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.

Innoix.com is my latest project. Currently its still in the planning stages so am not releasing any more information but expect an update within the next dew days.

If all goes well it is going to be a very long term project that will span many years. Sorry about not releasing much about it but I dont like people stealing my ideas etc

Just giving a quick update on SpudMud . A few weeks ago me Eric submitted 2 games to HeavyGames.com and 3 days ago they were approved and SpudMud’s traffic shot up. Previously we were getting around 150 - 200 unique hits a day and after they were submitted we got 4,000 - 6,000 hits a day for the past 3 days but the traffic has gradually been going down since yesterday.

Now we are about to submit as many games as possible and see what traffic it brings us.

Ad wise we got $12.34 the first day, $18.54 the second day and $14.12 the third day and so far today we have got $4.67. So overall I am very pleased considering normally we get around $0.75 - $2.50 a day . So I highly recommend  submitting your  games to there if you need some traffic.

Well I’ve just finished my 1 week holiday to Tenneriefe which was great fun, got a nice tan etc, so im quite happy. Might post some pics later.
I did decide to after my exams start on SpudMud.com but that didnt quite work as planned because I was a bit too lazy but now that ive been lazy for 2 weeks I better get started. I have decided to add the following features:

• Pictures section
• Animations section
• Changing the layouts so they flow more
• Adding more features behind the scenes to the admin panel
• Possibly changing the entire layout round a bit

The only problem is in a few weeks im going to Switzerland for a week so I better get started soon because there is quite a lot of work to do still and I better get it done while im young

I think that SpudMud.com is a bit of an anomalie, because me and my brother have done zero marketing for SpudMud and it seems to be booming. We started out with a few visits a day during the late Alpha stages which I was quite pleased with but now half way through the Beta stages me VPS is starting to struggle with all of the hits (and also my bad coding ) During on day 28/06/2007 - 29/06/2007 we had a massive spike in traffic of almost 1,600 unique visitors with a total of about 6,000 page views which was absolutely astonishing, this was all due to BowMan Battlefield being submitted to StumbleUpon and all this traffic seems to come at once at about 1PM GMT on both days.
Also over the past week (while I was on holiday) SpudMud has been getting 3000+ pageviews a day which is just amazing considering I have done zero marketing/advertising. I just hope that we can keep this going.

Also all of these stats are not the actual figures because I havent put any stats on the open in new window pages but will soon.