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.
5 Comments so far
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dude, that price is insane, I might opt out to choose them for one of my smaller european projects. they are situated in England, right?
Yes thay can do UK. They can also do US if you want.
Hi, you have also a control management panel? for example cpanel/whm or directadmin? or its totally unmanaged?
It came with CPanel/WHM.
Do not trust VAServe VPS hosting, if you want to be online. In other case, they ruined your business in any time.
I’ve rent unmanaged VPS server from CheapVPS (trademark of VAServe ) more than one year, paying monthly. All looks good, but in one day all falled down.
Friday, 26th September 2008 around 18:00 GMT my client’s site was DDOS attacked. I get information about attack only in the Saturday’s evening. I’ve send alert to the VAServe support, stopping Apache and start to install DDOS protection software – mod_security for Apache and Ngix like balancing proxy. I’ve use server mostly for my own sites and some sites of my clients, and don’t meet with attacks before.
In next 4 hours my VPS was turned off without any alerts from support, and i lost any access to it, except Web-panel.
At Sunday attacked site was moved to the other hosting, and protected from DDOS attacks, but my hosting was not turned on back. As support says, DDOS attack still run – but how anyone can attack non-working server?
My server was not turned on in 10 days, no qualified support was get. And also VAServe asks me for payment for the next month, no chargebacks for turning my server back was returned. My clients charges me for stopping their sites (internet-shops), and i ask VAServe to responce.
VAServe make simple answer – in 24 hours they delete my server with all data. I had no access even for backup databases and files.
Persons, who make this – Russell Foster and Vladimir Neskovic
I can send logs of my conversations, if you need.