic is over to you, Mr. SliceMatt. What do you think? :)

After EveryDNS and EditDNS's outage, I have finally got my act together to have this redundant and free DNS running for some of my domains. I know both EveryDNS and EditDNS have 4 geographically separated servers, however during the event when the vendor is targeted for DDoS, I am still suffering downtime when their servers stuggle to stay alive. Therefore, instead of having your zone resiting on only one free DNS provider, you can get your domain hosted by both of them. Therefore just in case all servers of one provider get DDoS'ed, your domain can still stay visible on the net as the servers from the other provider are still answering requests.

Here is a question for those running web hosting companies today: “Are life-time hosting plans feasible?” Do they present a valid business model? Is it possible to run life-time plans, i.e. your users pay once and once-only for a hosting plan that runs as long as either the user or the hosting company shall live.

It actually sprung out from this discussion thread at Whirlpool forums, where many Australian Internet users hang out. OP asked “any reason why I shouldn’t go with life-time hosting?” and used one small US-based hosting company as an example, where for USD$120 out-right you can get a life-time hosting plan with 6,000MB of disk space and unlimited bandwidth.

Is EditDNS dead? Their website is not responding, nor are their 4 DNS servers. Since the DDoS attack at EveryDNS late last year, I have moved some of my domains to EditDNS, another free DNS provider that I have not yet had a chance to review. It is actually the first complete outage I have observed from EditDNS, and with all 4 servers out of reach, you wonder what is happening to them. Another DDoS?

As I have suggested in my previous post that it might be a good idea to build secondary DNS utilising other free DNS providers. Have I taken any action? No. Hopefully this EditDNS incident would teach me some lessons.

Just received an email from Amazon about the pricing change of Simple Storage Service. Instead of charging a flat rate of $0.20/GB uploading and downloading, “traffic cost” will be split into two from 1^st June onwards — a per request cost and bandwidth cost. It makes sense because not every gigabyte fetched costs the same for Amazon. 1,000 requests for 1Mb object will definitely be much more expensive than one single request for a 1Gb object.

Here is the relevant section in the email: