From SliceHost to VPSLink

I have migrated from SliceHost, i.e. the RackspaceCloud, to VPSLink for hosting this blog. See my previous VPSLink review here.

SliceHost has served me very well for the last 3 years. In fact at one stage I had > 450 days of uptime, before one of my Python script crashed the slice by using up too much memory. Performance has been great. Absolutely tops in stability. Highly recommended if you are looking for the “Rackspace of Xen VPS host” (which it literally is).

I am however switching to VPSLink for this site for a few reasons (together with about 10 other sites I run). Because,

• It costs me less. From heavy discount & referral system, I am getting a Xen Link4 for ~$251/12 months ($29.36/month x 12 – 10% coupon code discount – $66 referral bonus), which has 512MB RAM, 20GB disk space & 500GB/month data transfer. It’s actually free to me because of past referral credit.
• Sydney to Seattle is around 20ms less than Sydney to St. Louis
• VPSLink has 32bit templates, which saves memory for my LAMP stack.
• Accessing to all 8 cores of an Xeon E5420 rocks (not that I need it).
• Did I say it’s free?

So due to simple economics I made the change to migrate my sites from SliceHost to VPSLink. Thanks for the service!

From Drupal to WordPress

Another big change that I have made is switching from Drupal to WordPress as the blogging platform.

Man I love Drupal. It is flexible and very customisable. It is a developer’s dream CMS because of its flexibility. It is powering my main hobby site at the moment (which takes way too much of my time) serving over 4 million page views a month.

However what I am doing here is just blogging. I am not running a community, nor trying to organise some structured content. I am just posting things here a few times a month, and the flexibility of Drupal has actually became a curse. Drupal 7 is almost out, but I cannot even upgrade to Drupal 6 without heavily tweaks on my modules.

So I gave up. Might as well run WordPress and keep things simple.

I ended up spending a day developing a converter to migrate all my old posts + comments from Drupal to WordPress and retain all the permalinks. So far so good.

Other Updates

A few other updates around the place.

• Updated serverstats to 0.2. Ended up rewriting the tokenizer to get rid of dependency on libpcre so it uses even less memory.
• Updated phpmonitor.py as Linode cleaned up their pastebin thus removed my code.

Blog Statistics

One thing for sure — 2008 has not been the year of growth. I had around 400-600 uniques a day pulling around 2GB/month last year. 12 months later I think I actually has less visitors. According to Google Analytics, I am having 130,000 visits and 196,000 page views so far for the whole year (which is not a lot). Google PageRank has actually dropped to 3 (from 4/5 last year). The growth of HostingFu leaves much to be desired.

I guess the lack of posting is to blame. I have written 33 posts here in 2008 (comparing to 54 back in 2007), including this very review. For the month of November I have not written a word. No wonder traffic is dying. However the solution might be less trivial than saying “okay I am going to write more in 2009″, as I am constantly side-tracked by other projects, work and family.

However I’ll keep on writing and use this space to provide unbiased web hosting reviews. Hopefully someone will find the content useful.

Hosts I am Currently Using

A list of hosting providers that I am still using at the end of 2008:

• DreamHost — same story as last year. In fact I have renewed until 2013, and bought another hosting account for another congregation at my church. It is cheap, it provides virtually unlimited storage space and data transfer, and it works (although can be slow at times).

  As of this year DreamHost also provides 50GB personal backup space that supports SFTP and rsync, which I am now using to back up all my other VPS. Somehow there are enough people who signed up using my promo code (which gives you $50 discount + 3 free domains) that my hosting account at DreamHost has been fully paid-for.

• NearlyFreeSpeech.net — yes I am still using their service, and I have not spent my initial $20 deposit either, which I made in March 2007. Okay I know that there’s no one visiting my site at NFS.net, but that’s the whole point — why pay more for an over sold shared hosting when a top notch provider with pay-as-you-go can cover it?

• SliceHost — it has been more than 2 years since I signed up with SliceHost, and I have nothing but praises for them. Although I have not wrote much about them this year, the service simply cruise along without any issue. During this year I have temperately resize the VPS to cope with site migration, rebuild it with Ubuntu and then upgraded to the latest LTS. Current uptime — almost 250 days, and my slice is currently hosting this very website + around 20 other light-traffic sites.

