This review is a follow up from my previous blog entry. Long story short — I have been a customer of VPSLink for 17 months and have been using their OpenVZ VPS to host various projects. Recently they launched their Xen VPS hosting product, and Cameron from VPSLink has provided me a Xen Link-3 account to play around.

Before I go on, I feel that I might need to make some disclaimer. VPSLink has also been a regular sponsor of this blog since June this year (in case you have not spotted their skyscraper ads on the right), but I will try to keep my review unbiased :) I was going to give their Xen beta program a try any way when it was announced 2 months ago, but was too busy to do so.

I have been a VPSLink customer for about as long as they have been offering the service — since June 2006 I think — although I rarely blogged about them here. Recently I had an opportunity to test out their recently launched Xen VPS hosting. VPSLink now offers both OpenVZ and Xen based VPS hosting at the same price point, and I will be reviewing their Xen offering here shortly. However I would like to look into an obvious question — Xen or OpenVZ VPS — which one is suitable for me? I will be looking at the differences between Xen and OpenVZ especially in memory model, and how it is affecting us the VPS customers.

Robert Cichon of CrystalTech wrote on theWHIR blog about getting ready to start up a VPS solution for his hosting company. He asked “Are we making the best choice for what the customers will want?”, and tried to explain what VPS is for.

I mean it’s pretty obvious why some would want to buy VPS; for the value of course compared to true dedicated server offerings. It’s just a perfect next step from shared without having to incur all the expense of a dedicated. (Emphasis mine)

Is virtual private server the “perfect next step from shared hosting”? Is VPS the logical step-stone between $10/month shared hostings and $100+/month dedicated servers? Is it something you buy when your hosting company kicks you out for resource overage, and are too poor to buy your own “real” server? What do you think?

Media Temple, home of the Grid Server which I wrote about here, has just posted an excellent post on their blog, titled Anatomy of MySQL on the Grid Server. It

1. Acknowledge MySQL issues in the current grid server platform.
2. Talk about their old load balancing system for MySQL, and why it did not work.
3. Discuss their new VPS based MySQL solution that will be switched on in March.

When a web site or hosted application out grown the shared hosting accounts, the natural progression is usually stepping up to a VPS or a dedicated server. I have seen quite a few times on WHT where people ask whether they should go to dedicated or virtual private server — usually those with budget slightly more than a good shared hosting, and looking for places to run their busy websites. Surprisingly I have seen a lot of people putting their preference on cheap dedicated servers.

I will go for a VPS, if I have limited budget, and have a busy site to host.

I am an Australian, and Australia is a tiny place. Well, the land is big, but majority of 20+ million people chose to squeeze into a few coastal cities. Web hosting is expensive here, and everyone went “wow” when Aussie HQ introduced their million-dollar real time provisioning dedicated server this month (see all the buzz on this Whirlpool thread). I mean, you have enough customers and servers in Australia to provision dedicated servers in real time? Instead of hours or even days of waiting? No wonder they claimed to be Australia’s first.

But it is a dwarf in comparison to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which is currently at limited beta.

Page for Virtual Private Server Hosting.