Came to the office this afternoon (have to go to a primary school’s open day this morning), and found out that my VPS at VPSLink has been rebooted. The outage started at around 10:05 AEST (on 19 May 2009 here in Australia), and the server rebooted twice — and came back online at 10:43 AM (so only 40 minutes of downtime). However network feels a bit slow at the moment — could be my end, but it could be something wrong with the routers in VPSLink/Spry’s Seattle DC.

Their website and the forums are apparently down right now. VPS control panel is up — but a bit useless as it kept on throwning me error messages. @NeosurgeHosting said that there’s a power outage, but someone suggested that there’s an DDoS attack. Waiting for the official statement when it comes back online…

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.

If you are a user on a shared server, be that shared hosting or VPS hosting, have you ever wondered, what is my host’s strategy in storage and backup? Is it as robust as it claims?

The disk array error fiasco at VPSLink, has revealed some dark side of shared servers — or when the server hardware setup is out of your control. How would you know that your hosting company is using RAID 0 with SATA drives that is probably having double the failure rate as the drives are stripped?

Tough luck.

Two hours ago I tried to go to my daughter’s website, and all that was presented was an error message from my proxy server saying (113) No route to host. D’oh. Is the server down again? The website is hosted on an OpenVZ VPS on VPSLink running Gentoo Linux, and VPSLink has been very stable and fast over the last 3 months that I have been with them.