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

03 Apr 09 shPanel – the Linux System and Hosting Control Panel

shPanel is now in production. You should see http://www.adamsinfo.com/shpanel-linux-system-hosting-control-panel/ to preorder! I welcome any ideas/comments

Tags: Control Panel, Hosting, Linux, shPanel, System

07 Oct 08 True Infrastructure On Demand

We already have Cloud computing systems available, however when will we be able to shopping list order our computing power or infrastructure – consider two pricing models, shared and dedicated:

With shared pricing, you’ll be able to pay a fee for Kb/RAM/s which is a flat fee for every Kilobyte of RAM used per second, a fee per CPU clock cycle and a fee per Kb of space used. Alternatively you could purchase 2 hours access to 32Gb RAM and 3.2GHz for a flat fee.

Cloud computing is being driven forward by service providers such as Amazon, Google, and Yahoo! however I wonder if there will ever be a need or solution for truly instant on demand infrastructure or resources. GoGrid and Amazon EC2 seem close, however they’re not as straight forward or as powerful as you’d expect, and I’d personally be worried about runaway costs.
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Tags: amazon, CPU, dedicated, GHz, google, hosted servers, Hosting, hosting providers, infrastructure, RAM, resources, shared, True Infrastructure On Demand, yahoo

17 Sep 08 95th percentile billing explaination

95th percentile billing commonly misspelled as “percential” is a method used by some NOCs to change for bandwidth.

The system is simple and essentially discards the top 5% of your traffic peaks, and then uses the next value down as your bandwidth rate. 5% of a month is 36 hours. This might sound like a bit of a scam, because you’re being billed for bandwidth consumption that you may not have used, but it’s not difficult to get it to work for you.

If you’re hosting a site where a lot of content is downloaded, it may be better to go for bandwidth billing. A client’s content server uses about 8,000GB transfer per month and shows a 95th percentile of 34mbit/sec. It’s certainly cheaper to pay for 8,000GB transfer over 30+mbit/sec dedicated.
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Tags: 95th, 95th percential, 95th percentile, bandwidth consumption, bandwidth management, bandwidth rate, burst, content, datacenter, download, Hosting, limiting, noc, peak, peaks, servers, shaping, traffic, traffic peaks

14 Sep 08 Linux virtualization, vmware, xen, hosting, and squeezing the most out of your resources

I’d guess that 90% of hosting providers ‘oversell’. This essentially means that should they have 1,000GB allocated, they might offer 15 packages of 100Gb to 15 of their customers, banking on the fact that no one will fully use their 100GB allocation – Selling 5 Virtual Machines with 256MB RAM on a 1GB host, assuming that no one will use their full RAM allocation. This is bad, because you’ll generally be able to confirm that you’ve been allocated the resources, but nonetheless benchmark tests will show that you’re just not getting them, and your environment will be sluggish and unresponsive. This is the same as airlines selling 110 seats on a 100 seat plane. When that 101st paying customer does show up to claim his seat, he’s stuck without a flight.

The general consensus is that a VPS is a cheaper and lower-grade option than a dedicated service, however VPSs have a number of undisputable advantages over dedicated servers and I’m going to discuss why almost all the dedicated machines I manage are hosts for a range of VPSs.
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Tags: 10mbit, adamsinfo.com, advantages, allocation, apache2, backup service, benchmark, bind, cheap, client, co-locate, colocate, config, CPU, datacenter, debian, dedicated, dedicated servers, disk access, disk IO, endpoint, environment, exim, host, Hosting, hosting providers, Intel, kernel, kernel upgrade, mailserver, mppc, mppe, MySQL, named, noc, oversell, packages, php5, pptp, processor type, Quad Core, racks, reboot, remote services, routing, seek time, spamassassin, system administrator, tick speed, virtualization, vmware, vmware free server, vmware gsx, VPN, vps, xen, Xeon