  A lot of happening at SliceHost as well this year. Big news being that it has been sold to Rackspace back in October, becoming part of RS’s cloud computing line up. Looking forward to my 3^rd year of satisfaction.

• VPSLink — here is another service that I have used for more than 2 years. Although even with my 50% off early adopter discount their plan has ceased to be “cheap”, when you compare the feature with many that are on offer at WebHostingTalk, I have been too lazy to cancel the service because (1) the server I am on is very under-sold, and (2) the service has been very smooth so far.

  I used to run LxAdmin + CentOS to host some of my friends’ sites but I have moved them somewhere else. I am currently running Ubuntu 8.10 on this OpenVZ VPS, running 1 small website (Nginx, PHP, MySQL) + my secondary MX + an ejabberd 2 server for 2 domains using around 150 MB all together. I did have to get support a couple of times because of my attempt to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, and the standard upgrade procedure pretty much rendered the VPS unbootable (note: don’t try apt-get dist-upgrade on OpenVZ). The support has been excellent and has always resolved my issues in a timely manner.

• Linode — I did a quick review early this year and ended up being a customer of theirs. Then in April I moved one of my busiest site there, and that has to be one of the best decisions I’ve made this year. I highly recommend Linode to anyone thinking of unmanaged Xen VPS.

  Currently I have a Linode 540 at Fremont in HE.net data centre, running Ubuntu 8.04. It hosts a Drupal site + a WordPress blog with Nginx + PHP/FastCGI + MySQL, and this month it served 2 million page views, 32 million HTTP requests and used 160+GB of data. If I ask on WHT what sort of hosting do I need for a 2m page view/month site, I’ll probably get $150+ dedicated server kind of responses. I am happy to say that my $29.95/month Linode is more than capable of handling that. Current uptime – 212 days.

• Web24 — at the beginning of the year I had quite a few issues with my Web24 VPS — the host feels oversold and the IO-wait is killing my sites. So I closed my account there, moved the sites to Linode, and left a mixed review for them. Last month Aaron S. from Web24 contacted me for a new review, as he believed that Web24 has resolved the issue.

  So I picked up the cheapest VPS they are offering, and I will evaluate it again over the next month or two. It seems that they have upgraded to Virtuozzo 4, but is still offering very high burstable memory that is prone to abuse. We’ll see.

• Data Realm — I picked up one of their budget VPS ($4.95/month, 64MB Xen VPS) for a small experimental project in February. It runs fine on an old Xeon with 1x CPU core. Very old kernel as well (2.6.9). Otherwise it’s a capable little VPS.

  The management facility is however very lacking. There’s no control panel to reboot or rebuild the VPS. I will be writing a review in the next month or two.

There are a few other providers that I won’t mention just yet but expect to see reviews in the coming year.

Hosts I Not Longer Use

There are also a few hosts that I no longer use this year due to various reasons.

• ServerWays — I bought a low end VPS from these guys on 31 Jan, posted a review on 4 Feb, and then terminated my account on 14 Feb. Working on a VPS with CPU throttled to 4% of core speed is simply too painful to do anything useful. I do not think that review matters anyway — ServerWays sold their VPS business to Web-Wide-Hosting soon afterwards. The business model is still the same though.

• NCL Hosting — while I am generally pretty happy in my review back in August, I decided to cancel the service in November to “cut cost” (hey, that GFC thing is really kicking). I’ll still recommend them for high data usage hosting in Australia.

