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

16 Sep 09 Multithreaded Tunnel Proxy and OpenVPN experiment

Further to the Multithreaded TCP Tunnel Proxy that I wrote a while ago, I’ve picked up a low end UK VPS and installed OpenVPN on it, as well as my local machine. I set up the iproute2 split access load balancer and established the OpenVPN connection.

Now, each of the two DSL lines is established at 17mbit giving me a theoretical maximum of 2.125MB/sec. In actual fact to kernel.org I can get a steady 1.7-1.8MB/sec which is more than enough. From my 100mbit UK VPS, I can get 8-9MB/sec from kernel.org without issue. Establishing OpenVPN over a single connection and then pulling a file from kernel.org leaves me with only 1.3MB/sec which I’m not best pleased about. Pulling the file through a proxy running on the UK VPS downloads at 1.6MB/sec minimum, so it isn’t my new route that’s causing the slow down, it’s OpenVPN.  Either way, I didn’t bother testing for any improvement with pptpd because I need OpenVPN’s single TCP connection anyway for this experiment to work.

The positive outcome of the story, is that with iproute2 load balancing set up, and OpenVPN established through the multithreaded TCP proxy over both connections, and using -t4. My single 1.3MB/sec became 2.2MB/sec which is IMHO an incredibly successful outcome.

A problem to note, is that on more than one occasion, netstat/lsof showed 3 TCP connections established over one DSL, and 1 over the other DSL. I just restarted my tcp tunnel a few times until I had them equally balanced. If this was a big enough problem -t6, -t8 or -t10 might have showed interesting results, but the more threads the more delay and potential issue with misordered packets. -t4 with iptables forcing the TCP connections equally over the DSLs might also be worth investigating. Nevertheless, as the experiment goes, a pleasing outcome!

Tags: dsl, iproute2, load balancer, multithreaded tcp tunnel, openvpn, proxy, split access, tcp, tcp tunnel, vps

12 Sep 09 Good UK VPS Provider?

Recently I’ve been trying to find a good 100mbit ‘unmetered’ UK VPS provider to host my hopefully ongoing split access multithreaded tcp tunnel experiment. At minimum, if not unmetered, I’d want 5TB+ on a 100mbit. Whilst many are offering ‘unmetered’ options for less than £20.00 per month, without any speed test site, I can only assume that this is on some sub-optimal, lagged-to-@!#$ type connection, that won’t be of any use to me.  Whilst I’m not adversed to hosting this myself, at 95th percentile billing, I’m not entirely sure I want to. I’d also rather UK based so I end up with as few as possible hops from my home and office. The only thing I’m really interested in running on this VPS is OpenVPN, and as such any reasonably well know/trusted providers would be beneficial. If anyone knows of any good hosts for this, then please drop me a line!

Tags: vps

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