Posted by Fred Wu
Disclaimer: The post indicates my personal opinion, all references about Envato are not official.
The word cloud is getting a lot of attention lately, almost like web 2.0. Marketing gimmick aside, I believe cloud computing does offer a tremendous amount of advantages over traditional computing environment,. If you want to learn more about modern marketing topics, get some help from experts at this seo agency
At Envato, we use a number of providers for our server needs. We currently have servers with Media Temple, Slicehost and Engine Yard.
Even though Envato was already using Slicehost for some of their applications, I still did my fair share of research before making a suggestion to move away from Media Temple.
I have eventually nailed down to three service providers: Slicehost, Linode and VPS.net.
For Envato, we decided to go with Slicehost, because we already have some servers there, and they offer bandwidth pooling. We would have given Linode a deeper look if they had offered backups (their backups system is still in beta).
Having said that, I was very very impressed by VPS.net, so I decided I should sign up anyway, for my personal projects.
Let’s compare the three services: Slicehost, VPS.net and Media Temple.
One very very important factor that you don’t mention at all is support. How quickly are your support tickets tended to? What avenue of support is available? How does it compare to the competition? Support and how things play out during unexpected complications (whether it be hardware issues or what have you) is a crucial when choosing who you want to be responsible for your hosting needs.
Would you open some tickets with all these folks and let us know how it goes? Go secret shopper on their asses so they don’t know your coming.
Good point Dave.
I haven’t had any chance to test the Slicehost support, but Envato has been using them for a while now and the Ruby dev team is very happy with Slicehost, so I assume the support is great.
VPS.net support is also great, my two tickets were both answered within 20 minutes.
Media Temple’s support is similar, my three tickets were all answered within 20 minutes.
:-)
Thats a realy cool comparison, I can tell you it’s reviews like these from everyday users that help all the providers listed improve their products.
One thing I don’t like about VPS.net is that you can’t tell if a coupon works without completing the signup process.
Did you consider SoftLayer? The last time I compared hosts, SoftLayer costs slightly more for the CPU and RAM but has nearly twice the storage and bandwidth. 5 IP addresses are included and after that they’re 50¢ (instead of the $1 or $2 charged by others).
Thanks NullMind, I hope you guys would bring more awesome products in the future. :)
@christefano: I did look at SoftLayer, but I was more interested in their CDN offering rather than their cloud computing. The latter is simply not flexible enough for our needs, their CDN on the other hand, looks interesting. But now that VPS.net is bringing on their CDN solution, I am keen to try it out.
Support is a big deal for me. Hackers are attacking these boxes all the time. You only know a hosting company’s true colors until this has happened. If you want to be a NOC admin and designer/programmer at the same time then go right ahead.
Some of your bullets are wrong as I am a MT customer. MT does provide backup for a nominal monthly fee. http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/dv/addons.php
Excellent review, Fred. I shopped around quite a bit for VPSes after some recent frustrations with MediaTemple and I tend to agree that VPS.net is (by far) the best provider. To be fair, MediaTemple actually does offer a backup solution for $20/mo: http://mediatemple.net/webhost.....hp#backups
Something worth pointing out in this thread (for those of you who aren’t customers) is that Nullmind and Ditlev are the top brass at VPS.net—seriously, Ditlev is the CEO of the UK2 Group. I’m not surprised at all to see them commenting, because they answer questions in the forums on what appears to be a daily basis. As a matter of fact, my first question on the forum was answered in short order by Ditlev himself. It’s not often that you find the CEO and top decision-makers getting their hands dirty, but they do. Every day. And they know their stuff.
to be clear, I’m not affiliated with VPS.net in any way other than being a very satisfied customer. There are several other things I could rave about, but you can read them here on the blog: http://vps.net/blog/
If you’d like to direct any questions my way regarding my experiences over the past two weeks (including and emergency, all-night transition of a site to VPS.net today), please use the comment form on my website.
Cheers from Atlanta,
Willie Jackson
Hello,
This is a great comparison of features between VPS.net and Slicehost. Media Temple, too, but I consider Virtuozzo somewhat inferior to Xen, so I wasn’t really looking for more reviews about them.
That being said, I’d like to know if you’ve had a chance since this post was originally written to try out Linode’s servers as well. I was under the impression that they did have a backup solution coming, and last time I remember reading somewhere that they were already in beta.
I ask because they’re usually also highly recomended, especially among Rails application developers, so to not see them in this comparison (as a reader) was a little disappointing. Not that this is your fault, of course, since, like you said, they didn’t have backups available at the time, and it was a feature you required.
Perhaps if you decide to do another review again of VPS host providers you would consider including Linode in your future comparisons? It would be very helpful to developers like me who don’t really have the resources to try out each service on our own without spending a small amount of our very limited fortune.
Again, thanks for your review, and I hope this didn’t come out sounding like a demand :) Please, excuse my rudeness if it did.
This is an awesome review. One host to add to the list is OpenHosting. They use KVM and VServer and do have backups and overall their approach seems slightly different, with more on the functional side. I found that they really understood my needs and didn’t have flashy features that I didn’t care for in the first place. It’s been fast and reliable and my support emails were always answered very quickly and replies were helpful and to the point. I do also have one Slicehost and two Linode VPS’s, BTW, and I like Linode better, but over the years seems like my OpenHosting ones are the best, actually.
This is a very good review. I use ressellerzoom.com VPS and its quite good their support is very nice. In terms of scalability they start from 25GB onwards not like VPS.NET. Am comparing different VPS hosting and this review was really helpful.
Why did you omit Engine Yard from your final selection?
I tried MT a couple of years ago but was very disappointed. Even a simple FTP upload took a long time. I’m on my way to VPS.net as I’m very disappointed from resellerzoom where I currently host my sites (uptime issues).
Might be something wrong with the VPN connection itself. Reset the tunnel (If its cisco stuff – clear crypto ipsec sa peer ip). Initiate traffic from one end to bring it back up.
I feel the need to say that you deserve a thumbs up for your efforts.
I made this comment before but I will do it here also:
VPS.net is the worst host I ever tried, every week my websites have downtime and it cost me a ton of money. I have no idea when any of the websites I host with them had a full week of uptime.
Today they broke one of the vps and my website was down all day because they corrupted the database also.
I started moving my websites from them and I wouldn’t advise anyone to host with them.
VPS really are a must-have item nowadays for me. Thanks for the info.
Dead on. Cloud computing is definitely not a one-size-fits-all approach. Take the time to understand your business requirements and then develop your strategy.
Hi there. This is my first ever comment on your blog. I want to know which hosting your site is using. I am searching for Cheap linux hosting for my projects.
I am actually in the start process of a music service right now. I on to use streaming as main service, like a web radio. But also list building and downloads. Getting licences seems to be one of the main challenges, including 4 different licence organizations (and that is just for the US marked).. I don’t like the fact that Google is joining the niche. They are powerfull, and can if they want place their services on top of all music serps..
John, Well put. Desktops are far from fail-safe. Mission Critical is as much about planning and execution as it is software and hardware.
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