Saw this special on WHT from Server Axis. You get the entire month of May free when you quote a promo code when signing up their Xen Opteron Virtual 1 or 2 plan for $30 or $45 per month.

When I looked at their plan, their price seem to be pretty cheap, and their base $30/month plan (assume unmanaged) includes 0.5Gb of RAM, 20Gb of storage, 200Gb of bandwidth and /29 IP addresses. For every $15 more you pay, you’ll get 0.5Gb more RAM and 20Gb more storage. For example, $60/month gets you a 1.5Gb RAM/60Gb storage VM on a dual Opteron, which is much cheaper than getting a equivalent white-box dedicated. However the monthly transfer stays the same at 200Gb — more than enough if serving CPU intensive applications, but maybe not for media-rich contents.

And I was even tempted by their $30 per month base plan. It is only around $7.50 per month more expensive than what I am paying Unixshell#, but has far more storage and memory. Yum, more memory… (drool).

But I guess I need to learn to be content :) Trying to persuade myself that 192Mb is more than enough serving a few websites.

Data centre is in Chicago, and is around 240ms round trip to Sydney, which is a bit slower than Unixshell. Why ain’t there any cheap Xen VPS hosting on the west coast? Sydney to LA (in my case DreamHost) is only around 160ms round trip.

Although Server Axis has been in business since 2001, there isn’t much information about the company. No phone contact number, which is a bit of worry. You don’t get web-based OS intallation like Unixshell, and the only way to re-install the OS is by contacting the support, although you don’t expect to rebuilding the server too often anyway. Also there’s no sign that Gentoo is supported. When I attempted to sign up, it only gives you an option to select Cent OS or “Other Linux”. Sounds like it would be more difficult to get up and running than Unixshell.

Also from AUP, IRC is not allowed. Similar to Unixshell I guess, probably limited by the upstream carrier. Not that I need it anyway.

Maybe I’ll take a look again when I finally need that much memory/storage one day…

Update: here’s one favourable review here. I would love to have half a gig of RAM — I can’t really run a mail server there without Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV, and they chew up a lot of memory (damn Perl!). Hmmm…

Update 2: A few months later… Looks like ServerAxis is droping the ball? Great company if you are only looking at the specs, but support is clearly lacking.