VPS Seer

Join the Matrix, Mr. Aragorn

In the beginning, Web hosting was rare and expensive endeavor. For both sides: I used to spend up to $40 monthly on shared hosting, offering huge 50Mb of Web space and 200Mb of traffic. Can you imagine how happy I was at having such an inexpensive hosting?

Now, when you read hosting forums/hosters' sites, you are looking at gigabytes of space and all the like. Damn, and it costs at times sheer $5-$10 a month! Those who never had hosting, say, 15 years ago, can't understand they are living in paradise. For a sum costing less than a very modest dinner, one can have a month' amount of resources enough to host a good site! Let's chortle in our joy.

However, the trend to have everything for nothing becomes an eerie usual part of this reality.

If you visit popular hosting-related forums, you will see customers battling hosting providers over the huge sum of $5 they should pay for unlimited disk space and traffic. There ain't no such thing as unlimited, but we'll talk about that later. People are ready to spend hours trying to find a hoster that would cost $4 a month for the same amount they see for $5.

Definitely, I cease to understand what happened to human beings. They stay in their Matrix, where everything is unlimited, inexpensive or even free; where there's 24/7 support guaranteed for the above resources.

Come on, folks, take you red pill before it's too late!

Uptime contest

Boasting high uptime values is a popular ego contest on the Net. However, at times uptime can be not only a tool to inflate self-respect, but a tool to detect unusual or unexpected reboots.

When it comes to VPS, I happened to use services where host machines (nodes) were rebooted often, at times without serious reason. Naturally, a task to register uptime intervals has appeared. It is solved easily with a script you can download via the following link:

check-uptime.sh.txt (1033 bytes, SHA1 checksum a43ce663e12bf5764d5d7a33c2de52b78aedca43).

You will need a calculator utility, 'bc', that is usually present in most Linux/other distributions. Just issue 'sudo yum install bc -y' or similar command.

Five minutes to year

When I started composing this post, the uptime count of one of my Amazon EC2 instances, the one I keep my private repository on, was 364 days, 23 hours and 55 minutes.

So, cheers to the longest VPS uptime I have at the moment. No, that's not an idle VPS. There is a very busy repository running there. There are very CPU-intensive tasks running there from time to time. Development occurs, as well. However, that didn't prevented the instance from running for a year without becoming inaccessible for even 5 minutes.

To those interested, I have ordered another reserved instance (subscription, to make hourly costs lower). Let's calculate: $100 for three years, $0.005 hourly. Given there are 365.25 days in a year, it makes an average of $6.43 a month (traffic not counted; the VPS is low-traffic anyway).

None of VPS/cloud hosting providers I tried were able to provide that high stability and close cost-performance ratio. That's very strange to me. I read about redundancy, high availability blah-blah-blah, but not even 2 months of uptime, in most cases. With Burst.net I had sometimes up to 4 months. And that's all.

«Welcome to Matrix, Mr. Aragorn»

First thing one discovers after the vacation has ended, is how much is to do. A hell of work, usually. And the changes happened to your beloved Matrix, or wherever one choose to live in.

My absence and silence on the Net comes to its another end. And the first task a blogger should care about is how to announce his or her posts on the Net. Crossposting is the answer.

Oh yes, it's an evil. Not the Evil, but an evil nonetheless. A mortal sin of duplicate content, that is. I won't argue whether posting short announces to a multitude of Net services (blogs, microblogs etc) is good. But it helped to notify quite a number of people about what's new. Oh yes, there's RSS, mighty and elegant. But not everyone's using it. There are still services to post your announces to such social monsters like Facebook. E.g., Twitterfeed. But all such services are either pathetic and unreliable (Twitterfeed still can't post automatically, it misses new entries now and then) — or expensive and unreliable. During this year the empire of crossposting lost three powerful kings. Let's mourn them.

...is human

To gift is human, just as to err is.

I am quite serious. To share, to give away, to gift is very human. Just as to thank in any other way, even if most people forget to say «thank you» in most situations.

I will not deny the obvious, I have received quite a number of gift servers (VPSes, for example) since the moment VPS Seer started to exist. And I have never thought these gifts were meant to influence my conclusions, the tone and style of my reviews, whatever. People knowing me are aware that no gift can change my conclusions. Whatever it could be, it simply isn't worth the lost reputation.

Once again. I do not doubt the people having given me hosting resources just wished to express their gratitude. Just as I offer free hosting to a number of projects I deem interesting, without even the slightest intent to influence those people's opinion about me. I give just because it's human and I can.

Black Friday

Last Friday was a day of several hardware problems.

First, the DSL modem failed all of a sudden. While investigating the connectivity error with ISP, we've discovered their line is down due to another hardware failure from their side.

Almost at the same time, the HDD on my desktop indicated it can fail at any moment (I like S.M.A.R.T. for this chance to get warned).

The final: a long-planned upgrade to a SSD drive has taken place, and I switched, finally, from Fedora 16 to Ubuntu 12.04. To those interested, the model of SSD drive I use is Corsair Series 3.

Solid state of things

Solid state drives (SSD) are changing the entire hosting industry, swiftly and thoroughly. Less than a year ago you could hardly find many hosting providers offering SSD-based hosting solutions. Now there are dozens and hundreds of those.

I will not try to describe the story of SSD technology or unveil myths (there are many). However, higher prices of SSDs is a fact, and thus the task was to find the provider with the best cost-performance and I/O speed, simultaneously. I will mention the whole list of providers I tested in one of the following posts. Atthe moment, though, looks like GridVirt.com is at the moment the leader in cost-performance.

Good support is...

...dead support, perhaps. I do not assume we are talking about dreams of vengeful customer that gets actually no support when he assumes to have one. The examples are many. Search on a popular hosting forum for something like «bad support» and you will get thousands of threads.

No, I am speaking about companies that build their business model on limited or virtually absent support.

If you wish to see examples, visit No Support Linux Hosting or 10gi.gs. Both are solid, reliable Web hosters with good reputation.

What's a good hoster?

True friends are those who stay with you in a time of need.

True hosters are those who do everything possible to keep you as a customer. First of all, of course, by keeping high uptime and preventing disasters.

It grieves me to say a server hosting some of JaguarPC's VPSes went down on 30-th of September, 2012. Today, almost 17 days after that moment, the situation isn't fully handled. You can read further on this WHT thread, and on JaguarPC forum as well. I sympathize with everyone, hoster included. Hardware will eventually break down. The scale of disaster can't be predicted in most cases, even though the first traits of the upcoming failure should have been seen long before.