VPS Media, a relatively young provider in the virtual private server scene — yet have years of experience in application hosting, is marketing itself as “for Designers and Developers”. Thanks to Carlos T. who has provided me a testing VPS over the last two weeks, and here is my review on Xen VPS at VPS Media.

(Disclaimer: Aaron W. from Crucial Paradigm emailed me early last week asking for a review on their re-launched Xen VPS plans. So here we go — a review on their Xen VPS after playing with one for a few days.)

Crucial Paradigm is a web hosting/web design company in Sydney, Australia that have both Australian and US based operations (just realised that their office is around 400 metres to where I work). They have been in business for 5 years now, and early this year they launched their virtual dedicated servers service, providing fully managed Xen VPS hosted at the Equinix data centre in Sydney (which is on the same road where I live!)

(Note: This is a review of VPS hosting services provided by Web24 and Linode, and a migration of one of my sites from one to the other at the end of March 2008.)

Web24 — Virtuozzo VPS in Australia

Back in early this year I talked about writing a review on Web24.com.au, which I used to replace a VPS I got from GPLHost, which I terminated last December as I was using too much bandwidth (and was too cheap to pay :) The VPS I got from Web24 was their Silver package, a Virtuzzo Linux VPS running Ubuntu Linux, with 384MB guaranteed memory, over 6+GB of privvmpages (burstable memory), 50GB/month data transfer, and was located in Fujitsu data centre in Melbourne (see their profile on VPSAU). All these for under AUD$50/month — very affordable for my little sites.

Last week I needed a small VPS to test a new project so I went to Web Hosting Talk VPS offers forum to look for something really cheap, and found this deal at ServerWays.com. ServerWays is a new company, with its domain registered in December 2007. It is also a one-man shop according to this discussion thread. However it does not really matter to me as (1) it is only less than $5 per month (2) it is for a throw away project. So I clicked on the Order button for their lowest spec’ed VPS 111.

This is what you get for $4.90/month, billed monthly and no set up fee.

• 100MB guaranteed memory
• 10GB storage
• 100GB/month transfer
• OpenVZ + HyperVM

When I first went shopping around for VPS hosting back in early 2006, Linode was high on my list. There were only a few Linux VPS providers back then but I knew Linode has been in the VPS/VDS hosting business for years, way before the flood of HyperVM/OpenVZ hosts that I have observed in the recent months. However I did not go with them in the end (but went with Unixshell instead) because (1) they were a bit more expensive (2) I heard User Mode Linux (virtualisation used by Linode) was not as fast as Xen.

Fast forward 2 years.

A few days past Christmas, Thomas from Linode offered me a VPS account to review, and I emailed back asking for a Linode 360 in their Fremont California rack. 2 hours later my account has been set up, and I was already inside their Linode Platform Manager configuring up my VPS. So far so good.

How do you know that a web hosting company is good? You do a Google Search, landed on an initial impression review written almost 12 months ago, search around the site for any hint of negative comments on that hosting company and find none, and 12 months later the site is still hosted there.

Yes, I am talking about SliceHost here, and they are that good.

“So, DreamHost has started their own Virtual Private Server hosting business.”

“You kidding?!”

“Yes, it is true!”

From DreamHost Blog’s latest entry, What a CON!, where Josh Jones has again done what he does best — humiliating the whole HostingCon, companies such as Lunarpages, HostGator, Tier 1 Research and OpenHosting. Very enjoyable read for an otherwise boring Friday afternoon.

Lxlabs’ LxAdmin Host-InA-Box is a “feature-complete” server control panel product designed for web hosting. There are already many control panels for web hosting providers. Some are commercial, some are free, and some are open sourced/free software. What then makes LxAdmin HIB unique? Its runtime size, which claims to be only 15MB! The tiny memory footprint includes not just the control panel software itself, but also the mail server, IMAP server, POP3 server, DNS server and web server — everything ready to get you started with web hosting.

Many commercial control panels require at least 128MB to have everything up and running, and it is commonly known that cPanel won’t be happy with less than 256MB of memory. Then how did LxAdmin HIB achieve such low idle memory foot print? I was wondering about the same thing when I first heard about it, so I bought a small VPS plan and found out.

Alright. I might got my small Xen VPS hosted in Sydney, I am still looking for alternatives every now and then. After all, virtual private/dedicated server hosting in Australia has a very small market, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It is good, because it does not take long to survey all the hosting providers to see what they have on offer. It is bad, because there actually aren’t many choices. Few choices means less competition. Less competition means expensive price. Expensive price means annoyed VPS shoppers heading overseas.

Anyway. I have documented my research and put a list of companies providing VPS in Australia.

Virtual Private Server Hosting in Australia

I am pretty sure that there are more VPS hosting providers in Australia than what is on the list, but these are the ones that I can find via the almighty Google. The documents are no where near being completed either, but hopefully I will find time adding more and more content to it.

Didn’t I just talk about life-time hosting plans last week, and used TextDrive/Joyent as a pioneer example? They have just released the new VC200 — Life-time Accelerator Plans! For only $799 out-right, you can buy a small Solaris container with 256MB RAM, 5GB NAS storage on the Thumper and 15GB/month data transfer. You’ll be in front within 18 months!

Even better — if you are an existing life-time plan holder, you get to pay only half the price ($399 for a small life-time Solaris container) AND keep your existing shared hosting with TextDrive as well! However, there will only be 200 slots available. My Solaris skill is pretty rusty (last used one — 2000), otherwise I will be very tempted.

Now, the mic is over to you, Mr. SliceMatt. What do you think? :)