13 Nov 09 UK VPN Hosting

I’m going to be offering some VERY high end UK VPN hosting accounts in the next few weeks once I can get a site and signup form up and running. The VPN servers will run from within the same cluster as this site, and so you can test your ping time with ping www.adamsinfo.com which in my case from my London based BETHERE DSL connection gives a 16-17ms ping time. You can also grab http://www.adamsinfo.com/wp-content/10mb.test and http://www.adamsinfo.com/wp-content/100mb.test for speed tests. I’m planning on running OpenVPN as the server software but will additionally offer PoPToP if anyone really wants it. Compared to other VPN providers, this will be a reasonably expensive offering. This is on the promise that:

• The service will be thoroughly undersubscribed
• The connectivity will be very fast
• You can select as much bandwidth as you want from 512kbit up to 80mbit – assuming your ISP supports it.
• Your service can be configured to use compression and encryption if you wish, meaning even faster access for you. This can use a lot of CPU and RAM on our end
• Custom set up as you wish as well as NAT 1:1 dedicated public IP and reverse DNS
• Squid Caching Proxy if desired
• 99.9% uptime guaranteed or your month’s money back

Addition I will be running the multithreaded tcp tunnel server software for anyone who wishes to use it, which means that with the right settings/config at your end, you can balance your VPN access over multiple connections at your local end.

Contact me (adam [AT] adamsinfo [DOT] com) to register interest!

Tags: openvpn, poptop, pptp, uk vpn, uk vpn hosting, VPN

14 Oct 09 Xen, LVM and friends

I’m going to write 3 articles next, the first on installing Xen on a Debian Lenny host (Dom0) with Debian Lenny guests (DomU) on a regular loopback filesystem. Next I’m going to write about setting up LVM and some basic working examples, and then finally how to move your Xen over to LVM once you realise that you don’t want loopback. This is the same order in which I performed my installation, and covers Xen setup, LVM setup and migration from loopback to LVM which is a valid upgrade path. My Xen installation is entirely automated. Watch this space..

Tags: debian, lenny, Linux, lvm, xen

08 Oct 09 New Rapidswitch Server

Further to my UK VPS posts, I took out a nice new server at RapidSwitch. I am fully aware of their recent extended outages, however after some quite extensive research, I am confident enough that this was an isolated and unfortunate set of circumstances, and it will not dissuade me from hosting with them. Maybe I’m used to paying too much for bandwidth, but about £150.00 ($230?) per month for a dedicated 100mbit? I don’t believe it. I was paying that for about 3mbit in the past, albeit premium network and bandwidth (not to say that RS isn’t of course). I’ve run some speed tests at various times throughout the day and from various locations. Here’s my latest:

# wget http://download.thinkbroadband.com:8080/1GB.zip
–2009-10-07 22:17:07–  http://download.thinkbroadband.com:8080/1GB.zip
Resolving download.thinkbroadband.com… 80.249.99.148
Connecting to download.thinkbroadband.com|80.249.99.148|:8080… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 1073741824 (1.0G) [application/zip]
Saving to: `1GB.zip’

100%[==========/.../============>] 1,073,741,824 11.2M/s   in 96s

2009-10-07 22:18:42 (10.7 MB/s) – `1GB.zip’ saved [1073741824/1073741824]

10.7MB/sec average over 1GB download? That’s definitely 100mbit. I still can’t quite get over the speed for the price I’m paying.

Ping time from my local host (UK) is 16-17msec, from UK Solutions, it’s 5msec. From SagoNet in Florida, US, it’s 118msec.

Server was set up in about 18 hours from order, and that includes a private /26 AND a non standard routing setup, that they don’t offer by default.

So far so good, but very pleased at time of writing..

Tags: 100mbit, ping, rapidswitch, uk vps, vps

06 Oct 09 Hosting – Users too quick to judge?

I made a post yesterday over at WHT http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=895047 after some of the material I’d seen posted over there by some users.

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader, I’ve been considering setting up a UK VPS recently, specifically along the unmanaged route. The user should be able to log in and reload his VPS, reboot it, and do everything himself, no management will be offered. That’s the plan at the moment anyway.

Most of my firm’s current hosting set up is offered as part of a much larger overall solution, and so selling hosting alone, and directly to a customer, is something new for me and my team.

I don’t think that there’s any great gap in the market, just space for a good solid competitor at reasonable prices. With the hardware and hosting infrastructure that we’ve built up so far, we are also in a very good position to compete, whilst offering reasonably undersold resources and premium UK bandwidth.

Notwithstanding the above, I am concerned about the sheer level of whinging that I see from some users across various forums, and it seems that a number of users agree with me in my post on WHT. I’m all for outing bad service providers – I’ve been online and in the ‘ecommerce scene’ long enough to know the difference between good service and bad service, as well as ‘scams’ and legitimate businesses – I’ve seen all the ‘you’ve won 10 million dollars from the king of Nigeria’ scams, the PayPal/CC chargebacks and every other form of scam/rip-off that there is.

What’s my real concern here? Most users that have positive experiences don’t bother posting about it, and why should they? Some do, and that’s good of them, but as a rule, most don’t. For the sake of a $20 VPS or whatever these things end up getting sold at, is it really worth seeing ‘SCAM’ appear on google when people look me up, because some disgruntled 16 year old using his father’s PayPal account didn’t get his VPS set up quick enough, or his ticket answered fast enough questioning why his VPS had been disabled after it was linked to a PayPal phishing scam?

The upside is, that we have powerful enough servers, and good bandwidth on offer, so being as familiar with the industry as I am, it seems to make perfect sense, both in terms of [small!] financial reward, as well as the personal satisfaction at seeing happy hosting users

Tags: bandwidth, Hosting, uk vps, vps

05 Oct 09 UK VPS

I’m going to be starting a UK VPS provider in the next few weeks. I’ve had a few requests for UK VPS hosting lately. We’re going to be using the XEN technology, and hosting out of UKSOLUTIONS and RAPIDSWITCH, both of which are excellent UK Colo Providers. Simple signup and payment process, fast activation and an entirely unmanaged/automated service is what I’m ultimately aiming for. I’m hoping for positive benchmark results and guaranteeing no overselling. Unlike a lot of hosts, I’m also shooting for good fast access, rather than an ‘unlimited bandwidth’ plan, that you can never use more than 1TB/month on due to the slow speeds.

Ultimately, I’ll be moving for automatic payment/provisioning, and allowing the user to change plan at any time, without any manual intervention from an admin side. A  VPS/OpenVPN service is also not out of the question. Currently, we’ve got the support resources to attend to these things quickly enough, but instant is always better than quick!

Any requests, comments or ideas greatfully received on what promises to be a great UK VPS host!

Tags: Hosting, openvpn, uk vps, vps