It’s not you, it’s me (again)
It’s been a year since I first signed up with VPSLink. They’ve been a decent host for the most part. They had some troubles in the beginning with disk I/O and server loads, but those have pretty much been kept at a minimum as of late. I still experience high server load from time to time (like earlier today), but for the most part it’s generally OK. Nonetheless, I’ve decided to move on (again). Try something different. Something new. Something, better?
It’s not that I don’t like VPS technology. I do. In fact, I don’t think I could go back to a shared hosting environment again (sorry DH). I think it’s the virtualization technology (and perhaps the limitations of OpenVZ/Virtuozzo(TM)).
How you doin’?
When I first started looking for a VPS provider last year, I briefly signed up for one particular Xen provider. The server itself was pretty good, but the support and communication were lacking. I quickly ditched that host for VPSLink. Unfortunately, I paid for a year in advance and they don’t refund unused months so I was stuck in a mediocre relationship with a host I wasn’t happy with.
Then I met Slicehost. They use Xen and are reasonably priced for the same stats I’m getting over at VPSLink (actually, Slicehost is a smidgen cheaper). It’s build by developers, for developers and has a growing community. Last week I emailed support to ask a question just to see how quickly they respond. I got a response within 30 minutes. Fast enough for me.
Here’s a list:
- Xen based virtualization
- Proper VPS/Server ratio (<= 24 per Server depending on the Slice)
- Quad Core, 64bit CPUs and OS
- OS of choice. If I don’t like what they offer, I can install what I want
- Growing community of users (Wiki, Forum, IRC, and Campfire)
To Close for Comfort
My VPSLink account is now due (by the 18th) and I just submitted a request for a new Slice yesterday. I’m cutting a little close. I’m trying to get things setup locally so help migrate everything over as quickly as possible, however, I’m fairly confident that nothing will go as planned. There will inevitably be some down time… the question is, how much?
I got my slice very quickly, but I think I was luckier than others…
Anyway, I’d be glad to help you install Arch on it. It’s actually quite easy, dunno if you saw my guide on my blog… but I only did it once.
I have the 256 slice and it suits me just fine… only issue is high latency with my connection, since I live in Sweden. It makes shell access kind of painful.
Thanks Anders! I did read your post on installing Arch. I’m familiar with Arch as I used it for about a year after getting fed up with Gentoo. I actually pacman’d a x86_64 base system on my Ubuntu box at home… but not sure if it will actually work (I got some ldconfig errors because my Ubuntu box is 32bit). Might be easier to do all that from a 64bit machine on the slice itself?
Yeah, you probably could. Just boot into rescue mode, create a new partition for Arch and mount it. Download the pacman pkg and extract it over / and use pacman-static to download the base system into /mnt/sda1…
Oh yeah, don’t forget to copy the kernel modules before doing all this. You also want to chroot in and install ssh and then wipe hosts.deny (plus network configuration etc).