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.

Matt Ayres of Unixshell has just announced that orders are back!

We are back open for orders. Due to the inability for us to keep up with supply at the lower prices we’ve been forced to increase prices across the board and restructure the plans.

Current customers will NOT have their current plan prices changed.

May has been a pretty bad month for Unixshell — no more space in the data centre, and dom0 servers kept on crashing due to some Xen bugs in Linux 2.6.16. However, after Matt and his engineering team fixing up the issues, it has been smooth sailing since.

This is what I get this morning when I logged into my VPS.

Unixshell#, the VPS hosting company that I used for this site, recently had hardware issue with one of its dom0 box, which rendered many VPS hosted on that machine offline for a few days. It seems to be a complicated hardware issue as DC has replaced almost all components to try to single out the exact cause, but at the end Matt could only bring up that node with half the memory.

One disgruntled customer reported this incident on WHT, and Matt’s reply revealed something that I considered a potential issue for Xen-based VPS hosting.

After the decision that I need a Xen-based virtual private server, it came down to a journey of finding the right provider. What I need is simple —