The plan I got with them was the VM400 (now the XVM400 plan because the hosting packages have been changed around a bit). The main sites that I have hosted with them are www.spudmud.com and www.bakie.net and also about 8 other smaller ones.

Setup and configuration
When I ordered the plan from Zone.net it only took them 4 hours to setup my account which in my experience is above average. Once the VPS was setup I needed all of my sites moved from my old VPS to my new VPS and all I had to give the support staff was my login details and they did everything else for me within hours and without a single hickup.
I also requested some software to be installed and configured to my specifications i.e. Imagemagick,ffmpeg etc and they did this very professionally and to my specifications.

Performance
Once all of the sites were moved and the domains had propagated I got to fully take my VPS for a spin and it sure as hell was a dream to drive. All of my pages had very low page load times and with my previous VPS I had noticed a slight increase of load times at peak times (8-12pm GMT) but with my new VPS from Zone.net I saw no increase at all. This is all probably due to the excellent hardware used.

Support
Every ticket that I sent to the Zone.net support staff is normally responded to in under 10 mins and under 2 hours at the latest but I have only sent around 6 tickets so its probably not the best thing to go by for and accurate reading for response time.
As I have stated previously the support staff are very experienced and professional and have so far done a very good job of managing my server.
There has been 2 issues where phpMyAdmin hasn’t worked due to an auto-update in cpanel but the staff fixed this quickly.

Uptime
Well in 4 months my 5min uptime monitor hasn’t showed a single outage so am very pleased with that. Zone.net has a 99.99% server uptime guarantee so I think my uptime so far supports this guarantee.

Conclusion
If you are looking for a mid-high end VPS solution Zone.net defidently seems the way to go. If this is not quite what you are looking for Zone.net can also do you some VPS clusters for a very affordable price too as well as the lower end self-managed VPS’s too which sets them above the rest in my opinion because if I outgrow my current VPS I can easily upgrade to a better VPS or a cluster without needing to change company. Normally when I write a review I can find something bad to say about the company but zone.net seems to be different because for the 4 months I have not had a single negative experience and that is quite something.
So overall, a very positive and enjoyable 4 months of service and hopefully many more to come too.

If you are gonna sign up it will be greatly appreciated if you use my referral link because that way I can get some money too:
http://control.zone.net/aff.php?aff=024

Review also posted on WHT:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=5030821

Adsense: $216.00

Intergi:  $218.56

Total:  $434.56

One of my mates at Huddersfield Uni is studying Game Design and he has not had a single exam so far so has only had coursework and even that coursework sounds like fun because he has to do research into games like Half life 1 and World of Warcraft etc. I was really tempted to study Game design at uni but I would have probably gone to America because there are more game companies over there than over here in England. I would have probably gone to http://www.iadtvegas.com/ because I have heard good things about it.

So to summarise I am quite happy on my course “Chemical Engineering with Management”, and even though there are other courses out there that might have been more fun and less work, I would still stay on my course.

I have been looking for a good CPM ad network for SpudMud and I stumbled across Intergi over at Talk arcades. The main thing that caught my attention was the nice and high CPM of around $2.00 - $3.00 for some ads which is a lot more than my current eCPM of $0.60 - $1.00 from Adsense. So I have just submitted my application to them and lets hope that I get accepted so I can post some further feedback later on.

 EDIT  21/01/2007

Got accepted into the program and have placed the ads codes on my SpudMud. Did have a few small problems at first but they support was very good and fixed all issues fast.

EDIT 31/01/2007

I am almost speechless about how good Intergi’s CPM is, making $231.97 in 8 days is simply amazing for me, way better than I ever expected and as you can see this doesn’t include the revenue from Adsense which accounts for over half of the impressions and that averaged around $3-$8 a day. The only problem with them that I see is the Net45 payment method so I have to wait for the 15th march before I get paid but they do pay by PayPal which is great.

Ok I better stop with the boring bit to do with my life and get back onto what this blog is about. Over Christmas I am hoping to get some work done with the new design of SpudMud , I have already gotton a designer to do me a new design and now that that is finnished and coded (by me) I am slowely brining it to life. You can have a look at how the development is going over at beta.spudmud.com. I have still got a lot of work to do i.e. finishing off the games, video and pictures sections as well as trying to make all of the code valid (not sure why I want it to be XHTML valid but I just do).

I better write a bit about the designer now that you have seen the great job he did with the design. I found Ed’s site over at the DP forums and immediately contacted him to ask for a quote after seeing his great portfolio. The quote he gave my shocked me at first, it just seemed to low (I wont mention any values), but I shouldn’t complain should I. His work was done in about 1 and a half weeks which I was quite happy with considering it was 5 pages fully custom designed. He was great at communicating and always kept me updated. The thing that I was really amazed about was the way he could understand what I wanted because as you probably can see from this blog, I am not the best at getting things across.

I am hoping to get the new design up and running by Christmas but I think that that’s very unlikely because I’m simply too lazy at the moment due to Uni taking everything out of me and I have coursework and exams to revise for.

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

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.

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

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.

• 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