I have decided to move all of my sites from my current UK VPS at a2b2.com to a US VPS over in New York (reasons explained later on).

I decided to do this for many reasons, the main one being that I needed my VPS to be fully managed because I have very limited experience managing Linux servers so would rather  have a more experienced company do it that are there 24/7 and not 16/7 like I am (yes I really do get that much sleep). I moved from London to New York because I realised that most of my visitors come from the US/Canada and only a minority from the UK/Europe so decided to get a east coast provider to satisfy both demographics.

It was quite hard to choose a good provider but finally I went with Zone.net as my provider because I liked the look of their site as well as the great chat I had with one of their sales reps. I went with the VM400 plan because it has room for growth for all of my sites as well as the occasional spike in traffic (from heavygames etc).

I still highly recommend a2b2 as a provider but in my opinion they are more of a mid-class host and I wanted the mid to high class provider. I’m sure there are some people out there that wont agree with this statement but that life for you.

Ill diffidently post a review in a few months time to keep everyone updated.

^^This is an affiliate link so if you do sign up then I make a bit of money

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.

The name SpudMud was thought of by my little brother while we were talking about plans the entertainment site that I was going to make for my computing project. The name started off my be thinking out aloud while driving and for some reason I said Spud and then my brother said SpudMud, it stuck from then on …

I decided to do an entertainment site for my computing project because me and my brother had thought of doing to for a hobby a long time ago but I didn’t have the motivation to get it done. But when I was asked what am I going to do for my project for my second year of Computing I decided to finally get started on the site because it seemed like a “fun” project not a boring one like some of the other people in my class.

Currently the site, SpudMud.com , is still heavily under development with new features coming out almost daily. At the moment of this post the site is in full working order with no bugs but there are quite a few features that are still needed to be added to get a finished product that will get a good mark. i.e. :

• A category system because currently its all just one list
• A more advanced admin panel
• Get the site XHTML valid
• Tidy up my PHP code and add comments
• Possibly start on the pictures section unless it takes too long

My plans are to add a few of the games to Digg, Stumble and other community sites like that because its a good way to get quality traffic to my site because my brother submitted one game to Stumble and it site went from getting about 10 visits a day to over 100 unique visits a day.

A few games and videos that I recommend:

• Kick Boxer Breaks Leg (Ouch!) (Video)
• N the Ninja (Game)
• Random Funny Clips of Life (Video)

Just bought another site, RankAndLinks.com , on the Digital Point forums.

I decided to buy because:

• I liked the Name
• It was $15! (so I coudnt refuse)
• I can see a lot more can be dome with the site with just a bit of effort on my part
• Well thats probably about all, but for $15 who can say no?

Plan:

• Get a better design (current one sucks to put it bluntly!)
• Get some better code for it, probably more features and defidently some nice AJAX .
• Market it a bit and get some well palced adsense on it.

I havent moved the site to my server yet so am now just waiting to get stuck in once its moved over.

I saw PicHostOnline.com For sale on the Digital Point forums and looked at the stats and realised that it had great potential. So I decided to buy it at the BIN price of $150, which does seem like quite a lot but I think that I should be able to get it back within a few months.

The main reasons that I purchased it was because:

• It has a Page Rank of 2 (some backpages have a pagerank of 3)
• The design was nice and simple (just the way I like it).
• Domain was nice and memorable
• It had traffic from search engines
• It has good backlinks on Google and Yahoo

After I brought it I decided to add PicHostOnline.com to as many directories as I can so I paid a few people on Digital Point to do it so it should have been submitted to 400+ directories (Hopefully). There is not much else that I am planing to do to make the site better because currently it is making $0.5-$1.5 a day from adsense so I am quite happy with that, im probably just going to buy a few links of forums etc to get some more traffic and that is about it.

The only problem with the site so far is that some people cannot seem to be able read the sites terms so I have sometimes got some deleting to do.