Archive for October, 2007

My VPS provider Review (a2b2)

Ive been with a2b2 for exactly 9 months today, so I guess that now is a good time to post a review.

I better quickly state my package that I had. It was a custom special double ram package that I found over at WHT:

512mb RAM Guaranteed
1024MB RAM Burst
600GB Bandwidth
15GB Web space
2ip’s
Unmanaged
London Bluesquare datacenter

All for ~£14.50 a month

I liked this package and service so much that I decided to pay for an entire year a few months ago. Rus gave me 3 specials options: double RAM, Double Bandwidth or 12 months for the price of 10. I decided to go for the double RAM option so now I have 1024mb RAM Guaranteed and 2048MB RAM Burst.

The main site that im hosting is www.spudmud.com (300,000 + page views in September with around 45,000 Uniques a month) as well as a few very small sites.

Now I better get to the reviews:
1. Speed
The server was extremely fast in all respects. It almost seems like im the only one on my node. The specs as I can see them are 8 x 2.7GHz Xeons so its really is quite a tank with the best hardware.
Once when my site was on the front page of HeavyGames.com I was getting ~1 visitor every few seconds (the game file was ~2MB big) and I did notice that the site was starting to feel the strain (probably because of my bad programming :blush: ) and I submitted a ticket to support and Rus upgraded a few of my limits and the server was running super fast again. Since that every new game on heavy games doesn’t even seem to effect my server with the new limits (not sure what Rus upgraded but it did the trick).

2. Uptime
Since I got my server I would guess that I have had around 99.99% network uptime and around 99.8% server uptime. There have been one or two network problems but they were fixed fast.
My VPS had one day where it was down for 17 hours because it “Hung” and I was on holiday so didn’t know until I checked at an Internet cafe and I issued an reboot request and it was back up within a few minutes. I have never has any problems with my node, just with my own VPS, probably because im not the best server manager.

3. Support
Well all tickets are answered within a few minutes or up to 1 hour max but I would say around a 5 minute average response time.

4. Cost
Im very happy with the price of ~£14.50 for what I am actually getting. Even now when I look in the VPS offers section I don’t see many providers offering anything even close to what a2b2 offers hardware and support wise.

5. Features
a2b2 offers HyperVM which is great for rebooting you own server or monitoring your memory usage and traffic usage.
They also offer a DNS cluster for those who want it but I havent set mine up yet.

The only problem with a2b2 is that it has no RAID so I need to backup everything myself but a2b2 offers very cheap backup space so its not too bad.

6. Conclusion
To summarize I would call my 9 month time so far a very pleasant experience and I highly recommend a2b2 to anyone that wants a reliable and fast vps with very good support and a very nice price.

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