• Gandi — got a test Xen VPS from them back in March, and did not manage to write a review until December. However my review has not been positive because of their poor CPU performance. Still waiting for Gandi to figure out the issue but my testing VPS is going to expire on 31^st of December…

Thank You Sponsors

Finally, let me use this opportunity to thank all the sponsors that have purchased advertisement on HostingFu this year:

• Crucial Paradigm
• Dan Lemnaru
• Dyn-DNS/SpringServer
• Tektonic
• VPSLink
• VPS Media

Thank you for paying my hosting fees :)

Stefano actually asked a few good questions that I still not have put much thoughts in. For example DreamHost delegates some email hosting to Google — which I think is actually a good thing (although many in the industry don’t agree). It also reminded me that I need to spend a bit more time on this blog. However with wife, 2 kids, full-time dev job + a few websites to manage, HostingFu has unfortunately been stalling at the back of run-queue for a while. :(

Here is the Italian translation of the interview for those who are privileged to know the language.

Hosts I Am Still Using

Here is a list of hosts that I am still using as of 31 December.

• DreamHost — bought my very first web hosting account there back in 2005, and I am still hosting my church website, a file uploading service, and other large media files. $10/month, okay availability, crazy amount of storage space and data transfer allowance, slow servers but great bandwidth to East Coast Australia — perfect place to dump and serve up big media files.

  I don’t really plan to leave them in 2008 as moving that much data elsewhere is going to be PITA. Reading their blog alone is worth the price of $10/month anyway.

• NearlyFreeSpeech.NET — I reviewed them in March, and I still have one fairly static site hosted with them. It’s great for that low-traffic database-less site. In fact I suspect my initial $20 deposit might still have some change left by this time next year. They have also had some improvement since my review, for example migration to a new data centre, and migration to PHP 5.2. I will still recommend them for small sites that you want to host and forget, or larger PHP sites that you want to make use of their clustered set up to scale.

• SliceHost — I did a 12 month mini-review on them back in September, and 3 months later, this site is still hosted with their Xen VPS. In my review 3 month ago, the biggest issue was their wait list, as not many people were willing to fork out more to jump the queue for a product they have no experience with. Apparently it is no long the issue — Matt at SliceHost has officially declared the death of their wait list, and you can now sign up and get your slice instantly like how it used to be!

  Highly recommended for their service, their server performance and stability, their developer-centric community, etc. Wait for my 24 month review in September 2008.

• VPSLink — I have been with VPSLink for almost 19 month now, running a 256MB OpenVZ VPS with CentOS/LxAdmin. I use LxAdmin to host quite a few friends’ sites. Over the last 6 months it has been rock solid (especially after I requested my VPS to be moved to another host node with less IO wait :)

  Since I do not actually have a “production site” on my VPSLink VPS (these are all my friends’ sites), I don’t tend to tinker around with the configuration which might be why it has been quite stable. Another reason might be that LxAdmin requires CentOS, and personally I can’t stand CentOS and would like to keep away from it as much as possible :) Will I still be hosting at VPSLink? Most likely, as long as I am still responsible to keep my friends’ sites up and running.

• Web24 — after saying goodbye to GPLHost, I moved my project there to Web24.com.au in Melbourne Australia, as they have pretty cheap bandwidth for their Australian Linux VPS. I got a “Silver” plan running Ubuntu 7.10. So far so good — fast support, great hardware, good bandwidth, etc — but more I used Virtuozzo, more I appreciated my Xen-based VPS.

  I will hopefully write a review on them next month.

• Linode — they contacted me a few days ago offering me to review their VPS. They lent me a Linode 360 Xen VPS in Fremont CA and I have been playing with it over the last couple of days. Their control panel is very impressive and performance is good so I am tempted to actually get one myself.

  Their review will be up in the next couple of days as well.

Yeah, I know. I seem to have more VPS than I actually need. I am already paying over $100/month on hosting fees so I guess for 2008, I just need to develop some killer projects that actually utilise all my server resources :)

Hosts I No Longer Use This Year

There have been a few hosts that I no longer use during this year for various reasons.

• GPLHost — I had been with them for over 12 months, but has decided to say bye-bye to them because I need more cheap bandwidth in Australia. The support is excellent. Server performance has been great since migrating to the new hardware. Stability is patchy. They are still one of the cheapest Xen VPS provider in Australia though.

