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!)

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.

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.

SliceHost has never failed to introduce unique features that impress me. They gave you console access via Ajaxterm, which allows you to rescue badly configured server over nothing but HTTPS. They have also recently introduced “Rescue Mode” for their VPS — another feature that you wish you never would need to use, but is super useful when you need it. It shuts down your VPS, reboots in a separate partition, and enables you to mount your VPS partition as /dev/sda1 for 90 minutes.

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.

Got a comment from Damien of GPLHost on my XenFu blog that they have started to provide Xen based VPS hosting in Sydney Australia. The data centre utilises MCI network, which has a nice 15-20ms return trip time from both my home ADSL connection and work.

While Xen is the new kids in the block in web hosting, there are already many hosting companies setting up Xen hosting and starting to rent out VMs. I will (hopefully) use this space to list and track hosting companies that offer Xen as a VPS hosting platform.