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?

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.

They have had data centre space issue since May this year (they are with Gnax in Atlanta GA), have not been able to fill new orders, and have very limited capacity upgrading existing customers. It is great that they have in some extended sorted out the DC issues, and are able to provide more sign ups.

However the price of their VPS has gone skyrocket. They got rid of those silly plans with 32Mb memory increment — which I suspect is giving them issues keeping the servers utilised, when customers with weird memory configuration cancelled their plan. They now have Xen VPS plans ranging from 128Mb to 512Mb physical memory, costing $20 to $80 per month. They continued to be unmanaged, thus making them no longer good value, especially comparing to its sister company’s Virtuozzo-based VPS running SLM memory model. Gone is the company that started all that “Linux VPS under 10 bucks a month” craze.

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

xen ~ # uptime
 13:49:59 up 101 days, 18:16,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
xen ~ # uname -a
 Linux xen 2.6.16.13-xenU #1 SMP Sat May 13 14:18:58 EDT 2006 i686 AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 246 GNU/Linux

Well, it is not a busy VPS. There’s hardly any traffic to this website and 20+ other blogsites I hosted for friends from church. However I am still pretty happy that Xen and Unixshell has provided me a very stable platform over the last 3 months.

It does not mean that Xen is bug-free though. Someone posted on WHT that his VPS on Unixshell has been down for 22+ hours, and Matt admitted that there’s still a pending bug in Xen. He has also been more actively promoting Virtuozzo VPS with SLM as SWSoft-backed Virtuozzo seems to be more stable.

That won’t be a path for me though, as Tektonic (1) does not support Gentoo (2) has no burstable bandwidth. We’ll see how it goes.

Update 2006-08-29: I hate it when I have to take back my words. My unixshell VPS went down at 5:00am AEST this morning and was off-line for 30 minutes, as it has been reported on their forum. Worse, my Gentoo network configuration file /etc/conf.d/net was out-dated and it did not add the default route after it reboots. So the VPS was sitting there doing nothing until I noticed it at 10:00am AEST. Fortunately unixshell provides Xen console via SSH, so I can log in there and add the default route back.

Maybe I will stop give good reviews here, in fear that my sites will go off-line the day after…

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.

This is one huge problem we’ve run into with Xen, since memory cannot be over-committed if we run into a problem where we lose a couple of GB in a server then we have problems. With Virtuozzo/OpenVZ/Linux Vserver/FreeVPS we would be able to start up all customers at the expense of some performance.

You cannot oversell memory nor disk space on Xen — which is supposed to be a good thing for customers to ensure that the server will never be overcrowded. Each megabyte of memory in domU correspond to physical memory in dom0. If the physical memory on dom0 is less than the total amount of memory required by all domU nodes, you’ll find it is impossible start all the VPS on that machine.

Which is what happened to Unixshell in this case with VM5. Dom0 can now only start with half the memory, and they have to either (1) prevent some VPS from starting (2) reduce the memory allocation to some. Not good for the host, and not good for the customers as well, especially in the situation where no hot space is available on DC.

Where as in the case of OpenVZ/Virtuozzo, each VPS is guaranteed with a fixed amount of virtual memory, and that is physical + swap combined. In the case of this disaster, the host could still start everyone up, and increasing the swap space if they have to. Just that it will be faster to eat into the swap, which then will cause degraded performance for everyone.

Having setting up OpenVZ nodes for developers at work, I actually felt VZ is more efficient and has better resource utilisation for the host. As a customer of VPS I might prefer Xen as it feels more like a dedicated, but we also need to understand that it also runs similar risks as dedicated servers. When there is not enough physical resource, you’ll have problems.

• It needs to be affordable — I have my budget. I do not make much money from my websites. In fact I am running a community site there, and I do not wish to pay more than needed.
• Gentoo must be an option — I do not want to use other binary-package based distributions. I like to tinker, continuously upgrade and hated broken dynamic libraries. Gentoo is my Linux distribution of choice, but not all Xen hosting has it as a choice.
• Good community — A forum. Good informative communication between staffs and users. Maybe a blog to announce what has been happening.
• Reliable facility — Good redundant network. Fast servers. RAID disks. Everything a hosting company should have if they respect their customers and treat their sites just as important as their own sites.

What I don’t need are:

• Control panels — I will be the only user on this box, and I do not wish to pay for a piece of useless software that only limits what I can do.
• Managed solutions — I am the root of this VPS, and there shall be no other roots. Neither am I willing to pay for someone to gain sysadmin credential and “fix up” my VM for me. Thank you but I have used Linux for 12 years, and I just need help when VM refused to boot.

Searching for xen hosting on Google reveals many companies (some ain’t even provide xen hosting), however unixshell# wasn’t one of them, due to probably bad SEO effort (which I had suggested them to fix).

I actually came to know about unixshell# from WebHostingTalk’s VPS forum. From that forum I learnt that unixshell# is (1) cheap (2) very much self-managed (3) uptime isn’t all that great. They might not have the best user review because of all the data centre glitches and slow support response. However they seem to have a very fast setup, and they are probably one of the largest Xen hosting provider. I would not put that much weight on the user reviews from WHT as many are ex-shared hosting/resellers looking at something more beefier, and have little experience on managing their own server. So at the end I became a camper on their forum — for around 2 months. During this time, I saw unixshell# upgraded to Xen 3.0 and many have experienced much better IO performance and fairer shared of CPC slices. In geneal, I think I will be fine with this company.

Then came middle of March 2006 my home server’s hard disk died, putting my FOCUSer community site off-line for a few days. Instead of waiting for my server to rebuild, I bite the bullet, signed up unxishell’s “The 192″ plan and was hosted on VM27.

I picked Gentoo 2006.0 to bootstrap my first Xen-based VPS, and spent the next day building various packages (yeah, the pain of great customisation). It took another day to move all FOCUSer sites over. Now I also run a few other sites on this VM, including this very blog.