• VPSByte — when they advertised their 1 year anniversary specials — 512MB guaranteed, 1GB burstable, 300GB data transfer, OpenVZ $14.96/month — I bought one VPS from them as an impulse buy because it’s just too cheap. It turns out to be a $14.96/month waste of time and I was too lazy to cancel it so I actually kept it for 2 months! Faults:

  • Time drift. You can do nothing about it as it’s an OpenVZ VPS (whereas in Xen you can have your own independent clock). Ask the support to sync with NTP server, and few weeks down the track it’s out of sync again.
  • Capped bandwidth. Not sure whether it is capped, but RX can’t seem to exceed 50KB/s and it takes painful long to download package updates even from local mirrors.

• BuyAVPS — bought a small VPS from them back in March as I needed a small server in California. Then the big drama of its ex-owner Navid Nadali unable to pay the data centre, move the servers around, and then disappeared completely leaving all its customers screaming and shouting on WebhostingTalk.com. AxisHost came to rescue, but since it is no longer hosted in LA I gave the new BuyAVPS a miss.

• AnchorVPS.com — used them for a month. Too many reboots at the beginning and the whole server is simply not stable enough. A few months later they closed down giving their existing customers only 48 hours to respond. That is dodgy.

There might be others but I don’t really want to write out all these bad experiences on this blog.

Blog Statistics

It is still a small blog after 20 months. 400-600 unique visitors a day, less than 2GB a month and that’s about it. Most popular post this year is Nginx v.s Lighttpd for a small VPS, which has been featured on Reddit and linked by many other blogs.

Thank You Sponsor

Finally, I would like to thank VPSLink for sponsoring this blog (you should see their skyscrapper banner when you browse around). They have been advertising on this blog since June this year. Also thanks to Web Hosting Unleashed for sponsoring this blog in March-April.

Please contact me if you are interested in advertising on this blog.

Testing out Lxadmin

Testing out Lxlabs‘ Lxadmin and their “Host-in-a-box” solution, i.e. the very first control panel platform for lighttpd. It came out from a discussion at WHT on whether Host-in-a-box can serve 8 million hits a day on a 128Mb burstable VPS. I am still not convinced, so I guess I shall find out myself :)

So far I am actually quite impressed with Lxadmin — light weight, feature rich, and free with the VPS package. I shall write a review in a few weeks time.

Signing up New VPS

To test out Lxadmin however, I need to source a cheap OpenVZ VPS running CentOS. I ended up actually signing up two providers — so now I have two sub-$10/month VPS running Host-in-a-box. I initially signed up one, but VPS provisioning took way too long (over 24 hours). I then signed up with another guy (which also took 10+ hours, what is wrong with these guys?!) While preparing to fire a refund request to the first guy, I received an email telling me that my first VPS is now ready to go. Well, they are both under $10 but now I wonder what am I going to do with them.

Now onto CentOS — I hate it. Yum is such a slow memory hog, and I basically cannot run yum update on my low-mem VPS. Lucky I will just stick to control panels.

Other Commitments

Been very busy with my other hobby sites. I have just formed partnership with another website so we are at the stage exchanging API specs to integrate some of our features. Looks like there is going to be more coding to do this weekend.

Elsie

Finally, I have been busy with this girl. Elsie, who was born on Sunday 18 March, has been keeping us awake.

Going to do some nappy changing now.

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?

Hosting-Fu

It’s a weird name, isn’t it? “Fu” was derived from the Chinese word Kung-Fu which () means expertise or skills. I am hoping to eventually grow expertise in the scope of web hosting.

Site Platform

This site is currently running a vanilla copy of Drupal 4.7.0 with very small number of extra modules installed. It provides me flexibility to blog, and a room to grow if the site gets larger.

Current Hosts

I have been hosting various websites since late ’99 on my home line (on the speedy 33kbps upload ’til mid-2002), but has only step up to commercial web hosting in October 2005. Currently I have around a dozen or so websites hosted on:

• DreamHost — a popular LA-based shared hosting famous for their massive storage and bandwidth.
• Unixshell# — affordable Linux VPS hosting based in US east coast.
• Jumba — a cheap Australia-based shared hosting on cPanel.

I am still hosting some sites on my 512k/512k ADSL link at home on a static IP via Exetel. I am hoping to review these services in the future on this site.